Five years ago a Norwegian statistician set a computer to work counting history's wars. The machine quickly, competently and a bit contemptuously announced that in 5,560 years of recorded human history there have been 14,531 wars, or, as the computer pointed out, 2.6135 a year.
185 generations of man's recorded experience, the machine noted with a touch of sarcasm, only ten have known unsullied peace. And even as he always has, man these days is fighting man.
In Kipling country, Indians and Pakistanis last week slammed away at one another with polyglot curses and American weapons. In South Viet Nam, sticks of paratroopers fell and bloomed from big-bellied U.S. Hercules transports in the grandest airdrop of the war. In Yemen sun-blackened Arab guerrillas warily avoided Egyptian troops; in the Sudan, rebellious blacks kept up a tenacious hit-and-run pressure on Khartoum's troops. Befeathered Simbas in the Congo set ambushes for Colonel Mike Hoare's mercenary force. Turks and Greeks on Cyprus, Indonesians and Malays in the Malacca Straits, Portuguese and Angolans in West Africa, OAS troops and Dominicans in Santo Domingo —all kept their powder dry and their gunsights blackened Roughly speaking, ten wars are in progress throughout the world this week. They range from petty conflicts in which the strategic weapon is a poisoned arrow to major air raids in which jet B-52s bomb jungle hideaways. As a leading French strategist on the Quai d'Orsay puts it: "There is no longer such a thing as war and peace, just different levels of confrontation."
The Muscle-Bound Big Nations
Nuclear war, carried to holocaust, may yet scour the plan-Earth; the "ultimate deterrent" may become, in Julian Huxley's phrase, the "ultimate detergent." But it is a valid interim observation that The Bomb seems to be keeping peace quite effectively among its possessors, bearing out ChurchiII's ironic comment that he "looked forward with great confidence to the potentiality of universal destruction." Illogically, the general feeling that nuclear war equals suicide or surrender has induced a similar sentiment among some that any war is unthinkable. But a Pentagon count of conventional wars since 1945 adds up to 40, only a little fewer than history's average.
While the awful possibilities of their own strengths make the big nations muscle-bound and the United Nations grows ever more helpless in preventing conflict, the small non-nuclear countries have found limited wars to be a functional means of settling disputes. The very possession of doomsday weaponry by the U.S. and Russia has forestalled the main event, but lesser powers feel free to slug it out in dozens of other arenas.