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Comment by didibus | Hacker News Reader

It is a little insane how many wars were happening during those time periods.

I wonder if constitutions really did anything or it was just all technology's doing.

Maybe, unsurprising to HN, but I believe more in technology's impact than anything else. I can get onboard with the printing press having an impact, the same way social media is having one today. Technology enabled the wars, and probably similarly ended them.

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If you think [complex series of historical events] was solely caused by [singular noun] you are almost certainly always wrong.

I don't entirely agree with their comment, but while "technology" is a single noun, it's not a singular noun - it encompasses many different things.

I think mutually assured destruction thanks to nuclear weapons has ended large scale warfare. That technology ensures even the leaders die if a war starts. That makes it a tool of what we would consider a truly insane person.

So, I agree that technology has likely ended large scale wars for our lifetime but I think we will see evolving forms of conflict. To fight is human. We are still animals after all.

> I think mutually assured destruction thanks to nuclear weapons has ended large scale warfare.

Needed to fact-check this claim.

Wars [1] since the first and last nuclear weapons used in war - the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 - roughly ordered by death toll:

  Bangladesh Liberation War, 3M
  Second Congo War, 2.5M..5.4M
  Vietnam War, 2.4M..4.3M
  Korean War, 1.5M..4.5M
  War in Afghanistan, 1.2M..2M
  Second Sudanese Civil War, 1M..2M
  Nigerian Civil War, 1M..3M
  Rwandan genocide, 0.8M
  Soviet–Afghan War, 0.6M..2M
  Angolan Civil War, 0.5M
  Ethiopian Civil War, 0.5M..1.5M
  First Sudanese Civil War, 0.5M
  Iraq War, 0.4M..0.7M
  Algerian War, 0.4M..1.5M
  First Indochina War, 0.4M
  Syrian Civil War, 0.4M..0.6M
  War in Darfur, 0.3M
  Burundian Civil War, 0.3M
  Somali Civil War, 0.3M..0.5M
  Iran–Iraq War, 0.3M..1.1M
  War on Terror, 0.3M..1.3M
  First Congo War, 0.3M..0.8M
  plus some 4M combined from wars smaller than 250K
  
  TOTAL 23M .. 41M

The estimated death toll of the last big war before that - Second World War - 56M .. 85M people.

For comparison, over 100M people died in warefare in the middle ages.

Checks out.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll#Mod...

>Maybe, unsurprising to HN, but I believe more in technology's impact than anything else.

Technology is a facilitator for better and more impactful wars. Has always been historically.

>Technology enabled the wars, and probably similarly ended them.

The loss of the role of Europe after WWII (when they couldn't hold the colonies anymore or fight between them for global control) that ended them.

Plus tons of national barriers have been established by then (the break-up of empires and the unification of feudal arrangmenets into countries having brought many wars between populations wanthing their own state and fighting for its borders with neighbors).

The US, on the other hand, which picked up the "top dog" role after WWII, got into countless wars during the Cold War, but it was between them the USSR and their proxies - Europe did not need to apply anymore.

And the US got into all those wars despite the US having the most advanced technology of that era. It wasn't the technology that started/stopped the wars, it was the opportunity they offered (or lack thereof in Europe).

In the next economic vacuum/opportunity we'll see a revamp. We already see it with the current trade wars...

Maybe it's more of smokeless powder that did not obscure target to the nearby shooter, and faster firing rifle that made the case for mass armies - line infantry that took years to train so there can't be too many of them coz economy won't be able to feed so many people who don't plough the land, for so long - made way for huge conscript armies you can raise in months. Suddenly everyone had so many more men able to fight, and when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

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