Letters and comment

The letters (and my response) to "The Myth of Nuclear Deterrence" are up on the Nonproliferation Review's website. I recommend that you run right down to the corner drugstore and get a copy. (I'm kidding. I know it's not the fifties.) But you really should give it a look - if for nothing else to read Jeffrey Lewis' interesting piece on China, which I found thought provoking.

Here's a part of my response:

Finally, in arguing that nuclear deterrence might work, even though killing civilians doesn’t seem to have affected war’s outcome very much in the past, Tertrais notes that “Most modern states have less tolerance for human suffering and destruction than was the case until 1945.” It is certainly true that there seems to be less stomach for violence since World War II (although the Cambodians and Rwandans might see things differently). But even a cursory review of history will show that the lust for war ebbs and flows throughout history. We appear to be sailing through a period of relative calm now, with less destruction and less killing than sixty years ago. But these sorts of calms have come before.

At the turn of the 19^th century the European Victorians congratulated themselves on their civility and good manners. There might be wars in the colonies (fighting savages), they said, but there would never be savage war again in Europe. We have evolved too far, they said, our commercial interests are too intertwined, we are too cultured for the sort of brutal, rampaging war that engulfed all of Europe during the 1600s or the Napoleonic era. Massive wars like that, they confidently and complacently asserted, are gone forever. World War I disabused them with a savage fury.

Human beings have demonstrated, time and again, a lust for war that does not seem to fade or wear itself out. It is true that there have been times when we fight less. But the desire for war - and the destruction and killing that go with it - seems to be a savagery that only sleeps. When we think about the most destructive weapons yet created by man, this is a bit of history worth remembering.

Read the whole thing here.