Can Game Theory Predict When Iran Will Get the Bomb?

Is Iran going to build a bomb?

Many people wonder, but Bruce Bueno de Mesquita claims to have the answer.

Bueno de Mesquita is one of the world’s most prominent applied game theorists. A professor at New York University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, he is well known academically for his work on “political survival,” or how leaders build coalitions to stay in power. But among national-security types and corporate decision makers, he is even better known for his prognostications. For 29 years, Bueno de Mesquita has been developing and honing a computer model that predicts the outcome of any situation in which parties can be described as trying to persuade or coerce one another. Since the early 1980s, C.I.A. officials have hired him to perform more than a thousand predictions; a study by the C.I.A., now declassified, found that Bueno de Mesquita’s predictions “hit the bull’s-eye” twice as often as its own analysts did.

Last year, Bueno de Mesquita decided to forecast whether Iran would build a nuclear bomb. With the help of his undergraduate class at N.Y.U., he researched the primary power brokers inside and outside the country — anyone with a stake in Iran’s nuclear future. Once he had the information he needed, he fed it into his computer model and had an answer in a few minutes.

In June, I visited Bueno de Mesquita at his San Francisco home to see the results. A tall man with a slab of gray hair, Bueno de Mesquita, who is 62, welcomed me with painstakingly prepared cups of espresso. Then he pulled out his beat-up I.B.M. laptop — so old that the lettering on the A, S, D and E keys was worn off — and showed me a spreadsheet that summarized Iran’s future.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/magazine/16Bruce-t.html?th&emc=th

We have thousands of nukes. It would be suicidal of Iran or any other country to launch nukes at us or give them to terrorist to detonate here since we they might hurt us but our retaliation would burn their country off the map.

Anyone with an IQ higher than a Fox News fan should know that. Those in Washington do and know the only real "threat" is to our ability to intimidate and invade a country once they have nukes.

were right twice as often as the CIA analysts. He is on to something. His model predicted that Iran would give up its pursuit of the bomb but still try to develop nuclear power generation.