Since the mid-18th century, many European and American the-

orists have attempted to explain war as an aberration in human

affairs or as an occurrence beyond rational control. Violent con-
flicts between nations have been depicted, variously, as collec-
tive outbursts of male aggression, as the inevitable outcome of
ruling-class greed, or as necessary, even healthy, events in the
evolutionary scheme. One exception to the general trend was
the 19th-century Prussian strategist Karl von Clausewitz, who
declared, in an oft-quoted dictum, that war was the extension of
politics "by other means." Here, historian Michael Howard
argues further that war is one of Reason's progeny-indeed,
that war stems from nothing less than a "superabundance of an-
alytic rationality."

by Michael Howard

' /
No one can describe the topic that I have chosen to discuss
as a neglected and understudied one. How much ink has been
spilled about it, how many library shelves have been filled with
works on the subject, since the days of Thucydides! How many
scholars from how many specialties have applied their expertise
to this intractable problem! Mathematicians, meteorologists,
sociologists, anthropologists, geographers, physicists, political
scientists, philosophers, theologians, and lawyers are only the
most obvious of the categories that come to mind when one sur-
veys the ranks of those who have sought some formula for per-
petual peace, or who have at least hoped to reduce the
complexities of international conflict to some orderly structure,
to develop a theory that will enable us to explain, to understand,
and to control a phenomenon which, if we fail to abolish it,
might well abolish us.
Yet it is not a problem that has aroused a great deal of inter-
est in the historical profession. The causes of specific wars, yes:
These provide unending material for analysis and interpreta-
 WAR

Der Tag-the day when

war was to be declared-
was eagerly awaited by
many German generals
during the years pre-
ceding World War I .

tion, usually fueled by plenty of documents and starkly conflict-

ing prejudices on the part of the scholars themselves.
But the phenomenon of war as a continuing activity within
human society is one that as a profession we take very much for
granted. The alternation of war and peace has been the very
stuff of the past. War has been throughout history a normal way
of conducting disputes between political groups. Few of us,
probably, would go along with those sociobiologists who claim
that this has been so because man is "innately aggressive." The
calculations of advantage and risk, sometimes careful, some-
times crude, that statesmen make before committing their coun-
tries to war are linked very remotely, if at all, to the displays of
tribal "machismo" that we witness today in football crowds.
Since the use or threat of physical force is the most elementary
way of asserting power and controlling one's environment, the
fact that men have frequently had recourse to it does not cause
the historian a great deal of surprise. Force, or the threat of it,
may not settle arguments, but it does play a considerable part in
WAR

determining the structure of the world in which we live.

I mentioned the multiplicity of books that have been writ-
ten about the causes of war since the time of Thucydides. In fact,
I think we would find that the vast majority of them have been
written since 1914, and that the degree of intellectual concern
about the causes of war to which we have become accustomed
has existed only since the First World War. In view of the dam-
age which that war did to the social and political structure of
Europe, this is understandable enough. But there has been a
tendency to argue that because that war caused such great and
lasting damage, because it destroyed three great empires and
nearly beggared a fourth,it must have arisen from causes of pe-
culiar complexity and profundity, from the neuroses of nations,
from the widening class struggle, from a crisis in industrial soci-
ety. I have argued this myself, taking issue with Mr. A. J. P. Tay-
lor, who maintained that because the war had such profound
consequences, it did not necessarily have equally profound
causes. But now I wonder whether on this, as on so many other
matters, I was not wrong and he was not right.

It is true, and it is important to bear in mind in examining

the problems of that period, that before 1914 war was almost
universally considered an acceptable, perhaps an inevitable and
for many people a desirable, way of settling international differ-
ences, and that the war generally foreseen was expected to be, if
not exactly brisk and cheerful, then certainly brief; no longer,
certainly, than the war of 1870 between France and Prussia that
was consciously or unconsciously taken by that generation as a
model. Had it not been so generally felt that war was an accept-
able and tolerable way of solving international disputes, states-
men and soldiers would no doubt have approached the crisis of
1914 in a very different fashion.
Michael Howard, 62, a Wilson Center Fellow, holds the Regius Chair o f
Modem History at Oxford University. He was born in London, England.
Before receiving his B.A. from Oxford (1946),Howard served in the Cold-
stream Guards in Italy during World War 11, was twice wounded, and was
awarded the Military Cross. He received his Litt. D. from Oxford in 1976.
Among his many works, he has written War in European History (1976)
and War and the Liberal Conscience (1978), and he has translated, with
Peter Paret of Stanford, Karl v a n Clausewitz's classic study On War
(1976). This essay is reprinted by permission of Harvard University Press
from The Causes of Wars and Other Essays (2nd ed.), 0 1983 by Michael
Howard. Enlarged edition available i n the summer of 1984.

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 WAR

But there was nothing new about this attitude to war.

Statesmen had always been able to assume that war would be
acceptable at least to those sections of their populations whose
opinion mattered to them, and in this respect the decision to go
to war in 1914-for continental statesmen at least-in no way
differed from those taken by their predecessors of earlier genera-
tions. The causes of the Great War are thus in essence no more
complex or profound than those of any previous European war,
or indeed than those described by Thucydides as underlying the
Peloponnesian War: "What made war inevitable was the growth
of Athenian power and the fear this caused in Sparta." In Cen-
tral Europe, there was the German fear that the disintegration
of the Habsburg Empire would result in an enormous enhance-
ment of Russian power-power already becoming formidable
as French-financed industries and railways out Russian man-
power at the service of her military machine. In Western Eu-
rope, there was the traditional British fear that Germany might
establish a hegemony over Europe which, even more than that
of Napoleon, would place at risk the security of Britain and her
own possessions, a fear fueled by the knowledge that there was
within Germany a widespread determination to achieve a world
status comparable with her latent power. Considerations of this
kind had caused wars in Europe often enough before. Was there
really anything different about 1914?

Ever since the 18th century, war had been blamed by intellec-
tuals upon the stupidity or the self-interest of governing elites (as it
is now blamed upon "military-industrial complexes"), with the
implicit or explicit assumption that if the control of state
affairs were in the hands of sensible men-businessmen,
as Richard Cobden thought, the workers, as Jean Jaures
thought-then wars would be no more.
By the 20th century, the growth of the social and biological
sciences was producing alternative explanations. As Quincy
Wright expressed it in his massive A Study o f War (1942), "Scien-
tific investigators . . . tended to attribute war to immaturities in
social knowledge and control, as one might attribute epidemics
to insufficient medical knowledge or to inadequate public
health services." The Social Darwinian acceptance of the inevi-
tability of struggle, indeed of its desirability if mankind was to
progress, the view, expressed by the elder Moltke but very
widely shared at the turn of the century, that perpetual peace
was a dream and not even a beautiful dream, did not survive the

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WAR

Great War in those countries where the bourgeois-liberal cul-

ture was dominant, Britain and the United States. The failure of
these nations to appreciate that such bellicist views, or variants
of them, were still widespread in other areas of the world, those
dominated by Fascism and by Marxism-Leninism, was to cause
embarrassing misunderstandings, and possibly still does.
For liberal intellectuals, war was self-evidently a patholog-
ical aberration from the norm, at best a ghastly mistake, at
worst a crime. Those who initiated wars must in their view have
been criminal, or sick, or the victims of forces beyond their
power to control. Those who were so accused disclaimed respon-
sibility for the events of 1914, throwing it on others or saying the
whole thing was a terrible mistake for which no one was to
blame. None of them, with their societies in ruins around them
and tens of millions dead, were prepared to say courageously:
"We only acted as statesmen always have in the past. In the cir-
cumstances then prevailing, war seemed to us to be the best way
of protecting or forwarding the national interests for which we
were responsible. There was an element of risk, certainly, but
the risk might have been greater had we postponed the issue.
Our real guilt does not lie in the fact that we started the war. It
lies in our mistaken belief that we could win it."

The trouble is that if we are to regard war as pathological

and abnormal, then all conflict must be similarly regarded; for
war is only a particular kind of conflict between a particular
category of social groups: sovereign states. It is, as Clausewitz
put it, "a clash between major interests that is resolved by
bloodshed-that is the only way in which it differs from other
conflicts." If one had no sovereign states, one would have no
wars, as Rousseau rightly pointed out-but, as Hobbes equally
rightly pointed out, we would probably have no peace either. As
states acquire a monopoly of violence, war becomes the only re-
maining form of conflict that may legitimately be settled by
physical force. The mechanism of legitimization of authority
and of social control that makes it possible for a state to moder-
ate or eliminate conflicts within its borders or at very least to
ensure that these are not conducted by competitive violence-
the mechanism to the study of which historians have quite prop-
erly devoted so much attention-makes possible the conduct of
armed conflict with other states, and on occasion-if the state is
to survive-makes it necessary.
These conflicts arise from conflicting claims, or interests, or

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94
 WAR

ideologies, or perceptions; and these perceptions may indeed be

fueled by social or psychological drives that we do not fully un-
derstand and that one day we may learn rather better how to
control. But the problem is the control of social conflict as such,
not simply of war. However inchoate or disreputable the mo-
tives for war may be, its initiation is almost by definition a de-
liberate and carefully considered act and its conduct, at least at
the more advanced levels of social development, a matter of
very precise central control. If history shows any record of "acci-
dental" wars, I have yet to find them. Certainly statesmen have
sometimes been surprised by the nature of the war they have un-
leashed, and it is reasonable to assume that in at least 50 per-
cent of the cases they got a result they did not expect. But that is
not the same as a war begun by mistake and continued with no
political purpose.

Statesmen in fact go to war to achieve very specific ends,

and the reasons for which states have fought one another have
been categorized and recategorized innumerable times. Vattel,
the Swiss lawyer, divided them into the necessary, the custom-
ary, the rational, and the capricious. Jomini, the Swiss strate-
gist, identified ideological, economic, and popular wars, wars to
defend the balance of power, wars to assist allies, wars to assert
or to defend rights. Quincy Wright, the American political scien-
tist, divided them into the idealistic, the psychological, the po-
litical, and the juridical. Bernard Brodie in our own times has
refused to discriminate: "Any theory of the causes of war in gen-
eral or any war in particular that is not inherently eclectic and
comprehensive," he stated, ". . . is bound for that very reason to
be wrong." Another contemporary analyst, Geoffrey Blainey, is
on the contrary unashamedly reductionist. All war aims, he
wrote, "are simply varieties of power. The vanity of national-
ism, the will to spread an ideology, the protection of kinsmen in
an adjacent land, the desire for more territory . . . all these rep-
resent power in different wrappings. The conflicting aims of ri-
val nations are always conflicts of power."
In principle, I am sure that Bernard Brodie was right: No sin-
gle explanation for conflict between states, any more than for
conflict between any other social groups, is likely to stand up to
critical examination. But Blainey is right as well. Quincy Wright
provided us with a useful indicator when he suggested that
"while animal war is a function of instinct and primitive war of
the mores, civilized war is primarily a function of state politics."

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WAR

Medievalists will perhaps bridle at the application of the

term "primitive" to the sophisticated and subtle societies of the
Middle Ages, for whom war was also a "function of the mores," a
way of life that often demanded only the most banal of justifica-
tions. As a way of life, it persisted in Europe well into the 17th
century, if no later. For Louis XIV and his court war was, in the
early years at least, little more than a seasonal variation on
hunting. But by the 18th century, the mood had changed. For
Frederick the Great, war was to be pre-eminently a function of
Staatspolitik, and so it has remained ever since. And although
statesmen can be as emotional or as prejudiced in their judg-
ments as any other group of human beings, it is very seldom that
their attitudes, their perceptions, and their decisions are not re-
lated, however remotely, to the fundamental issues of power,
that capacity to control their environment on which the inde-
pendent existence of their states and often the cultural values of
their societies depend.
...
.a

And here perhaps we do find a factor that sets interstate

conflict somewhat apart from other forms of social rivalry.
States may fight-indeed as often as not they do fight-not over
any specific issue such as might otherwise have been resolved by
peaceful means, but in order to acquire, to enhance, or to pre-
serve their capacity to function as independent actors in the in-
ternational system at all. "The stakes of war," as Raymond Aron
has reminded us, "are the existence, the creation, or the elimina-
tion of States." It is a somber analysis, but one which the histor-
ical record very amply bears out.
It is here that those analysts who come to the study of war
from the disciplines of the natural sciences, particularly the bio-
logical sciences, tend, it seems to me, to go astray. The conflicts
between states which have usually led to war have normally
arisen, not from any irrational and emotive drives, but from al-
most a superabundance of analytic rationality. Sophisticated
communities (one hesitates to apply to them Quincy Wright's
word, "civilized") do not react simply to immediate threats.
Their intelligence (and I use the term in its double sense) en-
ables them to assess the implications that any event taking
place anywhere in the world, however remote, may have for
their own capacity, immediately to exert influence, ultimately
perhaps to survive. In the later Middle Ages and the early Mod-
ern period, every child born to every prince anywhere in Europe
was registered on the delicate seismographs that monitored the
 WAR

shifts in dynastic power. Every marriage was a diplomatic tri-

umph or disaster. Every stillbirth, as Henry VIII knew, could
presage political catastrophe.
Todav. the kev events mav be different. The wattern remains
the same.^ malfunction in the political mechanism of some re-
mote African community, a coup d'etat in a minuscule Carib-
bean republic, an insurrection deep in the hinterland of
southeast Asia, an assassination in some emirate in the Middle
East-all these will be subjected to the kind of anxious exami-
nation and calculation that was devoted a )ndred years ago to
the news of comwarable events in the Bal us: an insurrection
a
in Philippopoli, coup d'etat in Constani ;aple, an assassina-
tion in Belgrade. To whose advantage w: Ithis ultimately re-
dound, asked the worried diplomats, o 's or theirs? Little
enough in itself, perhaps, but will it lot precipitate or
strengthen a trend, set in motion a tide wh Jse melancholy with-
drawing roar will strip us of our friends and influence and leave
us isolated in a world dominated bv adversaries deewlv hostile
A d

to us and all that we stand for?

There have certainly been occasions when states have gone
to war in a mood of ideological fervor like the French republican
armies in 1792; or of swaggering aggression like the ~ m e r i c a n s
against Spain in 1898 or the British against the Boers a year
later; or to make more money, as did the British in the War of
Jenkins' Ear in 1739; or in a generous desire to help peoples of
similar creed or race, as perhaps the Russians did in helping the
Bulgarians fight the Turks in 1877 and the British dominions
certainly did in 1914 and 1939. But, in general, men have fought
during the past two hundred years neither because they are ag-
gressive nor because they are acquisitive animals, but because
they are reasoning ones: because they discern, or believe that
they can discern, dangers before they become immediate, the
possibility of threats before they are made.

But be this as it may, in 1914 many of the German people,

and in 1939 nearly all of the British, felt justified in going to
war, not over any specific issue that could have been settled by
negotiation, but to maintain their power; and to do so while it
was still possible, before they found themselves so isolated, so
impotent, that they had no power left to maintain and had to ac-
cept a subordinate position within an international system domi-
nated by their adversaries. "What made war inevitable was the
growth of Athenian power and the fear this caused in Sparta." Or,
WAR

to quote another grimly apt passage from Thucydides:

The Athenians made their Empire more and more strong

. . . [until] finally the point was reached when Athenian
strength attained a peak plain for all to see and the Athe-
nians began to encroach upon Sparta's allies. It was at
this point that Sparta felt the position to be no longer
tolerable and decided by starting the present war to em-
ploy all her energies in attacking and if possible destroy-
ing the power of Athens.

You can vary the names of the actors, but the model re-
mains a valid one for the purposes of our analysis. I am rather
afraid that it still does.
Something that has changed since the time of Thucydides,
however, is the nature of the power that appears so threatening.
From the time of Thucydides until that of Louis XIV, there was
basically only one source of political and military power-con-
trol of territory, with all the resources in wealth and manpower
that this provided. This control might come through conquest,
or through alliance, or through marriage, or through purchase,
but the power of princes could be very exactly computed in
terms of the extent of their territories and the number of men
they could put under arms.
In 17th-century Europe, this began to change. Extent of terri-
tory remained important, but no less important was the effective-
ness with which the resources of that territory could be exploited.
Initially there were the bureaucratic and fiscal mechanisms that
transformed loose bonds of territorial authority into highly struc-
tured centralized states whose armed forces, though not necessar-
ily large, were permanent, disciplined, and paid.

Then came the political transformations of the revolution-

ary era that made available to these state systems the entire
manpower of their country, or at least as much of it as the ad-
ministrators were able to handle. And finally came the revolu-
tion in transport, the railways of the 19th century that turned
the revolutionary ideal of the "Nation in Arms" into a reality.
By the early 20th century, military power-on the continent of
Europe, at least-was seen as a simple combination of military
manpower and railways. The quality of armaments was of sec-
ondary importance, and political intentions were virtually ex-
cluded from account. The growth of power was measured in

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terms of the growth of populations and of communications; of

the number of men who could be put under arms and trans-
ported to the battlefield to make their weight felt in the initial
and presumably decisive battles. It was the mutual perception
of threat in those terms that turned Europe before 1914 into an
armed camp, and it was their calculations within this frame-
work that reduced German staff officers increasingly to despair
and launched their leaders on their catastrophic gamble in
1914, which started the First World War.
But already the development of weapons technology had in-
troduced yet another element into the international power cal-
culus, one that has in our own age become dominant. It was only
in the course of the 19th century that technology began to pro-
duce weapons systems-initially in the form of naval vessels-
that could be seen as likely in themselves to prove decisive,
through their qualitative and quantitative superiority, in the
event of conflict. But as war became increasingly a matter of
competing technologies rather than competing armies, so there
developed that escalatory process known as the "arms race." As
a title, the phrase, like so many coined by journalists to catch
the eye, is misleading.

"Arms races" are in fact continuing and open-ended at-

tempts to match power for power. They are as much means of
achieving stable or, if possible, favorable power balances as
were the dynastic marriage policies of Valois and Habsburg. To
suggest that they in themselves are causes of war implies a naive
if not totally mistaken view of the relationship between the two
phenomena. The causes of war remain rooted, as much as they
were in the preindustrial age, in perceptions by statesmen of the
growth of hostile power and the fears for the restriction, if not
the extinction, of their own. The threat, or rather the fear, has
not changed, whether it comes from aggregations of territory or
from dreadnoughts, from the numbers of men under arms or
from missile systems. The means that states employ to sustain
or to extend their power may have been transformed, but their
objectives and preoccupations remain the same.
"Arms races" can no more be isolated than wars themselves
from the political circumstances that give rise to them, and like
wars they will take as many different forms as political circum-
stances dictate. They may be no more than a process of competi-
tive modernization, of maintaining a status quo that commands
general support but in which no participant wishes, whether
WAR

from reasons of pride or of prudence, to fall behind in keeping

his armory up to date. If there are no political causes for fear or
rivalry, this process need not in itself be a destabilizing factor in
international relations. But arms races may, on the other hand,
be the result of a quite deliberate assertion of an intention to
change the status quo, as was, for example, the German naval
challenge to Britain at the beginning of this century.
This challenge was an explicit attempt by Admiral Alfred
von Tirpitz and his associates to destroy the hegemonic position
at sea which Britain saw as essential to her security, and, not in-
conceivably, to replace it with one of their own. As British and
indeed German diplomats repeatedly explained to the German
government, it was not the German naval program in itself that
gave rise to so much alarm in Britain. It was the intention that
lay behind it. If the status quo was to be maintained, the Ger-
man challenge had to be met.

The naval race could quite easily have been ended on one of
two conditions. Either the Germans could have abandoned their
challenge, as had the French in the previous century, and acqui-
esced in British naval supremacy; or the British could have
yielded as gracefully as they did, a decade or so later, to the
United States and abandoned a status they no longer had the ca-
pacity, or the will, to maintain. As it was, they saw the German
challenge as one to which they could and should respond, and
their power position as one which they were prepared, if neces-
sary, to use force to preserve. The British naval program was
thus, like that of the Germans, a signal of political intent; and
that intent, that refusal to acquiesce in a fundamental transfor-
mation of the power balance, was indeed a major element among
the causes of the war. The naval competition provided a very ac-
curate indication and measurement of political rivalries and ten-
sions, but it did not cause them; nor could it have been abated
unless the rivalries themselves had been abandoned.
It was the general perception of the growth of German
power that was awakened by the naval challenge, and the fear
that a German hegemony on the Continent would be the first
step to a challenge to her own hegemony on the oceans, that led
Britain to involve herself in the continental conflict in 1914 on
the side of France and Russia. "What made war inevitable was
the growth of Spartan power," to reword Thucydides, "and the
fear which this caused in Athens." In the Great War that fol-
lowed, Germany was defeated, but survived with none of her la-
 WAR

tent power destroyed. A "false hegemony" of Britain and France

was established in Europe that could last only so long as Ger-
many did not again mobilize her resources to challenge it. Ger-
man rearmament in the 1930s did not of itself mean that Hitler
wanted war (though one has to ignore his entire philosophy if
one is to believe that he did not); but it did mean that he was de-
termined, with a great deal of popular support, to obtain a free
hand on the international scene.
With that free hand, he intended to establish German power
on an irreversible basis; this was the message conveyed by his ar-
mament program. The armament program that the British reluc-
tantly adopted in reply was intended to show that, rather than
submit to the hegemonic aspirations they feared from such a re-
vival of German power, they would fight to preserve their own
freedom of action. Once again to recast Thucydides:

Finally the point was reached when German strength at-

tained a peak plain for all to see, and the Germans began
to encroach upon Britain's allies. It was at this point
that Britain felt the position to be no longer tolerable
and decided by starting this present war to employ all
her energies in attacking and if possible destroying the
power of Germany.

What the Second World War established was not a new

British hegemony, but a Soviet hegemony over the Euro-Asian
land mass from the Elbe to Vladivostok; and that was seen, at
least from Moscow, as an American hegemony over the rest of
the world; one freely accepted in Western Europe as a prefera-
ble alternative to being absorbed by the rival hegemony. Rival
armaments were developed to define and preserve the new ter-
ritorial boundaries, and the present arms competition began.
But in considering the present situation, historical experience
suggests that we must ask the fundamental question: What
kind o f competition is it? Is it one between powers that accept
the status quo, are satisfied with the existing power relation-
ship, and are concerned simply to modernize their armaments
in order to preserve it? Or does it reflect an underlying insta-
bility in the system?
My own perception, I am afraid, is that it is the latter. There
was a period for a decade after the war when the Soviet Union
was probably a status quo power but the West was not; that is,
the Russians were not seriously concerned to challenge the
American global hegemony, but the West did not accept that of
the Russians in Eastern Europe. Then there was a decade of rel-
WAR

-
- -

ative mutual acceptance between 1955 and 1965; and it was no

accident that this was the heyday of disarmamentlarms-control
negotiations. But thereafter, the Soviet Union has shown itself
increasingly unwilling to accept the Western global hegemony,
if only because many other people in the world have been un-
willing to do so either. Reaction against Western dominance
brought the Soviet Union some allies and many opportunities in
the Third World, and she has developed naval power to be able
to assist the former and exploit the latter. She has aspired in fact
to global power status, as did Germany before 1914; and if the
West complains, as did Britain about Germany, that the Rus-
sians do not need a navy for defense purposes, the Soviet Union
can retort, as did Germany, that she needs it to make clear to the
world the status to which she aspires; that is, so that she can op-
erate on the world scene by virtue of her own power and not by
permission of anyone else. Like Germany, she is determined to
be treated as an equal, and armed strength has appeared the
only way to achieve that status.

The trouble is that what is seen by one party as the breaking

of an alien hegemony and the establishment of equal status will
be seen by the incumbent powers as a striving for the establish-
ment of an alternate hegemony, and they are not necessarily
wrong. In international politics, the appetite often comes with
eating; and there really may be no way to check an aspiring ri-
val except by the mobilization of stronger military power. An
arms race then becomes almost a necessary surrogate for war, a
test of national will and strength; and arms control becomes
possible only when the underlying power balance has been mu-
tually agreed.
We would be blind, therefore, if we did not recognize that
the causes which have produced war in the past are operating in
our own day as powerfully as at any time in history. It is by no
means impossible that a thousand years hence a historian will
write-if any historians survive, and there are any records for
them to write history from-"What made war inevitable was
the growth of Soviet power and the fear which this caused in the
United States."
But times have changed since Thucydides. They have
changed even since 1914. These were, as we have seen, bellicist
societies in which war was a normal, acceptable, even a desir-
able way of settling differences. The question that arises today

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102
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is, how widely and evenly spread is that intense revulsion

against war that at present characterizes our own society? For if
war is indeed now universally seen as being unacceptable as an
instrument of policy, then all analogies drawn from the past are
misleading, and although power struggles may continue, they
will be diverted into other channels. But if that revulsion is not
evenly spread, societies which continue to see armed force as an
acceptable means for attaining their political ends are likely to
establish a dominance over those which do not. Indeed, they
will not necessarily have to fight for it.
My second and concluding point is this: Whatever may be
the underlying causes of international conflict, even if we accept
the role of atavistic militarism or of military-industrial com-
plexes or of sociobiological drives or of domestic tensions in
fueling it, wars begin with conscious and reasoned decisions
based on the calculation, made by both parties, that they can
achieve more by going to war than by remaining at peace.
Even in the most bellicist of societies this kind of calcula-
tion has to be made and it has never even for them been an easy
one. When the decision to go to war involves the likelihood, if
not the certainty, that the conflict will take the form of an ex-
change of nuclear weapons from which one's own territory can-
not be immune, then even for the most bellicist of leaders, even
for those most insulated from the pressures of public opinion,
the calculation that they have more to gain from going to war
than by remaining at peace and pursuing their policies by other
means will, to put it mildly, not be self-evident. The odds
against such a course benefiting their state or themselves or
their cause will be greater, and more evidently greater, than in
any situation that history has ever had to record. Society may
have accepted killing as a legitimate instrument of state policy,
but not, as yet, suicide. For that reason I find it hard to believe
that the abolition of nuclear weapons, even if it were possible,
would be an unmixed blessing. Nothing that makes it easier for
statesmen to regard war as a feasible instrument of state policy,
one from which they stand to gain rather than lose, is likely to
contribute to a lasting peace.

The Wilson Quanerl~ISiiiiiiuei-

1984
103