hal@finney.org wrote:
> Robin writes:
> > The chart: http://abcnews.go.com/media/world/images/peacechart_990531_t.gif
> > in http://abcnews.go.com/sections/science/DailyNews/peace_warbiology990602.html
> > shows a bad long term trend. I sure hope it has changed lately.
>
> It is perhaps encouraging that at least 70% of the deaths occured in
> the first half of the century, despite the population being twice as
> high in the 2nd half on average. Perhaps that will turn out to have
> been the peak and now we are on a downslope towards historical levels.
I suspect war deaths in the last fifty years would have been substantially higherhad
it not been for MAD from nuclear weapons. Ex post we did well by them,
but I think we have to admit that ex ante we had a substantial possibility of a
nuclear war which would have killed very many people indeed. So we may
have just been lucky.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:14:11 MDT
