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Comment by iskander | Hacker News Reader

"Not as bad as WWII" isn't much of a standard for world peace.

If you total up casualties from the ongoing conflicts in Syria, Yemen, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia then you might be surprised at just how many violent deaths have transpired in the past decade. What's more, many of these conflicts have significantly outlived WWII in duration. Will the humpty dumpty of Syria ever be put together again? Probably not as long as it's the proxy battleground for regional powers.

What we might be seeing, rather than real peace, is a disparity of safety from violence. Some countries will be bomb-wrecked hellscapes for decades, while others fund those conflicts but don't think about them too much (except for when terrorists show up to burst our bubbles).

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I don't think the world has ever seen a decade without any major armed conflict. Immediately after WWII we had the conclusion of the Chinese Civil War, the Korean War, the first Indo-Pakistani war, war in French Indochina--and virtually all of those involved either major world powers or extremely populous countries.

There hasn't been a direct conflict between two major powers since the Korean War. Such a conflict would result in unprecedented levels of death and destruction even without nuclear weapons. With nuclear weapons, it becomes impossible. Sure, sometimes there are wars between tin-pot dictators and insurgents in pickup trucks, but there have always been those wars. What we don't have anymore are modern, industrialized nations killing millions of each other's citizens in an attempt to press their respective claims on Alsace-Lorraine.

And if anything, that's a sign of hope. If Alsace-Lorraine can move beyond decades of being a bomb-wrecked hellscape, perhaps Damascus or Aleppo or Kirkuk or Mogadishu can some day achieve the same peace. Just as (fingers crossed) Sarajevo has.

Again, I don't think you're considering the scale of loss there since these numbers are so huge. Let's look at it another way. We could kill literally every single person in Syria/Yemen/Libya/Iraq/Afghanistan/Somalia and it still wouldn't even be remotely comparable to the scale of loss of WW2. You'd be a shade over half way there. And like you mentioned this is something that's been going on for many years. All that death in WW2 was compressed into 6 years - most of it within 3.

When we look at the minuscule fraction of the real loss of life in the Mideast it's completely and absolutely negligible compared to the sort of wars we've had in the past. And that's largely due to the fact that modern nations no longer fight. If nations like China and the US were capable of fighting each other without mutually assured destruction, we would have. And that is a conflict that almost certainly would have drawn in the entire rest of the world to one side or the other and the death toll there would dwarf WW2 and anything else - at least until WW4.

Instead we're approaching the centennial of WW2 meaning we have had generations live, and mostly die, without ever experiencing the sort of death and destruction that used to be regularly wrought in war. And for this, we can thank nuclear weapons.

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