4 ms·

A full scale war today, excluding skirmishes, between two large conventional armies would be nuclear. It would be over very fast. Perhaps there is little to not

• msandford 11y ago
  > A full scale war today, excluding skirmishes, between two large conventional armies would be nuclear. It would be over very fast. The problem with this line of thinking is you assume that the enemy doesn't care if there's a world left for them to have greater power/influence/wealth/whatever in. Nobody really wins a nuclear war, some people just lose a little less.
  • PavlovsCat 11y ago
    > some people just lose a little less. ..that's how the world works already. Nobody needs a second house or car or whatever as much as some other people need food, clothes, medicine and/or shelter. Does this make the world a shitty place? IMHO yes, and the people who "win" don't really win, not in my books, because they are damaged in wholly other ways I'm not jealous of at all. But here we are, and I think you're imputing pure rationality where there is a lot of narcissism, greed and other defects mixed in. And nuclear war already nearly happened by accident, right? Also, having full control of a small pie which then grows bigger is preferable than being a part of a big pie that's growing where there are competing actors, if you're serious about power. For organizations and their zealots, that can be enough. Scenario A: you have 10000 points, the others have 5000 points Scenario B: You have one point, the others have 0 points One way to look at it, is to say you have 10000 times less points, or 9999 points less, in scenario B over scenario A. (I submit the more intelligent way to look at it is that there are 15000 times less points in the world, or 14999 less, but that is besides the point). But the other way to look at it is to say you have infinitely more points than anyone else, and are now God for eternity, for all practical purposes. That this seems silly or sick to you, that you would rather be a normal person in a decent world, than a ruler with an iron fist in a hellish world, doesn't make it less appealing for those who are already chin deep into things we would also find abhorrent. Never say "nobody" easily, unless it's about something that doesn't really matter.
    • msandford 11y ago
      If the planet is no longer capable of sustaining life after the nuclear war is over -- and I would argue that once you launch a couple of missiles you might as well launch them all, just to be safe -- then yes nobody wins. Your country/continent might die out more slowly than the other ones, but nuclear winter will kill everyone. Now if you have 1000 years of rations saved up sure you might win. You might be the only person left on earth. But is that winning? Maybe somebody thinks so, I guess.
• jacquesm 11y ago
  A war in Europe could definitely happen, the outward unity belies the inner rivalries. There is also the option of civil war. Breakaway provinces wanna be nations, religious factions, old hatchets barely buried. The potential for war has never gone away.
  • tomjen3 11y ago
    As a European, I doubt that unless you are thinking balkan scale wars on the edges of Europe in countries that are not normally considered Europe as the term in commonly used or possibly Turkey actually get of its ass and do something about ISIS. It is true that there are a lot of rivalries, but nobody wants another world war. We are all fat, rich (relatively compared to 1939) and entertained, but more importantly there would be nothing to win and a lot to lose. The same goes for civil war - Scotland isn't going to war, nor is Catalonia. Northern Ireland is more peaceful than it has been in decades and no country is seriously oppressing any other country. Even Putin isn't stupid enough to go into a NATO country, at least not the way he did in Ukraine.
    • jacquesm 11y ago
      On what time-scale are you looking? A decade out? Two? Three? Europe is in flux in a way that it hasn't been in a long time. And I mean that in a downward way, until the mid 00's we were converging, since then we have been diverging with the '08 crisis as one catalyst and the whole nationalist resurgence as another. Add a couple of million refugees as a convenient scapegoat and the stage is set. Between Le Pen, Wilders and a bunch of other Euro-sceptic parties as well as a widespread fear of everything that isn't lily white you'd have to be a tremendous optimist to think that Western Europe has somehow become immune against war. I hope you're right but the signs are definitely not 'all good' and it would need some serious good news (such as the populists being voted out to the point of insignificance) before I'd be ready to believe it. Mind you, I'm not pessimistic, I think we'd largely survive such an ordeal, it will never be on the scale of WWII (at least, that is something you'd hope) but it might take more than just a skirmish before the lessons of old would be re-learned. One of the reasons the anti-war sentiment in Europe was so strong in the 1970's and early 1980's is that we were under no illusion what would be the battle field, today the fact that we have the illusion that the battlefield would be anywhere but here is what endangers us more than anything. Two days driving separates the Russian border from Amsterdam, add another one and you've gone from Amsterdam to Bulgaria. Conflicts could easily spill over from one region to another. The first world war arguably started with a single shot, the second followed from that first. I have no idea what Europe would feel important enough to go to war over but it could just as easily be something insignificant as something big. The most important thing (apologies to Spain, Italy, Romania and Poland) would seem to me to be that Germany, the UK and France keep seeing eye-to-eye. If those ever find themselves on opposite sides of some kind of confrontation all bets are off.