Winston Churchill to the Chiefs of Staff Committee, July 1944

The rain of large sparks, blowing down the street, were each as large as a five-mark piece. I struggled to run against the wind but could only reach a house on the corner of the Sorbenstrasse . . . .[We] couldn’t go on across the Eiffestrasse because the asphalt road had melted. There were people on the roadway, some already dead, some still lying alive but stuck in the asphalt. They must have rushed onto the roadway without thinking. Their feet had got stuck and then they had put out their hands to try to get out again. They were on their hands and knees screaming.

            Kate Hoffmeister, then nineteen, on the firestorm in Hamburg in 1943

History tells us that when the first atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, some 70,000 lives were snuffed out in a single explosion. What is not commmonly considered, however, is that even before the first nuclear weapon was used, one million people were dying each month during World War II.  In Tokyo, 220 thousand died in only two bombing raids using conventional bombs. The air over Tokyo, Hamburg, and Dresden literally caught fire. 

The question is this:  Is all-out global war, along the lines of 70 years ago a thing of the past?  Perhaps. But it is an equally debatable question as to whether or not the same results - massive global destruction and loss of life - is possible, or even likely as we get further into the 21st century; whether the meme, the behavior of making war, has changed in 5,000 years of recorded history. 

I contend that the massive, global mobilization of armies is probably something that is in truth no longer useful.  Modern weapons of mass destruction are so efficient, so certain to do the job of killing the enemy, that armies are a losing proposition in global warfare. They have been made obsolete. It is a certainty that if the major atomic powers went to war, using all the means at their disposal to inflict death, one million people could die each minute that such a war raged. 

Nevertheless, it is also  just as certain that humanity's propensity to make war  upon itself is as real as it was when it was when Rome salted the earth at Carthage. We need not look far to see the proof of it. 

Our nuclear-equipped enemies, real or percieved,  are no less afraid of us as we are of them. Thousands of atomic and hydrogen warheads  are aimed at both the United States and Russia and for that reason, the leaders of both countries have negotiated a way to untie the Gordian Knot of endless numbers of atomic weapons threatening each country.

The Strategic Arms  Treaty (New START) recently negotiated between President Obama's administration and the Russians aims to verifiably reduce nuclear weapons inventories, with the goal of dispensing with them altogether at some point.

But once again, the hawkish (and largely civilian) voices within the halls of Congress are raising the red flag, asserting that any bargaining with the rest of the world must be done from a position of strength, which strength emanates from the possession of enough destructive power to incinerate the planet. Whether the Senate will constitutionally ratify the New START treaty is very questionable, given the near total gridlock within that body. 

It may be that we Americans will be the ones who prevent a more secure peace among the major powers from breaking out. The writers of histories will not be very kind to us. Worse, the continued existence of these horrific weapons will shade our foreign policy thinking for years to come, should the world somehow figure out a way to keep from blowing itself up.