Can men live without war? (1956)

We’ve had at least one war between nuclear powers off the top of my head. The Kargil war of 1999 between India and Pakistan, I believe both sides had nuclear weapons deployed at the time.

EDIT: also the Sino-soviet war of 1969

> War between nuclear powers doesn't happen any more

It didn't happen yet, but there are no is reasons for nuclear war to be avoided indefinitely.

Ukraine is uncomfortably close. Nuclear armed combatant on one side, and proxy on the other.

> War between nuclear powers doesn't happen any more

That might change as more nations acquire nuclear weapons. Or maybe the pathway to world peace is to give every country nukes.

half of those are not proxy wars in any way shape or form.

> War is the result of humans fighting over the metaphorical petri dish of land, resources, and also power.

People do all of that in modern economies without resorting to physically eliminating each other.

To get millions of individuals to coordinate over long times, mobilizing massive resources etc. in order to exterminate other millions (to grab their resources, subjugated them or whatever) is not "natural" or biological in any sense.

War is a cultural adaptation that worked for aeons because it did not threaten the survival of the species. In a technologically advanced civilization this is no longer assured. Vannevar Bush was simply a century or so ahead of his time. In the arc of human history this is just a blip.

I think it's more about our resource growth outpacing our resource demand, because if that happens we bypass the resource competition that drives most conflict.

This has a lot of pathways, tech efficiency, slower population growth, more resource acquisition (asteroid mining etc). It's definitely possible in the large scope, but I suspect there will be periods of spiking demand that still cause lots of short term conflicts.

Famines and mass migration are very likely with climate change going the way it is. Over the course of 100 years I suspect the resource problem will alleviate but until then there will be a lot of conflict.

The only real long term trick is creating larger and larger gulfs between the resource demand and availability, buffers that can withstand the smaller scale changes. But, unfortunately, our current dominant systems of power view buffers like that as either weakness or opportunity that are antithetical to progress.

Came here to say the same. We've evolved on a finite planet, so war is in our DNA.

What would you propose as an alternative?

> our brains remain wired like the tribes that fought for survival

If that was literaly true then there would only ever be a single organizational structure for human society, like bees, ants, chimps or whatever.

When you look at recorded history alone, societies have organized in many different ways and the complexity and variety is only exploding over time.

Organized war has generally been part of societal behavior, but that has been because perceived benefits always exceeded the attributed cost. From the nuclear age forward the calculus has changed. It only gets worse with each new potentially lethal invention.

The reality of a finite planet, where organized, technologically assisted violence can wipe out billions will eventually sink and lazy ideological thinking, vested interest in warmongering etc. will disappear.

Logically, given the trajectory of human development, for war-as-we-know-it to persist we'd have to wipe out modern civilization in a final global war and go back to primitive societies that can afford this "game".

Yup. I already moved out of my home country and that was one of the reasons. Sudden interest of governments in the old ways.

I actually think war driving progress is a strong argument. Not to use any obvious examples (e.g. internet), I would argue war has a profound effect on the psyche of nations (whether they lose or win).

A few examples: - Germany rose to power in the 1800s, with a culmination at Sedan in 1870, driven by the humiliation Napoleon inflected on 60 years earlier. In 1870, Germany was a behemoth of technology (especially chemistry) & industry - France won WW1 with such heavy losses that its people said “never again” (they called WW1 the “Great War” or the “last war”). War left an indelible mark (one wished it had left the same mark on the German).

Many such examples. Countries compete and war is a great impetus to modernize the Nation.

> men drive progress and war drives progress, and both of those things are debatable

I'm fairly confident that the progress mentioned in the article is meant as technological and maybe social progress. How would either of those happen without being driven by humans, or another hypothetical technological species?

In terms of war, I don't see how it's debatable. It may not be the only driver but it's definitely a strong one. It may not be progress towards something you (or I) desire but it's progress nonetheless.

Consider it an economic problem. War costs money, therefore war will be conducted when its benefits exceed its costs. What makes war profitable? For that you need to know the benefits of war. The most obvious benefit is the changing of borders and conquering of new land. Now you might say that it always makes sense for a country to try to conquer the enire world, because having the land grants you access to its riches for free, but then you have to consider the costs of war too.

The cost of conquering land and managing it yourself must be cheaper than letting the other country manage the land and production process and then importing the goods you want.

The cost of conquering the land can be split into two parts. First, the initial offensive representing capex and the ongoing defense costs against attackers represent opex. If it turns out that the foreign country is both fleecing you on imports and is spending less in defense per acre than you would, if you managed the land, it would be profitable for you to conquer the land and install a defense force that spends more to protect the same plot of land. Since your spending budget is higher per acre, the original country would lose if they tried to recover the territory.

Now consider the opposite scenario. The original country does not fleece you on imports and has a lean army. Then it would not be profitable for you to conquer the land, since you have higher opex and the benefit is insignificant.

Of course none of this stops crazy dictators from attempting world domination, but it can tell you that on average, people should be uninterested in war.

> and land get taken.

It's always land. This is because land is scarce. You can keep things that aren't scarce without force.

> Is there any convincing argument for getting out of this equilibrium?

The total destruction of artificial scarcity?

And people are slowly testing the limits of the nuke deterrent. Turns out everyone is really hesitant to use them especially when the aggressor has nukes too.

1945 gave us a way out of this equilibrium.

Not the nukes. The Bretton Woods principles. It was not a kumbayah exchange of platitudes. It was an agreement to let things be settled in the free market.

Want more oil from Nigeria? Offer them more money than the other buyers. Want to fish the waters around Tuvalu? Radio them and offer more money. Want Congolese cobalt? Same idea.

This was the brainchild of John Maynard Keynes, not Ayn Rand. It was not a matter of market fetishism. It was based on the sensible idea that the market place is a better way to settle these things than the battlefield, something even a Marxist should be willing to admit.

That could have brought us to a world wide peace in 1945, but only the First World went along with this idea. The Second World rallied around endless revolution and war until we get a worker's paradise. And the Third World tried to stay out altogether. (Reminder: by the original definition, Switzerland was in the Third World).

We had another chance in 1989. And we blew it.

Now we can try again.

Why doesn't Texas wage war on Oklahoma?

You have a nice theory there, would be a shame if something happened to it.

I played this older computer civilization-like space game. In it, there was an hyperaggressive race that always went to war with everybody. They always died out first.

I think conflict will always exist, but violence? I am not sure. I think it comes down to availability of information. People don't like a*holes. Once world becomes a global village, and almost everyone will run a SW on their phone that keeps tabs on other 8 billion people, starting a war will become nearly impossible.

A small percentage of humans can catch some hands and get stuffed into lockers by the rest of us who would prefer not to be led by them.

Evolution suggests that genes with no strong survival benefit are eventually discarded.

Luckily, such innate drive and desire to dominate can be funnelled into something more productive and less detrimental to others.

Instead of becoming a president and starting wars of aggression, why not try sports? How about becoming an academic, an expert in some esoteric field, and spend your days acquiring intellectual territory and terrorising your intellectual opponents?

Or use your greed to start a business that somehow ends up benefiting us all even whilst making you richer than all of us.

I don't know about you guys, but I think my masculinity is strong enough to survive the lack of war. I'm just not feeling threatened, here.

A small percentage? I would say most of humans, especially males, are territorial.

You’re not banning anything. You’re proposing a total monopoly on effective weaponry for this joint army.

And requiring global controls on 3D printers, CNC machines, any pressure bearing metal, and a range of chemistry and fertilizers.

All this after a door to door search for weapons and ammunition. What army exactly is going to be kicking down my door to confiscate these at gunpoint?

> A body like interpol would investigate the entire world, to surveil if anybody is trying to make firearms.

And that body would need firearms.

Firearms aren't the problem. It's states because states use firearms to get resources with which to conduct war. But states are unavoidable because without states we'd have caudillos -- warlords, heads of tiny states that will in due time coalesce into large states, and we're back at square one.

A single world state wouldn't be a solution for the same reason that larger states have at times fallen apart into smaller states: there will be resentments and tyranny. Indeed, a single world state would have to be tyrannical just in order to stay together, and its government would be highly non-representative for natural reasons, namely that having it be highly-representative would mean it having -impractically- hundreds of thousands of representatives.

You're not the first to think that extreme violence could bring peace, but it's an illusion. Huge majorities of humans must know internal peace and have tremendous wisdom for us to enjoy peace on Earth.

And these guys who disarm people will read lots of classic literature to stay noble, of course.

A few years of having the greatest power on earth turns 99% of otherwise good men into non-humans. That’s just the fact of life, explained thousands of times throughout history. That’s why you have to elect a new guy every few years, cause the old one starts to lose it. Try removing him if his gang is the only gang with firearms.

And those who will master creating weapons in the shadows will overthrow interpol and rule mankind.

I’d say in an ideal future humans wouldn’t want to create weapons.