"The Course of Empire:
Destruction," by Thomas Cole (Wikimedia Commons)
I was 23 when I almost died in
battle.
It was September 26, 1983, around 9:30 in the
evening. I was hunched over a manual typewriter in a rented room in Cambridge,
England, pounding out the first chapter of my Ph.D. thesis in archaeology. I had
just come back from four months of fieldwork in the Greek islands. My work was
going well. I was in love. Life was good.
I had no idea that 2,000 miles away, Stanislav
Petrov was deciding whether to kill me.
Petrov was the deputy chief for combat
algorithms at Serpukhov-15, the nerve center of the Soviet Union’s early-warning
system. He was a methodical man, an engineer, a writer of computer code—and not,
fortunately for me, a man given to panic. But when the siren went off a little
after midnight (Moscow time), even Petrov leaped out of his chair. A red bulb
blinked into life on the giant map of the Northern Hemisphere that filled one
wall of the control room. It signaled that a missile had been launched from
Montana.
Above the map, red letters came to life,
spelling out the worst word Petrov knew: “LAUNCH.”
Computers checked and double-checked their
data. Again the red lights flashed, this time with more certainty: “LAUNCH—HIGH
RELIABILITY.”
You may not be very interested in war, Trotsky
is supposed to have said, but war is very interested in you. Cambridge was—and
still is—a sleepy university town, far from the seats of power. In 1983, though,
it was ringed by air-force bases high on Moscow’s list of targets. If the Soviet
General Staff had believed Petrov’s algorithms, I would have been dead within 15
minutes, vaporized in a fireball hotter than the surface of the sun. King’s
College and its choir, the cows grazing as punts drifted by, the scholars in
their gowns passing the port at High Table—all would have been blasted into
radioactive dust.
If the Soviets had launched only the missiles
that they were pointing at military targets (what strategists called a
counterforce attack), and if the United States had responded in kind, I would
have been one of roughly a hundred million people blown apart, burned up, and
poisoned on the first day of the war. But that is probably not what would have
happened. Just three months before Petrov’s moment of truth, the U.S. Strategic
Concepts Development Center had run a war game to see how the opening stages of
a nuclear exchange might go. They found that no player managed to draw the line
at counterforce attacks. In every case, they escalated to countervalue attacks,
firing on cities as well as silos. And when that happened, the first few days’
death toll rose to around half a billion, with fallout, starvation, and further
fighting killing another half billion in the weeks and months that
followed.
Back in the real world, however, Petrov did
draw a line. He later admitted to having been so scared that his legs gave way
under him, but he still trusted his instincts over his algorithms. Going with
his gut, he told the duty officer that this was a false alarm. The
missile-attack message was stopped before it worked its way up the chain of
command. Twelve thousand Soviet warheads stayed in their silos; a billion of us
lived to fight another day.
A world like this—in which Armageddon hung on
shoddy engineering and the snap judgments of computer programmers—had surely
gone mad. People cried out for answers, and on both sides of the Iron Curtain
the young turned away from aging, compromised politicians toward louder voices.
Speaking for a new post-baby-boom generation, Bruce Springsteen took the
greatest of the Vietnam-era protest songs—Edwin Starr’s Motown classic “War”—and
sent a supercharged cover version back into the top 10:
War! Huh, good
God. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing.... War! Friend only to
the undertaker....
***
War is mass murder, and yet, in perhaps the
greatest paradox in history, war has nevertheless been the undertaker’s worst
enemy. Contrary to what the song says, war has been good for something: over the
long run, it has made humanity safer and richer.
There are four parts to the case I will make.
The first is that by fighting wars, people have created larger, more organized
societies that have reduced the risk that their members will die
violently.
This observation rests on one of the major
findings of archaeologists and anthropologists over the last century: that Stone
Age societies were typically tiny. Chiefly because of the challenges of finding
food, people lived in bands of a few dozen, villages of a few hundred, or (very
occasionally) towns of a few thousand members. These communities did not need
much in the way of internal organization and tended to live on terms of
suspicion or even hostility with outsiders.
People generally worked out their differences
peacefully, but if someone decided to use force, there were far fewer
constraints on him—or, occasionally, her—than the citizens of modern states are
used to. Most of the killing was on a small scale, in vendettas and incessant
raiding, although once in a while violence might disrupt an entire band or
village so badly that disease and starvation wiped all its members out. But
because populations were also small, the steady drip of low-level violence took
an appalling toll. By most estimates, 10 to 20 percent of all the people who
lived in Stone Age societies died at the hands of other humans.
The twentieth century forms a sharp contrast.
It saw two world wars, a string of genocides, and multiple government-induced
famines, killing a staggering total of somewhere between 100 million and 200
million people. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed more
than 150,000 people—probably more people than had lived in the entire world in
50,000 B.C. But in 1945, there were about 2.5 billion people on earth, and over
the course of the twentieth century roughly 10 billion lives were lived—meaning
that the century’s 100–200 million war-related deaths added up to just 1 to 2
percent of our planet’s population. If you were lucky enough to be born in the
industrialized twentieth century, you were on average 10 times less likely to
die violently (or from violence’s consequences) than if you were born in a Stone
Age society.
Rates of Violent Death, 10,000
B.C. - 2013 A.D.
Ian Morris
This may be a surprising statistic, but the
explanation for it is more surprising still. What has made the world so much
safer is war itself. The way this worked was that beginning about 10,000 years
ago in some parts of the world, then spreading across the planet, the winners of
wars incorporated the losers into larger societies. The only way to make these
larger societies work was for their rulers to develop stronger governments, and
one of the first things these governments had to do, if they wanted to stay in
power, was suppress violence within the society.
The men who ran these governments hardly ever
pursued policies of peacemaking purely out of the goodness of their hearts. They
cracked down on killing because well-behaved subjects were easier to govern and
tax than angry, murderous ones. The unintended consequence, though, was that
rates of violent death fell by 90 percent between Stone Age times and the
twentieth century.
The process was not pretty. Whether it was the
Romans in Britain or the British in India, pacifiers could be just as brutal as
the savagery they stamped out. Nor was the process smooth: for short periods in
particular places, violent death could spike back up to Stone Age levels.
Between 1914 and 1918, for instance, nearly one Serb in six died from violence,
disease, or starvation. And, of course, not all governments were equally good at
delivering peace. Democracies may be messy, but they rarely devour their
children; dictatorships get things done, but they tend to shoot, starve, and gas
a lot of people. And yet despite all the variations, qualifications, and
exceptions, over the 10,000-year-long run, war made governments, and governments
made peace.
U.S. soldiers watch a
nuclear test detonation in the Nevada desert, in 1951. (Wikimedia
Commons)
My second claim is that while war is the worst
imaginable way to create larger, more peaceful societies, it is pretty much the
only way humans have found. “Lord knows, there’s got to be a better way,” Edwin
Starr sang, but apparently there isn’t. If the Roman Empire could have been
created without killing millions of Gauls and Greeks, if the United States could
have been built without killing millions of Native Americans—in these cases and
countless others, if conflicts could have been resolved by discussion instead of
force, humanity could have had the benefits of larger societies without paying
such a high cost. But that did not happen. It is a depressing thought, but the
evidence again seems clear. People hardly ever give up their freedom, including
their rights to kill and impoverish each other, unless forced to do so, and
virtually the only force strong enough to bring this about has been defeat in
war or fear that such a defeat is imminent.
My third conclusion is that as well as making
people safer, the larger societies created by war have also—again, over the long
run—made us richer. Peace created the conditions for economic growth and rising
living standards. This process too has been messy and uneven: the winners of
wars regularly go on rampages of rape and plunder, selling thousands of
survivors into slavery and stealing their land. The losers may be left
impoverished for generations. It is a terrible, ugly business. And yet, with the
passage of time—maybe decades, maybe centuries—the creation of a bigger society
tends to make everyone, the descendants of victors and vanquished alike, better
off. The long-term pattern is again unmistakable. By creating larger societies,
stronger governments, and greater security, war has enriched the
world.
When we put these three claims together, only
one conclusion is possible. War has produced bigger societies, ruled by stronger
governments, which have imposed peace and created the preconditions for
prosperity. Ten thousand years ago, there were only about 6 million people on
earth. on average they lived about 30 years and supported themselves on the
equivalent of less than two modern American dollars per day. Now there are more
than a thousand times as many of us (7 billion, in fact), living more than twice
as long (the global average is 67 years), and earning more than a dozen times as
much (today the global average is $25 per day).
A Ukrainian soldier stands
guard near Crimea in March 2014. The tattoo on his forearm is a Latin quote of
the late Roman writer Vegetius, meaning, "If you want peace, prepare for war."
(Viktor Gurniak/Reuters)
War, then, has been good for something—so good,
in fact, that my fourth argument is that war is now putting itself out of
business. For millennia, war has created peace, and destruction has created
wealth, but in our own age humanity has gotten so good at fighting—our weapons
so destructive, our organizations so efficient—that war is beginning to make
further war of this kind impossible. Had events gone differently that night in
1983—had Petrov panicked, had the general secretary actually pushed the button,
and had a billion of us been killed over the next few weeks—the twentieth
century’s rate of violent death would have soared back into Stone Age territory,
and had the toxic legacy of all those warheads been as terrible as some
scientists feared, by now there might have been no humans left at
all.
***
Current trends suggest that robots will begin
taking over our fighting in the 2040s—just around the time, the trends also
suggest, that the United States, the world’s globocop, will be losing control of
the international order. In the 1910s, the combination of a weakening globocop
(Britain) and revolutionary new fighting machines (dreadnoughts, machine guns,
aircraft, quick-firing artillery, internal combustion engines) ended a century
of smaller, less bloody wars and set off a storm of steel. The 2040s promise a
similar combination. The next 40 years could be the most dangerous in
history.
We are already, according to the political
scientist Paul Bracken, moving into a Second Nuclear Age. The First Nuclear
Age—the Soviet-American confrontation of the 1940s–80s— was scary but simple,
because mutual assured destruction produced stability (of a kind). The Second
Age, by contrast, is for the moment not quite so scary, because the number of
warheads is so much smaller, but it is very far from simple. It has more players
than the Cold War, using smaller forces and following few if any agreed-on
rules. Mutual assured destruction no longer applies, because India, Pakistan,
and Israel (if or when Iran goes nuclear) know that a first strike against their
regional rival could conceivably take out its second-strike capability. So far,
antimissile defenses and the globocop’s guarantees have kept order. But if the
globocop does lose credibility in the 2030s and after, nuclear proliferation,
arms races, and even preemptive attacks may start to make
sense.
A long exposure photograph
of a U.S. Peacekeeper missile test in the Marshall Islands in 2004. Each
Peacekeeper missile consists of up to 10 independently targeted nuclear
warheads. Each of the warheads, when armed, has 25 times the explosive power of
the nuclear bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945. (Wikimedia
Commons)
If major war comes in the 2040s or ’50s, there
is a very good chance that it will begin not with a quarantined, high-tech
battle between the great powers’ computers, space stations, and robots but with
nuclear wars in South, Southwest, or East Asia that expand to draw in everyone
else. A Third World War will probably be as messy and furious as the first two,
and much, much bloodier. We should expect massive cyber, space, robotic,
chemical, and nuclear onslaughts, hurled against the enemy’s digital and
antimissile shields like futuristic broadswords smashing at a suit of armor, and
when the armor cracks, as it eventually will, storms of fire, radiation, and
disease will pour through onto the defenseless bodies on the other side. Quite
possibly, as in so many battles in the past, neither side will really know
whether it is winning or losing until disaster suddenly overtakes it or the
enemy— or both at once.
And yet, long-term history also gives us cause
for optimism. We have not managed to wish war out of existence, but that is
because it cannot be done. We have, however, been extremely good at responding
to changing incentives in the game of death. For most of our time on earth, we
have been aggressive, violent animals, because aggression and violence have paid
off. But in the 10,000 years since we invented productive war, we have evolved
culturally to become less violent—because that pays off even better. And since
nuclear weapons came into the world in 1945, the incentives in the game have
changed faster than ever before, and our reactions have accelerated along with
them. As a result, the average person is now roughly 20 times less likely to die
violently than the average person was in the Stone Age.
As the returns to violence have declined, we
have found ways to solve our problems without bringing on
Armageddon.
This post is adapted
fromIan Morris’s new book, War! What Is It Good For?, to be published April 15 by Farrar, Straus and
Giroux.
