Having processed historical data with statistical methods, a scientist from the University of Colorado admitted unreasonable hopes that after the victory over fascism, the world learned to live without major military conflicts.
The maximum gap between World War II and World War III could be 205 years.
After the end of World War II, mankind has been living in conditions of relative peace and tranquility for almost 73 years. Of course, local military conflicts still poison people's lives. However, the scale of the atrocities seems to be different. Historians have already dubbed the current conditionally serene period "the long peace." But how long will it last? There is no unanimity among scientists on this issue. Optimists argue that at the cost of 85 million deaths, people have finally learned the lessons of history. They realized that violence was far from the most effective tool for solving problems, and economic ties and common values brought peoples closer together. In turn, the threat of nuclear war forced the states to create a system of mutual deterrence and we entered an era of peace and prosperity, which will last a very, very long time.
Pessimists, on the other hand, say that nationalism, political adventurism, the idea of the superiority of one people over another, belief in their own exclusivity - all this has not gone anywhere. This fuel will be used to fuel new global conflicts and transform millions of people into bloody mince in the name of "great ideas."
Whether humanity has really grown wiser or we, without knowing it, are on the verge of a new monstrous catastrophe, the professor of the Faculty of Computer Science at the University of Colorado (USA) Aaron Clauset decided to find out. His research was published in the journal Science Advances.
The scientist, using statistical methods, analyzed a large set of historical data on military conflicts for the period from 1823 (French intervention in Spain) and 2003 (invasion of the United States and its allies in Iraq). During this time, a total of 95 significant armed clashes between states of varying severity took place in the world. Only military losses were taken into account. Based on the number of soldiers killed, Clauset divided wars into local and large ones. A major clash was considered a hostilities in which more than 26,625 soldiers were killed. But the sample did not include all wars. In particular, the Afghan war turned out to be overboard. It certainly belongs to the number of major military conflicts, during the battles the USSR lost from 15 to 26 thousand dead soldiers,another 18 thousand were the losses of the Afghan allies and from 75 to 90 thousand - the opponents lost. However, Clauset took into account only battles between states, and hostilities in Afghanistan belong to the category of civil wars - the USSR acted in the interests of one of the parties to the internal conflict.
In a statistical sense, a long peace simply balances the situation after the outbreak of aggression. Photo: DMITRY POLUKHIN / kp.ru
The most monstrous, of course, turned out to be World War II - 16 million killed soldiers. There were only 34 such major murders in history (see diagram). Analyzing the frequency and intensity of conflicts, the American mathematician identified 3 periods in history:
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1. During the period from 1823 to 1939, 19 major wars occurred, with a frequency of once every 6.2 years.
2. Then, from 1914 to 1939, the era of "Great Violence" begins, when 10 especially cruel bloodsheds occurred with an interval of 2.7 years on average.
3. After the end of the Second World War, the number of serious military conflicts decreased significantly. Since 1945, there have been only five of them and the frequency was 12.8 years.
However, according to Clauset, the dry language of mathematical formulas suggests that the "long peace" is only a seeming idyll.
“In a statistical sense, a long peace just balances the situation after the outburst of aggression, into which humanity fell in the era of the“Great Violence,”the scientist says. - In a sense, the current calm is an illusion. Just against the background of that madness, today's butchers need to try very hard to impress humanity. In general, the level of aggression has not changed much over the past 100 years.
By the way, in the past, the world knew long episodes of absolute peace, when there were no wars on the planet for 18 years. This happened in the 19th century, when the Russo-Turkish war ended in 1828, and the Mexican-American conflict was only about to flare up in 1846.
Clauset believes that the forces of evil are still accumulating strength for a new grandiose murder. According to his calculations, the maximum gap between the Second and Third World War could be 205 years. Only if during this time people manage to protect themselves from mass fratricide can it be said that the old mathematical model of conflicts has ceased to work and the world lives in conditions of new thinking.
YAROSLAV KOROBATOV