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Can men live without war? (1956)

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Re: Can men live without war? (1956)

#121

Post by TeMPOraL »

Nathanba wrote: post #84
TeMPOraL wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't make sense. > Want more oil from Nigeria? Offer them more money than the other buyers. How about I offer them some lead to sweeten the deal? As in, take my lower offer or else ? > Want to fish the waters around Tuvalu? Radio them and offer more money. Or I'll just go fishing because what ever Tuvalu can do to me? > Want Congolese cobalt? Same idea. The idea works when the players have no better choice th…

> In general, any solution that requires people to just go along with it is doomed to failure - someone eventually will figure it's in their benefit to defect. Stable solutions are ones that, by design, align with default human behavior. Like MAD. The problem with MAD is that it is human nature not to assume that your own destruction will occur. Which ends up meaning that these gentlemen's agreements like open skies…

Right. There's plenty of such non-obvious aspects of MAD. Counterintuitively to any other matter in the military, it's beneficial to you to let your enemy know the extent of your arsenal (or at least the lower bound), and the technologies used - like you explained above. And the corollary to that is, any defense or recon technology that makes it easier for you to defend against enemy nuclear attack, risks causing a war[0]. Same with offense upgrades that make first-strike weapons significantly better. For the balance to work, destruction must be mutually assured, and all sides must believe that.

--

[0] - Which is why I'm worried about recent developments in detecting underwater objects by gravity or whatnot. A critical part of MAD is nuclear SLBM-carrying submarines. Those subs, lurking in the darkness, are what guarantees that no matter how fast and effective your first strike is, you'll still get glassed in retaliation. Being able to detect those subs breaks MAD.

Re: Can men live without war? (1956)

#122

Post by openrisk »

kikokikokiko wrote: post #61
openrisk wrote: post #51

When a child is born there is nothing remotely resembling large scale warfare inscribed in its genes and the discretional cultural path that must be travelled before such detrimental collective phenomena come to be seen as innate and inevitable is enormous. Our predicament in relation to our war "habit" is similar to many other challenges we are facing: malignant social patterns that got established before a successi…

Even purely instinct based animals, like chimps amd lions, engage in war between groups. A human child is still a primate, and no ammount of cultural bs will make your assumption of purity at birth a reality. Life is, in all it's forms, a war between organisms to see who can get more resources. Life is war, unfortunately.

You seem to be confusing traits of individual competition (and even physical violence) with large scale organized war phenomena among increasingly larger and technologically advanced groups.

The logic that says that the latter follows from the former is simply not there. Social organization varies enormously in time and space and it takes a lot of "cultural bs" to get to a society that celebrates organized war and considers it inevitable.

Re: Can men live without war? (1956)

#123

Post by openrisk »

gotoeleven wrote: post #53
openrisk wrote: post #51

When a child is born there is nothing remotely resembling large scale warfare inscribed in its genes and the discretional cultural path that must be travelled before such detrimental collective phenomena come to be seen as innate and inevitable is enormous. Our predicament in relation to our war "habit" is similar to many other challenges we are facing: malignant social patterns that got established before a successi…

Your ancestors are the ones that won wars in the past. Inasmuch as warfare can be "inscribed" in genes, it definitely is.

Your argument is that historical patterns of past conditions have to repeat for ever even when these conditions go extinct or get modified dramatically?

What is definitely part of inate individual behavior is competitiveness and occasional propensity for physical violence. The road from this simple trait to organize millions (and now billions) of individuals to apply lethal, technologically assisted force on millions of other individuals is long.

Modern organized war is business, politics, ideology and none of that is biology.

Re: Can men live without war? (1956)

#124

Post by squigz »

injb wrote: post #104
squigz wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they make bows and spears, but not guns? That seems a fairly arbitrary technological line to draw.

To ensure the natural advantage that strong people have over weak people, of course. Nature has ordained that the strong should subjugate the weak, and the equalizing force of firearms is thus an afront to nature, and is not to be tolerated!

Describing widespread firearms as socially "equalizing" is a new one to me, so thanks for that.

Re: Can men live without war? (1956)

#125

Post by wruza »

jokoon wrote: post #14

In an ideal future, firearms would be banned worldwide. A body like interpol would investigate the entire world, to surveil if anybody is trying to make firearms. People would make bows and spears, but it would be more difficult to conduct war. It would not make war and violence impossible, but it would certainly be a better world. EDIT: lots of pedants: obviously there would be an joint army answering to an internat…

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.

Re: Can men live without war? (1956)

#126

Post by squigz »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #73
squigz wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they make bows and spears, but not guns? That seems a fairly arbitrary technological line to draw.

A small child could kill hundreds of people with a single gun (depending on the type). Firearms (including bombs) are force multipliers far beyond any bow or spear.

So basically, small-scale war/death is fine, as long as large-scale war is monopolized by the powerful?

Re: Can men live without war? (1956)

#127

Post by jack_riminton »

jokoon wrote: post #14

In an ideal future, firearms would be banned worldwide. A body like interpol would investigate the entire world, to surveil if anybody is trying to make firearms. People would make bows and spears, but it would be more difficult to conduct war. It would not make war and violence impossible, but it would certainly be a better world. EDIT: lots of pedants: obviously there would be an joint army answering to an internat…

Utterly ludicrous

Re: Can men live without war? (1956)

#128

Post by snowpid »

blub wrote: post #120
kiba wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Russia is a North Korean 'proxy'. With South Korea considering lethal aid, Ukraine may soon be a 'proxy' of South Korea. In the end, Russia made their own decision to invade, and the Ukrainians' own decision to resist.

Ukraine may not have started as a proxy, but it became one as its military stocks were exhausted. Both EU and US politicians claim on record that Ukraine would fold within days or weeks if it didn’t get support. At this point US+EU are paying for the pensions, military and keeping Ukraine’s economy afloat. Our military aid is keeping Ukraine in the fight. This doesn’t mean the Ukrainians don’t have agency or don’t ma…

"This doesn’t mean the Ukrainians don’t have agency or don’t make their own decisions, but the US and to some extent EU have a huge amount of influence."

By calling Ukraine proxy you deny its own agency.

Re: Can men live without war? (1956)

#129

Post by ZeroGravitas »

The 1953 sci-fi novel Limbo touches on these concepts and references the Moral Equivalent of War essay heavily. Must have been something in the air at the time.

In the novel's far future time of 1990 it's effectively a religious text and all the young men are volunteering to have their limbs removed as a protest against wars that were fought with those limbs.

It gets a bit philosophical, and takes a very 1950s detour into the philosophy of rape, but is overall a very interesting read, sci-fi catch-22 in many ways.

Re: Can men live without war? (1956)

#130

Post by The_Colonel »

blub wrote: post #118
ryandrake wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All it takes is one madman to get near the button and gain enough power that his button-press is honored. It almost seems inevitable given a long enough time frame.

Many if not all the close calls in the past were misunderstandings or tensions spiraling out of control. The madman with nukes is a trope. This is also why online commenters thinking that the Ukraine war will not go nuclear are misguided.

The weaker version of madman scenario is a head of state believing they can use nukes in a limited scope to achieve its political goals.

Imagine this scenario: the war in Ukraine goes for some more time, Russia starts to have economic problems and is desperate to settle it (without having to compromise), force Ukraine to surrender and demand sanctions to be lifted. So he uses a couple of small tactical nukes along the frontline to cripple Ukrainian forces. Civilian deaths are in tens of thousands.

Ukraine can't respond, but apparently some threat has been declared from US to prevent this scenario - NATO / US launches conventional strikes on Russian military installations within Ukraine. Russia is not able to respond symmetrically, so it drops a tactical nuke on a military base within NATO territory (in Eastern Europe, far from major population center) as a kind of last warning to step back. There are multiple ways how this can go from then on, but there are scenarios ending in a major or all-out nuclear exchange. Without the need for misunderstanding and madmans.

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