ABSTRACT
The escalation of interstate conflict to war has been a subject of deep concern to many scholars of international relations, and Harold Guetzkow has long been a leader in the drive to understand why nations go up to, and then over, the brink of war. Professor Guetzkow also pioneered the use of simulation as a research tool to investigate the causes of international conflict and other problems (Guetzkow 1976; Guetzkow and Valadez 1981). In this chapter, I will combine these two themes and present a model of nation state decision-making during serious disputes in the form of a computer simulation, with the object of predicting the principal escalatory moves of major power governments during these situations.
