Are Nuclear Weapons Making the World a Safer Place?
Podcast:
In this study, I extend Edgerton's reasons why the death rates for modern warfare have gone down, even though, as he argues, modern weapons are much more dangerous than they once were. I argue that the reason is because of the nuclear weapon.
Works Consulted:
"Casualties of Iraq War" Wikipedia. Web. 7, April. 2011
"War in Afghanistan (2001âpresent)" Wikipedia. Web. 7, April. 2011
"WWII Casualties" Wikipedia. Web. 7 April, 2011
"Vietnam War Casualties" Wikipedia. Web. 7, April. 2011
(17 votes)
Comments
War and my piece (or thoughts)
Has the nuclear bomb made the place a safer place
Sorry this is somewhat disjointed, I replied to certain comments as ideas popped into my head!
I would say that casualty ratings being lower are not that shocking because the weapons we now possess have more accurate aim and range, allowing for less error. Additionally, the increase in technology that you address in the beginning of the podcast, has allowed for more surveillance of areas, decreasing the need to say detonate a bomb to that destroys a large area of land, thus killing more people (particularly innocent people), and instead encouraging militias to work as a unit to determine where an attack should be placed, what kind of weaponry will have the least amount of unnecessary casualties, etc.
I agree that the case could be made for Vietnam that the people began spreading themselves out as we now know that the Vietcong (correct name? not sure? Sorry if politically incorrect) had a complex system of underground tunnels that allowed them to disperse quickly and undetected.
You said, “We can’t go to war with great super powers because nobody would win.” While I agree that going to war against a super power is a bad idea because they have access to larger weapons (such as the nuclear bomb), I do not think that it is as simple as that. I also don’t think I agree that troops are not getting smarter. The amount of intelligence we have available now is much more advanced than it was before, allowing them to perform in ways that would not have been possible before. Ofcourse, this intelligence has also changed the way warfare is “played.”
In the past, soldiers marched in lines towards each other, shot and retreated, allowing for dead soldiers to be picked up for burial, obviously that would never happen today.
I do not know that the reason we do not go to war is because “nobody would win these fights” (although many would argue that no one wins in a war), I do think that one of the reasons we avoid wars is because with the increasing media presence and technological growth, it would not be beneficial to certain countries to engage others. Before the presence of the media, etc. it was much easier for countries to regulate the information being dispersed to the general population in order to gain support for such endeavors, this is not necessarily the case now. I will agree, as I mentioned earlier though, that modern warfare has changed the way wars are played out, as you later mention in the podcast. I’m not sure that we can ever put our finger on one reason that wars happen the way they do, but I appreciate you sharing your ideas about the topic.
Yay for completing your last podcast, thanks for your ideas as well as all of your help with the Pedestrian project (and I realize I have used my store of exclamation points for the year in this response). Happy Graduation.
Amber Randall
abr9042@uncw.edu
Hey Steve, Great podcast.
Hey Steve,
Great podcast. You've done a great job in pointing out the essential irony in the fact that the heightened efficacy of rhetorical agency in settling modern diplomatic disputes is predicated upon the threat of supreme physical (nuclear) violence. Edgerton writes that "the military, and war itself [and by extension their practical technologies], have often been seen as left-overs from the past. War was not something which democratic, industrial and free-trading nations did" (138). Looking back at the history of Rome, we may see that war and the escalation of its technologies has always been one of the stones upon which democracy, as the sphere in which rhetoric is given agency, is founded. Competition Rome and other civilizations for land and other resources necessitated sophisticated armor and weaponry, innovations in training (analagous to the lower casualty rates you mentioned not being due to lowered intensity in modern wars, but to evolution in defensive tactics, like changing formations into a more dispersed formation in order to avoid multiple kills from one bomb strike) and supply/logistics considerations. So thoroughly was war integrated into Roman democracy that at certain periods during its history, a certain number of years of military service was required of each man in order to become/remain a citizen. Rome often viewed itself as the perpetrator of a necessary violence, a violence that, through military domination, was ultimately responsible for the civilization and eventual democratization of the people it conquered. Ezra Pound, referring to the civilizing power of language/rhetoric, points us to the ancient Latin maxim, "ubicumque Lingua Roma, ibi Roma," or, "wheresoever the Roman tongue, there is Rome itself." The point is that where ever the Roman language is spoken, there also exists, per force, Roman law, Roman democracy. But this law, this democracy, this sphere of rhetorical dominion, arrives only as a consequence of conquest.