Is the reason that there have been no significant wars since WW2 the atomic bomb...

WW2 and everything that came with it is a great deterrent against another major war against the Great Powers (in today's case, the Big Three, the US, Russia, and China).

But it's not just the bomb that acts as a deterrent, it's all the gritty details that made WW2 the most expensive war that broke nearly every power. Aside from the US and USSR, every participant in the war lost more than they gained regardless of whether they were with the allies or axis.

Mostly it's cost, WW2 demanded extreme amounts of resources in the form of oil for hundreds of thousands of vehicles and ships, food and supplies to feed and equip armies in excess of 8 million men, and keep these lines of supply secure over stretches of entire oceans and continents.

WW2 either bankrupted or permanently crippled every participant save for the US and the Soviets, it showed the world that a modern, total industrial war just is not worth the extreme cost to orchestrate, that anything to gain from it won't be worth the cost to wage said war, even with nukes not involved.

It also helps that today there are less powers that are even capable of waging such a global war. With the European colonial empires and the wealth and resources it provided gone, only the US, Russia, China, and arguably India are the only powers who could even hope to meet the resource demands of a total industrial war.

tl;dr: the cost of modern industrial war is massive enough to deter war altogether, even with nukes off the table.

>The world from 1815-1914 was extremely internationally peaceful relative to even the 1945-present time period.

No it isn't. You had great power conflicts in the 19th century. The Russo-Turkish war, the Crimean war, the Egyptian-Ottoman one in the 1830s, the Austro-Prussian war, the Franco-Prussian War, the Russo-Japanese war, etc. You haven't had major powers tearing it up since WW2, at least not directly.

>Also, you seem to be ignoring technological advances. People not starving and dying of smallpox en masse any more probably has something to do with the relative peacefulness of the post-WW2 system.

Probably not, you had a lot of local peace whenever you had one dominant superpower. Pax Romana and the peace in between dynastic overheavals in China are pretty good examples, despite them having extremely bare technological advances compared to what we have now.

Not the guy you're responding to, but how is it irrelevant to the question? It's a major conventional conflict after the invention of the nuclear bomb.

>It's a major conventional conflict after the invention of the nuclear bomb.

Well it's not conventional. It's a civil war. Even if they did have nukes they wouldn't use them as the aim of a civil war is to completely control the country at the end. Wiping out vast swathes of something you hope to one day own is stupid, and wouldn't be done. You want to gain the land back while destroying as little as possible.

They didn't have nukes anyway.

>Well it's not conventional

Of course it's a conventional war. You had regular armies tearing it up and attempting to occupy territory.

> It's a civil war.

Civil wars can easily be conventional (ACW, English Civil War), or they can not be conventional (The Sri Lankan Civil War, or the one in Afghanistan from 89-96). It's about methods, not about who is fighting whom.

>Even if they did have nukes they wouldn't use them as the aim of a civil war is to completely control the country at the end. Wiping out vast swathes of something you hope to one day own is stupid, and wouldn't be done. You want to gain the land back while destroying as little as possible.

You can make that argument about almost any war, and yet people often do destroy enormous swaths of territory, sometimes for no other reason than to deny it to the enemy who seems poised to take it. We haven't had a civil war among a nuclear power yet, but what makes you so sure they wouldn't turn the devices against each other if they thought it would aid them, or they were just desperate?

>They didn't have nukes anyway.

Most countries don't, and yet the nuclear deterrance effect is demonstrated anyway.

>No it isn't. You had great power conflicts in the 19th century. The Russo-Turkish war, the Crimean war, the Egyptian-Ottoman one in the 1830s, the Austro-Prussian war, the Franco-Prussian War, the Russo-Japanese war, etc. You haven't had major powers tearing it up since WW2, at least not directly.

Literally anecdotes

The number of major international wars between states 1945-present is very similar to 1815-1914. And no, "major powers" is an arbitrary definition.

>tl;dr

Then why didn't world (esp. European) powers realize that after WWI? Obviously it wasn't on quite the same scale as WWII, but it still fucked up the economies of most European countries bigly, enough that it caused the collapse of multiple established empires.

>It also helps that today there are less powers that are even capable of waging such a global war.
I think this is a better explanation, and ties in with the argument from American hegemony.

>OP states post WW2 conflicts
>Chinese civil war clearly lasts till at least 1949
>doesn't count

Okay

>Well it's not conventional.

I'm done responding to you

>The Russo-Turkish war, the Crimean war, the Egyptian-Ottoman one in the 1830s, the Austro-Prussian war, the Franco-Prussian War, the Russo-Japanese war, etc
>Literally anecdotes

You fucking wat m8?
Do you know what that word means?

>Literally anecdotes

As opposed to your completely unsupported assertion that today's era is more peaceful?

>The number of major international wars between states 1945-present is very similar to 1815-1914.

No, it isn't. Doubly so, since you haven't provided your criteria for what is a "Major international war".

>And no, "major powers" is an arbitrary definition.

google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=5&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjsuZ2k-ufRAhWKz4MKHSBaBAIQFgguMAQ&url=http://www.u.arizona.edu/~volgy/major_power_status.doc&usg=AFQjCNE9oUHkkUe8oP60Sy7iNqn37gA3Jg&sig2=rHFPz-fzZc8-JxkIjTqYjw

>Levy (1983), who defines a major power state as one with an extensive foreign policy agenda, a wide range of international interests, the ability to project power globally, and to be recognized for it.

Riddle me this

Why were there only two wars between East Asian nations 1350-1895?

>there have been no significant wars since WW2
Wut

anime

Not him, but wut? Just off the top of my head, you have the war between Dai Viet and Ming China in the early 15th century, the Japanese invasion of Korea, the war between the Manchus and the Ming in the 17th century, as well as the continuation war between the Qing and the southern Ming that went on for almost 50 years. That's 3-4 wars, dpeending on how you count it, in just under 200 years. I'm sure there are a lot more; I only have a cursory knowledge of Asian military history.

Anecdotal evidence

Post-WW2 had
Chinese civil war
Korea
Vietnam
Iraq-Iran
Falklands
Millions of African/South Asian wars
Soviet Afghan
Afghan 2001
Iraq 2003
And many more

Three witnessed wars between "major powers".
Even more had 300,000+ casualties

>Why were there only two wars between East Asian nations 1350-1895?

This is possibly the dumbest shit I have ever read.

None of those are wars between two major powers, unless you count Korea and Vietnam as wars by proxy between the NATO pact countries and the USSR.

The 19th century too, had lots of little ,border wars. All those fights in the Balkans, all those uprisings against the Ottomans, the wars in India, the unification wars in Italy and Germany, the "insurgencies" the U.S fought to expand westward and into the Native presence, the south American wars of independence and against each other, the wars over sub-saharan Africa, or to carve up spheres of influence in Asia . Hell, if you're counting the civil wars, the Taiping Rebellion killed more people than WW1.

Add in the much smaller population bases and economic ability to mobilize, and you don't have much to claim that today is more peaceful than 1816-1913.

What the fuck are you talking about?

>The internal politics of both the US and USSR wouldn't allow it, with or without nukes.
idk about this, nukes were the only thing that prevented something like the berlin crisis from escalating

also numerous wars between the mongols and everyone else, conquest of china, korea, 2 wars against japan, 3 against dai viet

>idk about this, nukes were the only thing that prevented something like the berlin crisis from escalating

Again, not him, but you have to remember, the nuclear weapon and its deterrent effects shaped pretty much the entire cold war: "The West" (i.e. NATO or the U.S.) relied on nuclear deterrence and relaxed conventional deterrence. They allowed the Soviets to build up to a conventional advantage that would have been unthinkable in an earlier age because they had something better or at least cheaper to use instead.

In a world with no nukes, you would see an enormously more mobilized and militarized Western Europe, and everything changes.

This sounds pretty dubious.

It seems incredibly unlikely that the two competing power factions of the First World and the Second World wouldn't have had a major conflict if only conventional weapons had been available.

I suppose that you could argue that even without nukes the potential power of chemical and biological weapons would have performed the same role if they had been developed with the same levels of research and finance had been.

However trying to go into the minutiae of internal politics seems weak as fuck. You have no idea (other than pure speculation) what the internal politics of the USA and the USSR would have even been like if the major factor of nuclear wars wasn't involved.

This.
In fact, I'd say the US was more willing to engage in all out nuclear war than the Soviets were. Look at the Cuban Missile Crisis - while we were at DEFCON 2 with hundreds of nuclear B-52s circling just outside the USSR's borders, they had hardly mobilized at all. They were pretty much sitting on their hands with their heads down while the US was staring right at them with nuclear teeth bared.

East Germans hopped the border, Khruschev needed to look like he was doing something about it, Eisenhower and JFK needed to look like they were responding. None of them actually wanted to cross the border (besides the East Germans).

>between east asian nations

journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1354066111409771

I mistated the start date, but it's a legitimate point. The Confucian Long Peace theory.

Crisis was averted shortly before the midterms while American missiles were removed from Turkey (the reason Khruschev sent the missiles to Cuba in the first place). Coincidence?

The Confucian long peace theory asserts, if you believe it, that Confucian nations generally don't fight each other. Since you only really had 2 Confucian nations in the timeframe examined, and Korea was pretty much a vassal state of China, that doesn't say much.

>Eurocentric
DROPPED
R
O
P
P
E
D

Over a 200 year period...

Tell me how many times Sweden fought its 3-4 Nordic neighbors 1600-1800.

>being a reverse SJW who gets triggered by one word

Kelly is one of the most respected IR scholars in the world.

A lot.

How many times did Russia fight it's Eastern Orthodox Neighbors from 1700-1900? How about the Ottomans fighting it's Sunni neighbors in the same time frame? How many times did Siam fight its neighbors? Cuba theirs?

Pointing to a period of relative peace and then blithely asserting it's because of cultural anti-war values is idiotically reductionist.

Wikipedia lists 39 wars Sweden participated in between 1600 and 1814, almost all of them either against their direct neighbors or close neighbors around the Baltic.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_Sweden

The nature of warfare has changed due to advancing technology but make no mistake, it's still there. America, China, and Russia are currently in a threeway war. Only most don't see it because it's mainly cyber attacks and probes.

Cyber and proxy wars are the future.

And yet the Democratic Peace Theory gets taken seriously.

>the reason Khruschev sent the missiles to Cuba in the first place
That's not THE reason Kruschev sent missiles to Cuba. Kruschev needed to put missiles in Cuba because up to that moment he had no missile base with a significant range of the U.S. Even without Turkey, the U.S. had missile bases capable of hitting every major city in Russia, not to mention SAC holding one hour outside of Russia AT ALL TIMES. Turkey is something that tankies bring up to make it seem like they weren't actually limping away from the crisis with their tail between their legs.

tl;dr
The Cuban Missile Crisis put the Soviets into a far worse position than the United States

>Pointing to a period of relative peace and then blithely asserting it's because of cultural anti-war values is idiotically reductionist.

1. Relative peace is incorrect. There were NO wars between the Confucian nations in that 200 year period. And no significant armed conflicts.
2. Blithely assert is wrong. Kelly clearly lists out hundreds of cultural and historical studies strengthening his point, and then proceeds to counteract shit like what you just claimed "le there weren't enough countries for it to be real evidence mannnnn!"
3. There is NO other period of time with a longer period of peace between a culturally similar region in human history than the Confucian East Asian nations.

nukes wouldn't be used in a civil war dumbasses

There were only TWO Confucian East Asian "nations" in the time period examined, and one of them held enormous sway over the other.

>2. Blithely assert is wrong. Kelly clearly lists out hundreds of cultural and historical studies strengthening his point, and then proceeds to counteract shit like what you just claimed "le there weren't enough countries for it to be real evidence mannnnn!"

No he doesn't, he does a great deal to try to distract from that. He quite flatly refuses to accept alternate theories to explain the same evidence on the ground, such as hegemonic power relations affecting war, and notes that China is quite happy to take cracks at pretty much all of her non-Confucian neighbors, indicating that those peaceful sentiments weren't really all that deeply held.

>3. There is NO other period of time with a longer period of peace between a culturally similar region in human history than the Confucian East Asian nations.

And how are you defining "culturally similar regions"? I could easily say that, as a cultural isolate, Pharonic Egypt had no neighbors of similar culture, and therefore none of her wars with Nubia or in what's now Palestine really counted. You had kingdoms that lasted for much longer than 200 years without meaningful internal strife. Seems like Egypt has the Confucians beat out. I'm sure that has nothing to do with extremely limited interaction with other organized nations, no-siree.

Or what about Russia? Post unification in the form of Ivan III, you didn't have any wars with other Eastern Orthodox Slavic countries for hundreds of years, until the Ukranian independence from Poland.

All Kelly did was take a relatively calm period, one that was relatively calm for reasons that have nothing to do with some inherent specialness in Confucinaism, and then spun it into a stupid all encompassing theory. And then an idiot like you bought it.

>nukes wouldn't be used in a civil war dumbasses

Why not? Civil wars are typically fought with less regard to civilian populations, more massacres, more ethnic cleansing, than direct wars. Why wouldn't they go nuclear?

>There were only TWO Confucian East Asian "nations" in the time period examined, a
?????????

China, Vietnam, Korea, Japan

>and notes that China is quite happy to take cracks at pretty much all of her non-Confucian neighbors, indicating that those peaceful sentiments weren't really all that deeply held.

You do realize that kind of makes Kelly's point, right?
China/Vietnam/Japan/Korea attacked non-Confucian nations hundreds of times 1640-1840. But not each other even though they had multiple times of heightened tensions over territory/diplomacy.

>Falklands
>Major powers

Argies getting BTFO does not make for a significant war.

But then why are those 200 years the only important ones? Surely, if the hypothesis has any weight, it would always tend towards being true.

Not wars then. The cold war meme has a lot to answer for as it made idiots think that there's such a thing as war with no combat.

>I could easily say that, as a cultural isolate, Pharonic Egypt had no neighbors of similar culture, and therefore none of her wars with Nubia or in what's now Palestine really counted.

*Isreal, not palestine

>why wouldn't a leader nuke his own people to gain their trust and support

Not anyone in this thread, are you literally retarded?

>China, Vietnam, Korea, Japan

Vietnam was never Confucian, it was a Buddhist majority, and Japan was also Buddhist majority for most of its history.

And my point is that overlooks quite a bit of other factors, namely that China and Vietnam fought quite a bit in earlier eras, and all of the above were pretty much in China's orbit. Not to mention that the fighting between the Ming remnant and the now majority Confucian Qing dynasty would definitely seem to qualify as a war, only it doesn't because of reasons.

Why would a leader burn down his own country's fields and cities, massacre entire population centers? You had that in say, the Afghan civil war, and despite the rather brutal reputation the Taliban got, you didn't see a cessation of those kinds of tactics.

Remember, most civil wars don't even unify countries; they cement the dominance of one ethnic or other socio-political subgroup over the rest.

Korean war
Vietnam war
Russian Afghan war
US Afghan war
US Iraq war
Pakistan/India-bangladesh war
What else did I miss?

I asked you a yes or no questions, where the answer is obviously yes.

Just say yes next time.

A war on the scale of the world wars

There's no reason. We're just passing the time until the next world war.

Also, reminder that before WW1 everybody thought that another global war would be impossible

>it's just not possible, no one would be so stupid as to have another major way
t. everybody in 1900

Second Congo War.

>India
Civ was right, Ghandi will nuke us all.

>There was greater globalism in trade in 1914 than in 2005

Trade numbers went up, people shipping of to different countries went up, multi-national businesses went up.

How the fuck is 1914 bigger in trade then 2005.

Compared to the importance of domestic markets.

>appeal to authority
I wouldn't care if he was the Grand Poobah of the Martians, claiming realism is """eurocentric""" is a huge blunder considering Sun Tzu is the first realist to spring to mind.

Domestic Markets are less important now then ever before.

Literally a handful of wars on that scale...in all of human history. The Vietnam war had millions of casualties.

The Diversification of the market in general has reduced possible conflicts however things like Oil and rare earth metals are still potential conflicts. However this argument is rather pointless when you actually examine OPs question, the idea that there haven't been any major wars since WW2 is ridiculous. There haven't been many wars on the continent of Europe since WW2, thats about it

>I asked you a yes or no questions,

Grammar isn't really your strong suit. Glass houses and rocks and some old proverb comes to mind.

>where the answer is obviously yes.

So your entire post was an ad hominem based around bad logic.

Good job, idiot.

Kek, you actually replied. Jesus christ man.

This is the crux of your argument.

>it's not retarded to think nations should nuke their peoples during civil war
>because these arbitrary reasons

That's your argument, senpai.

Pax Americana. Once America falls the world will go into chaos till a new leader arises.

I don't think you know what the word "arbitrary" means. Let me help you.

en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/arbitrary

>Based on random choice or personal whim, rather than any reason or system:

I gave you a reason, even a system for that reasoning: You have plenty of other civil wars in which both sides used every means at their disposal to win. In fact, your basic premise, sarcastically stated, up hereThat a leader in a civil war was always attempting to gain their trust and support, is quite obviously wrong, as you can see in say, the Syrian or Afghan civil wars, or the civil war/insurgency against the U.S. forces in Iraq. Often, they're the attempt of one ethnic group to dominate another.

>>appeal to authority
translation: I have a raging problem with authority which brings me to run my mouth even in the face of contradictory evidence provided by experts and professionals.

Kek, so instead of just saying. Yeah, you are right, maybe it's a bit ridiculous to expect leaders to utilise nukes in a civil war.

Instead, you argue the semantical meaning of 'arbitrary', your reasoning for why they don't use nukes is quite literally as arbitrary as it gets.

You then want to flesh out what is meant by civil wars are not fought to gain trust?

I mean, my original question is still highly relevant.

Get checked, senpai.

ad hominem/character assassination

>Instead, you argue the semantical meaning of 'arbitrary', your reasoning for why they don't use nukes is quite literally as arbitrary as it gets.

No, I laid out the reasoning quite clearly. Perhaps you could describe how it is arbitrary to expect past patterns to continue.

>You then want to flesh out what is meant by civil wars are not fought to gain trust?

It's very simple. What part didn't you understand? Most nations are built out of multiple population segments. Sometimes, the differences between these segments are small, sometimes they're large. You don't need an equal sharing of power between all of them to have a state, it can be quite stable with one dominant group, say an ethnic or religious group, suppressing all the rest.

Iraq lasted for decades as a Sunni minority among a Shiite majority. The recent suppression of the LTTE was done by the Sinhalese majority crushing the Tamil minority underfoot. The Malay Emergency was a communist insurgency in name, but some 90% of their operatives were ethnic Chinese in a country they were the minority in.

To win the civil war, you don't need the approval of all the population. You just need the approval of whichever segments of the population you need to create a stable power base. And if you have to say, eliminate or devastate one of the other minority population segments to do that, oh well. A nuke could be useful in such an endeavor.

>I mean, my original question is still highly relevant.

What question? You've just blithely asserted that nukes would never be used in a civil war and called me a retard for disagreeing with you despite the fact that you've never actually outlined what makes it so much more unthinkable than any other atrocity committed during a civil war, up to and including use of other WMDs like the gas attacks in Syria.

you just calling out how people are arguing isn't making your case sound any more compelling, cupcake