Raveman is essentially correct that “war games” are simulations that are designed to exercise strategic or tactical theories and provide a training exercise for making command decisions. Many war games occur in a completely artificial environment divorced from any reality, e.g. using fictional nations, opponents, and sometimes even basic technology. The danger to war games is that, while they are not really designed to prove or disprove such theories, they are sometimes cited as evidence specifically for that purpose and used to justify implementing questionable strategies.
even sven is exactly on point with the statement that North Korea, far from being “insane” is cleverly calculating their responses and threats to keep their population isolated and the rest of the world on edge. This has resulted in concessions including subsidies and relaxation of embargoes while North Korea has essentially given up nothing in exchange. Now, this may eventually backfire on them, as it did with Saddam Hussain’s saber-rattling and bluffmanship in Iraq (and very nearly Cuba in October 1962), but they’ve been able to walk the line without inciting significant military response for going on sixty years now, and have managed to tie up US and other assets in the process to the benefit of its former patrons.
However, we often tend to ascribe actions that we do not rationally understand as “insane”; for instance, Khrushchev placing nuclear missiles in Cuba, inciting the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Castro accepted and even recommending use of the above, knowing that such an act could very likely result in nuclear war. What American leaders did not appreciate at the time was that Khrushchev–who was comparatively a moderate in the Soviet leadership–was under pressure from hard-line military leaders to counter the placement of American IRBMs in Turkey, Italy, and the UK which provided a potential disabling first-strike capability, while Castro was (quite rightly, as it turns out) concerned that the United States government might again attempt assassination or invasion to reinstate a Batista-like regime which favored US industrial interests. From their respective standpoints, their actions were, if not entirely rationale, based in response by actions by the US which were not, in retrospect, particularly well-conceived or logical.
The US also viewed the 'Eighties era Soviet leadership as “dangerously unstable”, e.g. the “Evil Empire” which unprovoked invaded Afghanistan and deployed short range ballistic missiles in Warsaw Pact nations and road-mobile ICBMs. Never mind that the US had performed a similar invasion of Viet Nam (a sometime Soviet ally) two decades previously under the rationale of preventing Communist expansion under the questionable “Domino theory”, had conducted covert operations to draw the Soviets into Afghanistan, and had been working on and deploying our own SRBMs in West Germany as well as highly accurate rail-mobile ICBMs and SLBMs. While the US viewed the succession of terminally-ill Soviet leaders as evidence of increasing instability in the Politburo, the truth was that the Politburo was making internal concessions to prevent any powerful personalities from taking over the Secretary General role (and given what happened when Gorbechev did take the role, their fears may well have been justified).
Meanwhile, the Soviets viewed the United States–which went through entirely planned regime change on a 4-8 year cycle, often with radical changes in position–as horribly unstable. When Reagan took over the presidency they accepted his bombast as gospel, and were seriously concerned that the US was planning a pre-emptive attack as soon as they could deploy the LGM-118A ‘Peacekeeper’ in quantity. Reagan, of course, abhorred nuclear weapons and would never have intentionally initiated an attack, but that was not at all clear. The furor by the Soviets during the attempted assassination of Reagan (and the fears that Al Haig’s offhand comment about being in charge was a prelude to a military coup) and the later Able Archer 83 NATO exercise being a smokescreen for an actual invasion of Eastern Europe highlights their own paranoia which stemmed from an almost complete misunderstanding of US and NATO intentions. Their attempts at “information gathering” (see Operation RYAN) merely reinforced their views by filtering everything through a paranoiac lens.
National actors are rarely “rational” in a way that makes sense to their opponents, but with a few notable exceptions (which invariably collapse upon themselves) they are almost never truly insane in the movie villain sense. Even Stalin–who was so paranoid in his last years that even his most trusted confidants feared that he would turn on them–made decisions that can at least be understood in the context of his particular environment and experience.
Stranger