and more experience the criticisms that many of Lenin’s contemporaries had
made.
Doomsday
The idea of a doomsday machine is an intellectual exercise in modern strategic
thinking used to clarify certain points in nuclear war theory. The ideal
doomsday machine would be a super-bomb triggered to go off automatically
if the country which built it was to suffer a serious nuclear attack. As the name
is meant to imply, the destruction caused by this bomb would be so total that
the aggressor nation would be eliminated totally (as would all others). The
point is to takemutual assured destructionto its logical conclusion, because
a doomsday machine would make it impossible for any nation ever to risk
triggering nuclear war.
Although manifestly absurd (though not technologically impossible), the
concept acts as a limiting factor indeterrencetheory. Some proposals that
have been seriously made approach these limits. An example is a suggestion of
how to control the US Navy’s strategic nuclear submarine fleet. The technical
problems of communication with an under-sea fleet, especially after a possible
attack that may have wiped out the national command and control centres,
have always worried planners. One suggestion was that a continuous signal
should be transmitted to these submarines, on the cessation of which their
captains should automatically launch an attack on the enemy (which was, in
the context of the development of the idea, the Soviet Union). This, by
making retaliation quite automatic, would have the doomsday effect. The
phrase was made popular by the filmDr Strangelove, a biting satire on nuclear
strategy.
Doves (see Hawks and Doves)
Downs
Anthony Downs (1930–) was an American political scientist in the 1950s (he
has since left academic life and become a millionaire), who was responsible for
starting an entirely new line of research in politics with just one book,An
Economic Theory of Democracy. At a time when most empirical research was
influenced by sociology and psychology, this argued for the use of models and
assumptions drawn from economics in analysing political behaviour. The
difference is far from trivial. Downs’ approach, which came to be known as
therational choice theory, is based on taking ‘political man’ as a creature
who seeks to achieve maximum satisfaction through choices based on rational
calculation—just as ‘economic man’ does. This contrasts sharply with
Downs