4 ms·
> And war (for Americans and the rest of the world) is a lot less deadly than it used to be My hunch for wars getting less deadly is because of nuclear weapons
by Judgmentality 6y ago
> And war (for Americans and the rest of the world) is a lot less deadly than it used to be
My hunch for wars getting less deadly is because of nuclear weapons. There hasn't been a direct war between superpowers for the better part of a century. This sounds good, except it's possible we'll essentially wipe out the planet overnight because of a technical error.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alarm_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...
I think we need a longer timespan to say whether or not wars are getting deadlier.
- azernik 6y agoFatalities have gone down even for wars of similar intensities. More important is the improvement in battlefield medicine and body armor - the KIA/WIA ratio for the US military has plummeted, from around 1:1.5 during WW2, to around 1:3 in Korea after the introduction of helicopter evacuation and more refined frontline aid stations, to just above 1:10 in Afghanistan. e.g. I strongly doubt that Tammy Duckworth's wounds would have been survivable on the battlefield in 1940, or even in 1970.