202402251451 Escalation spiral

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The escalation trap of systems is an exponentially increasing feedback loop predicated the goals of actors in the system being relative to the state of the system. For example, the United States and the Soviet Union escalated their nuclear arsenals so that they would have more, bigger, better weapons than each other, not based on some absolute amount of capability.¹

There are countless examples of this trap in our world. Typically the system will only break down when one of the actors breaks. Instead we should set limits and stopping points for these systems. There must be an off-ramp for actors that does not come at one of their expense over the other. Mutual disarmament agreements are hard to obtain though. Easier, and surprisingly (given the internal logic of the feedback system) effective is unilateral disarmament. One party should simply stop playing.