[fidotron]

In your example there is nothing to be gained by not complying.

Failing to comply with what is in reality arms control is a widespread occurence. It's notable the only historical way to handle this (Schelling covered it at length) is tolerance of mutual espionage on a level that would simply not be tolerable to any of the groups involved.

I should add one of Schelling's other pet subjects was "time to weapon being viable". i.e. the distinction between a nuclear power and non-nuclear power isn't quite right, as there's a huge class of countries that could become so fairly fast if they were so inclined, and that this situation is somewhat inevitable. It is this that leads to efforts to denuclearize, even on a civilian level, "problematic" countries. You want to stop frontier AI and you'll have to be rolling back a lot of existing deployed technology.

[Nition]

The Montreal Protocol has not been perfectly adhered to either. China started emitting quite a lot of banned CFCs again from around 2012[1], which didn't get noticed until 2018! By 2020 it had finally stopped[2].

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0106-2

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00360-0

[alach11]

Great comment. I haven't read Schelling but will check that out. I think you're right that international cooperation on the topic is likely impossible at present, for the reasons you stated. I'm not sure what it would take to shift the Overton window, but it's probably not pretty.

[fidotron]

So honestly Schelling was utterly brilliant. I cannot recommend all three of the books wikipedia classed as his notable works highly enough:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Schelling#Notable_works

There are footnotes in "The Strategy of Conflict" containing more profound insight than whole books that are published today.

On this particular topic though "Strategy and Arms Control" is the one to go for.