…Because countries are less willing to fight wars due to the possibility of escalating into a nuclear war.


This is a common thing I see repeated throughout the internet. I wonder what’s Lemmy’s opinion on this.

  • Zonetrooper@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    I mean, you can argue some semantics about “peaceful”.

    What it is undeniable is that it prevented global powers from going directly to total war, resulting in a much diminished number of casualties (both soldiers and civilians) compared to the World Wars. Nothing since then, even if we summed up all the wars going on around the world at any given moment, rival the unthinkable numbers of dead who piled up those conflicts, nor - if I can speculate a bit - would they have rivaled another worldwide industrialized conflict.

    But.

    Does that actually mean the world is “more peaceful”?

    One can argue that the undeniable reality that you are much less likely to be killed in a war between nations today means “Yes.” One can also argue that peace should not be measured by cold mathematics: That the continued existence of smaller-scale conflicts around the world, internal conflicts within countries, or deaths from non-national conflicts such as the ongoing gun violence epidemic in the US or deaths caused by polluting megacorporations mean it has not gotten “more peaceful”; the risks have just changed.

    I suppose it depends on how you are analyzing all of this, in the end.