Dropping Out of the War System : Fewer Now See War, Nuclear or Conventional, as a Blessing

It is widely assumed that, for better or worse, the existence of nuclear weapons has profoundly shaped our lives and destinies.

It is true that there has been no world war since 1945, and it is also true that nuclear weapons have been developed and deployed in part to deter such a conflict. It does not follow, however, that it is the weapons that have prevented the war--that peace has been, in Winston Churchill’s memorable construction, “the sturdy child of (nuclear) terror.” To assert that the ominous presence of nuclear weapons has prevented a war between the two power blocs, one must assume that there would have been a war had these weapons not existed. This assumption ignores several other important war-discouraging factors in the postwar world:

--A nuclear war would certainly be vastly destructive, but for the most part nuclear weapons simply compound and dramatize a military reality that by 1945 had already become appalling. Few with the experience of World War II behind them would contemplate its repetition with anything other than horror.

--Unlike the situation after World War I, the only powers capable of creating another world war since 1945 have been the big victors, the United States and the Soviet Union, each of which has emerged comfortably dominant in its respective sphere.

--Although the Soviet Union and international communism have visions of changing the world in a direction they prefer, their ideology stresses revolutionary procedures over major war. The communist powers have never--before or after the invention of nuclear weapons--subscribed to a Hitler-style theory of direct, Armageddon-risking conquest, and they have been extremely wary of provoking Western powers into large-scale war.

Nor have nuclear weapons been necessary to restrain the superpowers in crisis. The notion that it is the fear of nuclear war that has kept behavior restrained looks far less convincing when its underlying assumption is directly confronted: That the major powers would have allowed their various crises to escalate if all they had to fear at the end of the escalatory ladder was something like a repetition of World War II.

To be clear: None of this is meant to deny that the sheer horror of nuclear war is impressive. It is simply to stress that the sheer horror of repeating World War II is not all that much less impressive, and that powers essentially satisfied with the status quo will strive to avoid anything that they feel could lead to either calamity.

To counter the remark attributed to Albert Einstein--that nuclear weapons have changed everything except our way of thinking--it might be suggested that nuclear weapons have changed little except our way of talking, gesturing and spending money.

Thus it may well be that the concerns about arms and the arms race are substantially overdone. That is, the often-exquisite numerology of the nuclear arms race has probably had little to do with the important dynamics of the Cold War era, most of which have taken place at militarily subtle levels such as subversion, guerrilla war, local uprising, civil war and diplomatic posturing.

Not only have the two superpowers avoided war with one another for more than 40 years now; they also seem to have been moving progressively further away from it. Although on occasion they still remember how to say nasty things about each other, there hasn’t been a true, bone-crunching confrontational crisis for more than a quarter of a century.

It seems reasonable, though perhaps risky, to extrapolate from this trend and to suggest that major war--war among developed countries--seems so unlikely that it may well be appropriate to consider it obsolescent. Perhaps World War II was indeed the war to end war--at least war of that scale and type.

It might be instructive to look at some broad historical patterns. For centuries now, various countries like Holland, Sweden and Switzerland, once warlike and militaristic, have been quietly dropping out of the war system to pursue neutrality and, insofar as they are allowed to do so, perpetual peace.

While the bandwagon quietly gathered riders, an organized movement in opposition to war was arising. The first significant peace organizations in Western history emerged in 1815 in the wake of the Napoleonic wars, and during the next century they sought to promote the idea that war was immoral, repugnant, inefficient, uncivilized and futile.

Nevertheless, as British military historian Michael Howard has observed, “Before 1914, war was almost universally considered an acceptable, perhaps an inevitable and for many people a desirable way of settling international differences.” One could easily find many prominent thinkers declaring that war was progressive, beneficial and necessary; or that war was a thrilling test of manhood and a means of moral purification and spiritual enlargement, a promoter of such virtues as orderliness, cleanliness and personal valor. A most powerful effect of World War I on the countries that fought it was to replace that sort of thinking with a revulsion against wars and with an overwhelming, and so far permanent, if not wholly successful, desire to prevent similar wars from taking place. Suddenly after World War I, peace advocates were a decided majority. As A.A. Milne put it in 1935: “In 1913, with a few exceptions, we all thought war was a natural and fine thing to happen, so long as we were well prepared for it and had no doubt about coming out the victor. Now, with a few exceptions, we have lost our illusions; we are agreed that war is neither natural nor fine, and that the victor suffers from it equally with the vanquished.”

For the few who didn’t get the point, the lesson was substantially reinforced by World War II. In fact, it almost seems that after World War I the only person left in Europe who was willing to risk another total war was Adolf Hitler. He had a vision of expansion and carried it out with ruthless and single-minded determination. Unlike the situation in 1914 where enthusiasm for war was common, Hitler found enormous reluctance at all levels within Germany to use war to quest after the vision. Only in Japan, barely touched by World War I, was the willingness to risk major war fairly widespread.

Since 1945 the major nuclear powers have stayed out of war with each other, but equally interesting is the fact that warfare of all sorts seems to have lost its appeal within the developed world. With only minor and fleeting exceptions, there have been no wars among the 48 wealthiest countries in all that time. Never before have so many well-armed countries spent so much time not using their arms against each other. This phenomenon surely goes well beyond the issue of nuclear weapons; they have probably been no more crucial to the non-war between, say, Spain and Italy than they have been to the near-war between Greece and Turkey or to the small war between Britain and Argentina.

The existence of nuclear weapons also does not help very much to explain the complete absence since 1949 of civil war in the developed world.

As a form of activity, war in the developed world may be following once-fashionable dueling into obsolescence. The perceived wisdom, value, and efficacy of war may have moved gradually toward terminal disrepute. Where war was often casually seen as beneficial, virtuous, progressive and glorious, or at least as necessary or inevitable, the conviction has now become widespread that war in the developed world would be intolerably costly, unwise, futile and debased.

Should political tensions decline, as they have to a considerable degree since the classic Cold War era of 1945-63, it may be that the arms race will gradually dissipate. And it seems possible that this condition might be brought about not principally by ingenious agreements over arms control, but by atrophy stemming from a dawning realization that, since preparations for major war are essentially irrelevant, they are profoundly foolish.