When you read the article that was written by David French about the way that wars begin, you tend to dismiss as inconsequential the rumors that some wars started inadvertently or by accident.
That’s because whatever it was that caused the first
bullets to fly in those wars, the reality remains that a great deal of thought
and preparations go into the progression toward such fateful moments.
David French’s article came under the title: “This is a
Uniquely Perilous Moment,” and the subtitle: “Smaller-scale tactical nuclear weapons could
bring the great powers into a brutal, deadly, and unprecedented conflict.” The
article was published on March 12, 2022 in The Atlantic.
To make a long story short, David French says that big
powers do not fight each other even with conventional weapons because if one of
them starts to lose, it will be tempted to use the tactical kiloton-size
nuclear bombs to prevent its forces from being annihilated. As well, neither
side would want to use the small nuclear bombs because they can lead to the use
of the megaton-size bombs that can annihilate entire cities. Thus, what French
has done to explain why there has not been a nuclear World War III, is to affirm
the Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) theory.
Fear being the sentiment that has guided both sides to
self-restrain during the Cold War, how can we gauge the level of personal responsibility
that would restrain either side in the event that the element of fear was non-existent?
Well, the way we can do that, is by studying the conduct of each side during
the Cold War and after it. In fact, the following is a condensed version of the
passages in the David French article that yield clues on this matter:
“In the early days of the Cold War, the
Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies possessed an overwhelming advantage in
conventional weaponry. They had more men, more tanks, and more planes—and they
were massed in proximity to NATO’s borders. There was fear that if the Soviet
Union decided to attack the West, it could pulverize NATO’s defenses in days,
and that once it penetrated NATO’s front lines, nothing could stop it from
sweeping all the way to the Atlantic coast. The United States, meanwhile,
possessed one major advantage: superior nuclear forces. But this was more an
advantage in theory than one that could actually be put to use”.
This was a time when the Soviet Union and its allies
could have attacked the West and won big, but they did not attack. Thus, it must
be viewed as the time when the Soviets displayed an exemplary conduct, a
reality that was acknowledged by most people in fact. But was this the only
time that the Soviet Union proved to be exemplary? No, that wasn’t the only
time. There was another time when the Soviet-Union did something even more
impressive. It was that despite the prediction the Soviet Union will collapse
and lash out at the world in desperation that the truth came out. It is that
when the end came, the Soviet-Union/Russia did not lash out, but went down
quietly. Better still, the Russians acknowledged the weakness of their system
and asked America to help them modernize it.
This being the conduct of Russia when difficult
circumstances befell it, how did America behave when it went through
circumstances that were hard on it, but not so hard as to bear resemblance to those
of Russia? The answer is that judging by the wars that America got into and
lost during and after the Cold War, the verdict can only be that America fared
poorly.
In fact, when we analyze America’s motivation for getting
into each of the wars from Vietnam to Afghanistan, we find that paranoia — caused by
a self-induced fear to the effect that the perceived enemy has the ability to
grow and threaten America’s existence — played a major role at pushing America
into adventures that rendered it more vulnerable than anything could or did.
Those were the moments when the world feared the reality that the doomsday clock
was approaching the midnight hour, and said so by indicting the likes of George
W. Bush as well as the Israeli leadership.
Having identified the causes of war in the modern era
with certainty, we can begin to work on preventing the next war, especially
that the next one may involve a full nuclear exchange between the big powers,
an act of suicidal folly that may annihilate the human species.
So then, where do we begin?
We begin by acknowledging that paranoia of the kind that
makes a superpower live with the belief that, “If you’re not with us, you’re
against us,” is one of the two main factors that lead to conflict. Next, we
thank David French for identifying the second factor, which he says goes as
follows:
“Mutual assured destruction kept the peace even during the darkest days
of the Cold War. It’s another thing entirely to confront a potential nuclear
conflict when one side believes it can win. That’s the most dangerous confrontation
of all, and we may be close to that now”.
This puts humanity in double-jeopardy because it is clear
from the unfolding of current events that both sides are under the illusion
they can win the next war, and go from there to inherit a world that will be
theirs exclusively.