The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (265 page)

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SALT
.

 
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START
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See
Cold War
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In military usage, ‘strategic’ contrasts with ‘tactical’, ‘strategic’ referring to the overall plan of battle, ‘tactical’ to smaller-scale battlefield issues. During the
Cold War
, in American and
NATO
parlance strategic weapons were intercontinental nuclear weapons capable of reaching between the United States and the Soviet Union. This was contrasted with tactical or theatre nuclear weapons, whose medium range restricted their targets to Europe, and with short-range battlefield nuclear weapons. These distinctions reflected peculiarly American concerns to distinguish which weapons could strike the United States directly, and which were confined to Europe. The distinction does not hold up outside this context, and even caused problems in arms control negotiations, where the Soviets saw as ‘strategic’ medium-range nuclear weapons based in Europe which could reach the Soviet Union.
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From the Greek, ‘generalship’. In game theory, the sense of the distinction between ‘strategic’ and ‘tactical’ ( see
strategic weapons
) is retained. A strategy is a plan for dealing with every possible move by the other player(s) at every stage in the game. The number of strategies open to a player in a game of any complexity is astronomical. Even in a trivial game such as noughts-and-crosses (tic-tac-toe) the first player has nine legal opening moves. To each of the second player's eight legal responses the first player has seven legal replies, thus 504 strategies for the first two moves alone, and a total of 20,160 (9 × 8 × 7 × 6 × 5 × 4 × 3) strategies for the complete game. Most of these strategies would of course be extremely silly, and many of them are in effect identical because of the rotational symmetry of the game. However, the example shows that analysis of strategies must depend on ruthlessly eliminating all but a tiny number of them. The usual way of doing this is to ask what is the best strategy against the best possible strategy by one's opponent(s). If everybody is playing a strategy such that nobody can better his or her chances by unilateral departure from his or her own strategy, the game is said to be in
equilibrium
and the players' strategies are called equilibrium strategies.

 
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A voting procedure is said to be strategy-proof if it never rewards any voter for pretending that his or her preferences are other than his or her true ones. In the 1970s Allan Gibbard and Mark Satterthwaite independently proved that it was a corollary of Arrow's
impossibility theorem
that no fair and non-random procedure was strategy-proof.

 
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