I was watching the history channel last night, it was a modern marvels episode about the Manhattan project. In it, one of the interviewees stated that deaths from war had been increasing exponetially up until 1945, when they dropped drastically and stayed at 1 million a year. His message was (apparently) the fact that the atomic bomb made large scale war between powerful nations a bad idea, so war deaths went down.
Is there any collaberation for this theory, or anywhere i can find this chart that shows war deaths before & after the invention of the atomic bomb?
From the perspective of “Nuclear War was so horrible to contemplate that we did not indulge ourselves with a WW III,” I suspect that that case can be made. Prior to the atomic bomb, either Korea (1950) or Hungary (1956) or either of the last couple of Israeli-Arab wars (1967, 1973) might have precipitated a major all-out war.
It has not, of course, prevented people from killing each other in huge numbers, but the phrase “limited war” was coined for a reason.
I don’t have any hard numbers to give you, but I think the “increasing exponentially” part is true but misleading. The whole population of the Earth has been increasing exponentially, so it would stand to reason that total casualties in wars would increase as well. A more meaningful statistic would be casualties as a percentage of the population. And even then, you would have to factor in that the World Wars came after nearly a century of relative peace in Europe. The Forty Years war and the Napoleonic wars were times of great bloodshed as well.
That said, I think that if somehow nuclear weapons were impossible, there would almost certainly have been a conventional third World War between the US/Nato and the USSR/China no later than the 1960s, on a scale probably equal to two or three WW2s