The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,163

job . . . when they’re actually there. I qualified that last comment because the Germans have already abandoned the towers several times. The first time was when we got hit by rockets. The remaining instances had something to do with it being cold in the towers. A German Lieutenant with whom I spoke about this lack of honour and basic soldier etiquette replied that it was Canada’s responsibility to provide heaters for the towers. I snapped back by mentioning that it was Germany’s responsibility to provide warm clothing to its soldiers. I was tempted to mention something about Kabul not being Stalingrad, but I held my tongue.

The German army of today is not what it once was. Or, as I’ve heard mentioned here several times: “This ain’t the Wehrmacht.” Given the history of our people, I can make the argument that that’s a very good thing indeed. However, since my safety now rests upon the vigilance of the Herrenvolk’s progeny, I’m slightly concerned to say the least.187

In a book titled Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? The Transformation of Modern Europe (and in Britain, The Monopoly on Violence: Why Europeans Hate Going to War), the historian James Sheehan argues that Europeans have changed their very conception of the state. It is no longer the proprietor of a military force that enhances the grandeur and security of the nation, but a provisioner of social security and material well-being. Nonetheless, for all the differences between the American “mad cowboys” and the European “surrender monkeys,” the parallel movement of their political culture away from war over the past six decades is more historically significant than their remaining differences.

IS THE LONG PEACE A NUCLEAR PEACE?

What went right? How is it that, in defiance of experts, doomsday clocks, and centuries of European history, World War III never happened? What allowed distinguished military historians to use giddy phrases like “a change of spectacular proportions,” “the most striking discontinuity in the history of warfare,” and “nothing like this in history”?

To many people, the answer is obvious: the bomb. War had become too dangerous to contemplate, and leaders were scared straight. The balance of nuclear terror deterred them from starting a war that would escalate to a holocaust and put an end to civilization, if not human life itself.188 As Winston Churchill said in his last major speech to Parliament, “It may well be that we shall by a process of sublime irony have reached a stage in this story where safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation.” 189 In the same vein, the foreign policy analyst Kenneth Waltz has suggested that we “thank our nuclear blessings,” and Elspeth Rostow proposed that the nuclear bomb be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.190

Let’s hope not. If the Long Peace were a nuclear peace, it would be a fool’s paradise, because an accident, a miscommunication, or an air force general obsessed with precious bodily fluids could set off an apocalypse. Thankfully, a closer look suggests that the threat of nuclear annihilation deserves little credit for the Long Peace.191

For one thing, weapons of mass destruction had never braked the march to war before. The benefactor of the Nobel Peace Prize wrote in the 1860s that his invention of dynamite would “sooner lead to peace than a thousand world conventions, [since] as soon as men will find that in one instant whole armies can be utterly destroyed, they will surely abide in golden peace.”192 Similar predictions have been made about submarines, artillery, smokeless powder, and the machine gun.193 The 1930s saw a widespread fear that poison gas dropped from airplanes could bring an end to civilization and human life, yet that dread did not come close to ending war either.194 As Luard puts it, “There is little evidence in history that the existence of supremely destructive weapons alone is capable of deterring war. If the development of bacteriological weapons, poison gas, nerve gases, and other chemical armaments did not deter war in 1939, it is not easy to see why nuclear weapons should do so now.”195

Also, the theory of the nuclear peace cannot explain why countries without nuclear weapons also forbore war—why, for example, the 1995 squabble over fishing rights between Canada and Spain, or the 1997 dispute between Hungary and Slovakia over damming the Danube, never escalated into war, as crises involving European countries had so often done in the past. During the Long Peace leaders of developed countries never had to calculate