From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. If you do a quick recap of the international news this past month, it might give you a panic attack.

There's the ongoing crisis of the coronavirus, missile strikes in the

Middle East, all kinds of headlines, and if they cause you anxiety, and they probably should,

think for a minute about the people who have to respond to all these developments in real time,

hour by hour. The complexity of world events can't be modeled by an algorithm,

at least not yet, so diplomats, policy analysts, and senior military officials sometimes turn

to very unusual tools to develop strategies. They play games. In 2018, Simon Parkin, who writes about gaming for the New Yorker,

traveled to the Defense Academy of the United Kingdom to see one of those games firsthand.

There's a story from the Second World War that you probably haven't heard before.

It's about U-Boats.

They were the Nazi submarine fleet, and they were causing a great deal of trouble for the British.

This is not addressed up propaganda story.

It's telling you that this U-boat, one of the wolves that hunting packs in the Atlantic, is as dangerous to your home as a thousand-pound bomb from the air.

The Germans were using the U-boats to sink convoys of supplies en route to England and an alarming rate, sometimes hundreds each month.

Winston Churchill came to believe that the outcome of the entire war rested on dealing with the U-boats.

So he called up a retired naval captain named Gilbert Roberts.

Roberts was a tactician and outside of the box thinker,

and at a secret naval base in Liverpool, he came up with an unusual plan to help the Navy sink

those U-boats.

Battleship! Battle ship! He designed a game.

It's loaded with action and suspense.

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