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Comment by m0zg | Hacker News Reader

That arms race is the only reason why we haven't had a major war in the last 75 years, and won't have one in the foreseeable future. AKA Long Peace.

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> That arms race is the only reason why we haven't had a major war in the last 75 years, and won't have one in the foreseeable future.

The Cold War was one of largest wars in history by casualties, on the same rough order as (and possibly ahead of) WWI.

Nuclear weapons are a big part of why it was popular to maintain the rather paper-thin fiction that it was simply a series of separate conflicts that happened to have the same parties standing behind the principal combatants (or involving at most one of those backers directly).

Do you recall one event during cold war where 65.000 men were killed in just one day?. Or how compares the 40.000.000 casualties during ww1 with the coldwar?.

For a single day, I think there are a few days of the Indonesian anti-communist purges that would qualify. Overall, about ½-1 million were killed, over a period of a few months, but a lot of the deaths happened over a period of just a few days when the army rolled up into central and eastern Java.

Yeah, but those were proxy fighters from other lands, right? They don't count, according to most US/RUS public.....

Those wars are insignificant in comparison to world wars.

Just thinking out loud here, but how long would this level of having no “major” wars have to last for it to have been worth it if it ends in nuclear war?

It's not how long they _last_, it's how many lives they take. USSR alone lost some 25 million people in WW2, mostly young, able bodied men. Some estimates put the casualty count even higher. Imagine the impact of taking basically all military aged men in the United States and sending them into a massive, five year long meat grinder. That's what this war was like for the USSR and other countries that couldn't wait until 1944 to directly intervene.

So yeah, I think it's great that we can no longer have major wars, and I think it's worth having the nukes if that's what it takes to deter others.

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