Arguments of physicists concerning the use of the first atomic bomb

Abstract

The decisions that politicians have to make with respect to foreign policy are in general very complex because the possible strategies have multiple uncertain consequences. For such complex problems the mathematical decision theory has developed procedures to arrive at optimal decisions. Accordingly, the politicians formulate the decision problems in terms of possible strategies and possible consequences with their probabilities and utilities, but they don´t have the numeric information and the calculation facilities to use the suggested optimal “Subjective Expected Utility model” to derive conclusions. Therefore we have studied in a long term project the decision rules the politicians use to derive their choices. We have suggested 7 decision rules which are specific for the description of the decision problem with respect to the use or not of the rank ordering of utilities and/or probabilities. It turns out that these 7 decision rules are sufficient to near perfectly predict the choices in 231 observed decision situations. To check whether the argumentation is similar with respect to crucial decisions i.e. going to war or not, we studied arguments of decision makers concerning the start of the First and Second World War, the Cuba missile crisis and recently the use of the atomic bomb in 1945. In most of these situations one of the decision rules specific to the form of description of the observed decision problem predicts the chosen action. Surprised by the limited us of evaluations of utilities by the politicians we decided to study the arguments of scientists concerning the use of the atomic bomb against Japan or not. We were wondering whether they would use the same procedure for argumentation and possibly use more elaborated arguments. The result of this study was that they use the same procedures for argumentation but they use more frequently arguments involving evaluations of utilities but this was more determined by the situation than by a different way of argumentation.