The waning of major war

The waning of major interstate war, which during the closing years of the century is still under way, was brought about primarily by the introduc­tion of nuclear weapons. From the beginning of history, political or­ganizations going to war against each other could hope to preserve themselves by defeating the enemy and gaining a victory; but now, assuming only that the vanquished side will retain a handful of weapons ready for use, the link between victory and self-preservation has been cut.^[379] On the contrary, at least the possibility has to be taken into account that the greater the triumph gained over an opponent who was in posses­sion of nuclear weapons, the greater also the danger to the survival of the victor.

Appearing as they did at the end, and as a result, of the largest armed conflict ever waged, nuclear weapons took a long time before their stul­tifying effects on future war were realized. During the immediate post- 1945 years, only one important author seems to have understood that ‘‘the absolute weapons” could never be used;^{3 [380] whether in or out of uniform, the great majority preferred to look for ways in which the weapon could and, if necessary, would be used.[381] As always happens when people try to forecast the form of future conflict, inertia and the ‘‘lessons” of World War II played a part. So long as the number of available nuclear weapons remained limited, their power small compared to what was to come later, and their effects ill understood, it was possible to believe that they would make little difference and that war would go on more or less as before.}

At first, possession of nuclear weapons was confined to one country only, the United States, which used them in order to end the war against Japan. However, the ‘‘atomic'' secret could not be kept for very long and in September 1949 the USSR carried out its first test.^[384] As more and more weapons were produced and stored, there were now two states capable of inflicting ‘‘unacceptable damage” on each other, as the phrase went. The introduction of hydrogen bombs in 1952-3 opened up the vision of unlimited destructive power (in practice, the most powerful one built was 3,000 times as large as the one that had demolished Hiroshima) and made the prospect of nuclear war even more awful. At the end of World War II there had been just two bombs in existence; but now the age of nuclear plenty arrived with more than enough devices available to ‘‘service” any conceivable target.⁹ For the first time, humanity found itself in a situation where it could destroy itself if it wanted to. The decade and a half after 1945 saw the publication of widely read novels such as Aldous Huxley's Ape and Essence (1948), Neville Shute's On the Beach (1957), and Walter Miller's A Canticle to Leibowitz (1959). All three described the collapse of civilization following a nuclear exchange. All three had as their central message the need to prevent such an exchange at all cost.

Even as the possible effects of nuclear weapons were becoming clear, the two leading powers were busily developing better ones.

To focus on the United States alone, the number of available weapons rose from perhaps less than a hundred in 1950 to some 3,000 in 1960, 10,000 in 1970, and 30,000 in the early 1980s when, for lack of targets,

See A. Enthoven, How Much Is Enough?: Shaping the Defense Budget, 1961-1969 (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), for the kind of calculation involved. growth came to a halt. The size of the weapons probably ranged from under 1 kiloton (that is, 1,000 tons of TNT, the most powerful conven­tional explosive) to as much as 15 megatons (15 million tons of TNT); although, as time went on and the introduction of new computers and other navigation aids permitted more accurate delivery vehicles to be built, there was a tendency for the yields of ‘‘strategic” warheads to decline to as little as 50-150 kilotons.

By basing them on the ground, at sea, and in the air, as well as greatly increasing numbers, the nuclear forces themselves could be protected against attack, at any rate to the extent that enough of them would survive to deliver the so-called second strike. However, the same was not true of industrial, urban, and demographic targets. During World War II a defense that relied on radar and combined fighter with anti-aircraft artillery had sometimes brought down as many as a quarter of the bom­bers attacking a target: so, for example, in the case of the American raid against the German city of Schweinfurt in the autumn of 1943. Should the attack be made with nuclear weapons, though, even a defense capable of intercepting 90 percent of the attacking aircraft would be of no avail, since a single bomber getting through was capable of destroying the target just as surely as Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed.

With the advent of ballistic missiles flying at hypersonic speeds, as well as cruise missiles flying so low that they could not be traced by ground­based radar, the problem of defending against attack became even more intractable. From the anti-ballistic missile area of the late 1960s all the way to the ‘‘Star Wars” program announced by President Reagan in 1983, tens of billions of dollars were spent and many solutions proposed; in the end, however, none of them appeared sufficiently promising to be developed and none were deployed on any scale.

10

For the arrangements in question, see P. Bracken, The Command and Control of Nuclear Forces (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983). chance of hitting it in mid-flight (though the meaning of ‘‘reasonable’’ remained in doubt) appeared feasible. However, how to deal with a missile carrying as many as ten warheads, let alone an attack consisting of numerous missiles and aimed at swamping the defense, was a different question altogether.

In the absence of a defense capable of effectively protecting demog­raphic, economic, and industrial targets, nuclear weapons presented policy-makers with a dilemma. Obviously one of their most important functions - some would say, their only rightful function - was to deter war from breaking out. Previous military theorists, with Clausewitz at their head, had seldom even bothered to mention deterrence; now, however, it became a central part of strategy as formulated in defense departments and studied in think tanks and universities. On the other hand, if the weapons were to be capable of exercising a deterrent effect, the weapons had to be capable of being used. What is more, they had to be used in a ‘‘credible’’ manner that would not automatically lead to all-out war and thus to the user’s own annihilation.

In the West, which owing to the numerical inferiority of its conven­tional forces believed it might be constrained to make ‘‘first use’’ of its nuclear arsenal, the search for an answer to this problem started during the mid-1950s and went on for the next thirty years. Numerous theories were developed; though none of them was ever put to the test, in retros­pect they may be divided into three types. The first, proposed by Henry Kissinger among others,^[385] suggested that an explicit agreement might be concluded concerning the kind of targets that might be subjected to nuclear bombardment as well as the maximum size of the weapons that might be used to destroy them.

The third, and most hair-raising, ‘‘solution’’ to the problem was pro­posed during the mid-1980s and was known as decapitation. Its adher­ents recognized that the chances of reaching an agreement, tacit or explicit, on the limitation of nuclear use in a war between the superpowers were anything but good; they therefore suggested that the new missiles and cruise missiles then coming into service should be used to ‘‘decapi­tate” the Soviet Union. By this they meant a series of superaccurate strikes that would eliminate the leadership and destroy its system of command, control, and communication, thus hopefully preventing it from launching an effective response.¹³

As the two last-mentioned strategies, dating to the 1970s and 1980s, suggest, by this time the apocalyptic fears so characteristic of the 1950s had to some extent evaporated. Such novels as John Hackett's The Third World War (1979) and Tom Clancy's Red Storm Rising (1984) enjoyed immense popularity - to say nothing of the latter's A Debt of Honor (1994), in which a team of American commandos is sent to demolish Japan's nuclear establishment in order that a war may be fought against that country. In the years before 1914, the popularity of military fiction was one indication of the approaching slaughter.¹⁴ In Reagan's United States, presumably many people would have welcomed an opportunity to test the wonderful weapons put at their disposal by advancing technology. They might, indeed, have brought about a clash if it had not been for the restraining effect of nuclear weapons which, unfortunately, threatened to bring the fun to an end before it had even properly started; not by accident, both The Third World War and Red Storm Rising come to an end the moment such weapons are introduced. Whatever the precise relation­ship between fact and fiction, in practice the planners' attempts to devise ‘‘war-fighting” strategies for using the smaller bombs and superaccurate delivery vehicles came to naught. Deterrence, ‘‘the sturdy child of terror'' as Winston Churchill had once called it, prevailed.

After the Cuban Missile Crisis, which for a few days in October 1962 seemed to have brought the world to the verge of nuclear doom, the superpowers became notably more cautious. There followed such ag­reements as the Test Ban Treaty (1963), the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT, 1969), the two Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties of 1972 and 1977, and the cuts in the number of medium-range missiles and warheads that were achieved in the late 1980s by President Reagan and General Secretary Gorbachev. Each was brought about under different circumstances, but all reflected the two sides' willingness to put a cap on the arms race, as well as the growing conviction that, should a nuclear war break out, there would be neither winners nor losers. To date, the capstone of these agreements is formed by the one which was signed by

¹³ C. S. Gray, ‘‘War Fighting for Deterrence,” Journal of Strategic Studies, 7, March 1984, pp. 5-28.

¹⁴ See I. V. Clark, Voices Prophesizing War (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1963), ch. 5. Presidents George Bush and Boris Yeltsin and which provided for doing away with the more accurate delivery vehicles (the MIRVs). This was tantamount to an admission that ‘‘war-fighting” was dead, and that the only function of nuclear weapons was to deter.

By the time the Cold War ended, the number of nuclear states, which originally had stood at just one, had reached at least eight. From Argen­tina and Brazil through Canada, West and East Europe, all the way to Taiwan, Korea (both North and South), Japan, Australia, and probably New Zealand, several dozen others were prepared to construct bombs quickly, or were at any rate capable of doing so if they wanted to.^[387] One, South Africa, preened itself on having built nuclear weapons and then dismantled them, although, understandably, both the meaning of ‘‘dis­mantling’’ and the fate of the dismantled parts remained somewhat obscure. Meanwhile, technological progress has brought nuclear weapons within the reach of anybody capable of producing modern conventional arms, as is proved by the fact that states like China, Israel, India, and Pakistan all developed the former years, even decades, before they began building the latter.

The entry of new members into the nuclear club was not, of course, favorably received by those who were already there. Seeking to preserve their monopoly, repeatedly they expressed their fears of the dire con­sequences that would follow. Their objective was to prove that they themselves were stable and responsible and wanted nothing but peace; however, for ideological, political, cultural, or technical reasons this was not the case elsewhere.^[388] Some international safeguard, such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1969 and the London Regime of 1977, were set up, the intention being to prevent sensitive technology from falling into the hands of undesirable - which in practice meant those of Third World countries. However, the spread of nuclear technology proved difficult to stop. If, at present, the number of states with nuclear weapons in their arsenals remains limited to eight, on the whole this is due less to a lack of means than to a lack of will on the part of would-be proliferators.

Looking back, the fears of nuclear proliferation proved to be greatly exaggerated. Worldwide, the number of devices produced reaches into the high tens of thousands; fifty years after they were first introduced, however, the only ones actually used in anger remain those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. First the superpowers, which were sufficiently terrified by the Cuban Missile Crisis to set up so-called hot lines; then their close allies in NATO and the Warsaw Pact, which signed various agreements designed to prevent the outbreak of accidental nuclear war; then the USSR and China, which settled their border dispute in 1991; then China and India, which have not seen a shot fired across their borders since the 1961 war between them; then India and Pakistan; and finally Israel and its neighbors - each in turn found that ownership of such weapons did not translate into as much military power as they had thought.

Instead, the nuclear arsenal tended to act as an inhibiting factor on military operations. As time went on, fear of escalation no longer allowed these countries to fight each other directly, seriously, or on any scale. As time was to show, the process took hold even where one or more of the nuclear states in question was headed by absolute dictators, as both the USSR and China were at various times; even when the balance of nuclear forces was completely lopsided, as when the United States possessed a ten-to-one advantage in delivery vehicles over the USSR during the Cuban Missile Crisis; even when the two sides hated each other ‘‘for longer than any other two peoples on earth” (Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto of Pakistan), as in the case of India and Pakistan; and even when officials denied the existence of the bomb, as in both South Asia and the Middle East. In fact, a strong case could be made that, wherever nuclear weapons appeared or where their presence was even strongly suspected, major interstate warfare on any scale is in the process of slowly abolishing itself. What is more, any state of any importance is now by definition capable of producing nuclear weapons. Hence, such warfare can be waged only either between or against third- and fourth-rate countries.^[389]

Since, in the years since 1945, first- and second-rate military powers have found it increasingly difficult to fight each other, it is no wonder that, taking a global view, both the size of the armed forces and the quantity of weapons at their disposal has declined quite sharply. In 1939 France, Germany, Italy, the USSR, and Japan each possessed ready-to-mobilize forces numbering several million men. The all-time peak came in 1944­5, when the six main belligerents (Italy having dropped out in 1943) between them probably maintained some 40 to 45 million men under arms. Since then the world's population has tripled, and international

relations have been anything but peaceful; nevertheless, the size of regu­lar forces has declined to a mere fraction of the war years and is still declining.¹⁸

To adduce a more specific example, in 1941 the German invasion of the USSR, as the largest single military operation of all time, made use of 144 divisions out of approximately 209 that the Wehrmacht possessed; later, during the Soviet-German war, the forces deployed on both sides, but particularly by the Soviets, were even larger. By contrast, since 1945 there has probably not been even one case when any state used over twenty full-size divisions on any single campaign, and the numbers are still going nowhere but down. In 1991 a coalition that included three out of five members in the Security Council brought some 500,000 troops to bear against Iraq, which was only about one-third as many as Germany, counting field forces only, used to invade France as long ago as 1914. As of the late 1990s, the only states that still maintained forces exceeding 1.5 million (for the United States alone, the 1945 figure stood at 12 million) were India and China - and, of them, the last-named had just announced that half a million men would be sent home. In any case, most of those forces consisted of low-quality infantry, some of which, armed with World War I rifles, was suitable - if for anything - more for maintaining internal security than for waging serious external war.

While the decline in the number of regular troops - both regulars and, even more so, reservists - has been sharp indeed, the fall in the number of major weapons and weapons systems has been even more precipitous. In 1939, the airforces of each one of the leading powers counted their planes in the thousands; during each of the years 1942-5, the United States alone produced 75,000 military aircraft on the average. Fifty years later, the air forces of virtually all the most important countries were shrinking fast. The largest one, the United States Air Force, bought exactly 127 aircraft in 1995, including helicopters and transports;¹⁹ elsewhere the numbers (if any) were down to the low dozens. At sea, the story has been broadly similar. Of the former Soviet navy, on which fortunes were spent and which as late as the 1980s appeared to pose a global threat, little remains but rusting surface vessels and old, undermaintained submarines that allegedly risk leaking nuclear material into the sea. The US navy is in a much better shape, but has seen the number of aircraft carriers - the most important weapons system around which everything else revolves -

¹⁸ The International Institute of Military Studies, The Military Balance, 1994-1995 (London: IISS, 1995), gives a country-by-country overview of the armed forces currently in existence.

¹⁹ World War II figures are from R. Overy, The Air War 1939-1945 (London: Europa, 1980), pp. 308-9; 1995 ones are from D. M. Snider, ‘‘The Coming Defense Train Wreck,” Washington Quarterly, 19, 1, Winter 1996, p. 92. go down from almost 100 in 1945 to as few as 12 in 1995. The United States apart, the one country which still maintains even one full-deck carrier is France; that apart, the carriers (all of them decidedly second- rate) owned by all other states combined can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Indeed, it is true to say that, with a single major exception, most states no longer maintain ocean-going navies at all.

In part, this decline in the size of armed forces reflects the escalating cost of modern weapons and weapons systems.²⁰ A World War II fighter bomber could be had for approximately $50,000. Some of its modern successors, such as the F-15I, come at $100,000,000 a piece when their maintenance-packages (without which they would not be operational) are included - which, when inflation is taken into account, represents a thousandfold increase. Even this does not mark the limit on what some airborne weapons systems, such as the ‘‘stealth” bomber, AWACS, and J-STAR - all of them produced, owned, and operated exclusively by the world's sole remaining superpower - can cost. And it has been claimed that the reluctance of the US Air Force to use its most recent acquisition, the B-2 bomber which carries a $2 billion price tag, against Iraq stems in part from the fact that there are simply no targets worthy of the risk.²¹

Even so, one should not make too much of the price factor. Modern economies are extraordinarily productive, and could certainly devote much greater resources to the acquisition of military hardware than they do at present. Thus, the cost of modern weapons systems may appear exorbitant only because the state's basic security, safeguarded as it is by nuclear weapons and their ever-ready delivery vehicles, no longer appears sufficiently at risk to justify them. In fact, this is probably the correct interpretation - as is suggested by the tendency, which has now been evident for decades, to cut the size of any production program and stretch the length of any acquisition process ad calendas grecas. For example, to develop the Manhattan Project - including the construction of some of the largest industrial plant ever - and build the first atomic bombs took less than three years; but the designers of present-day conventional weapons systems want us to believe that a new fighter bomber cannot be deployed in fewer than fifteen. The development histories of countless modern weapons systems prove that, in most cases, only a fraction of the numbers initially required are produced, and then only after delays las­ting for years and years. The reason is that, in most cases, the threat - which would have made rapid mass production necessary and inciden­tally led to a dramatic drop in per unit costs - no longer exists.

²⁰ The best analysis of cost trends remains F. Spinney, Defense Facts of Life (Boulder: Westview, 1986).

²¹ BBC World Service, television broadcast, 25 February 1998.

At the same time, yet another explanation for the decline in the quan­tity of weapons produced and deployed is the very great improvement in quality; this, it is argued, makes yesterday’s large numbers superfluous.^[390] There is, in fact, some truth in this argument. Particularly since guided missiles have replaced ballistic weapons in the form of the older artillery and rockets, the number of rounds necessary to destroy any particular target had dropped very sharply; as the 1991 Gulf War showed, in many cases a one-shot-one-kill capability has been achieved. On the other hand, it should be remembered that for every modern weapon - nuclear ones only excepted - a counterweapon may be, and in most cases has been, designed. However simple or sophisticated two opposing military systems, provided that they are technologically approximately equal, the struggle between them is likely to be prolonged and to result in heavy attrition.^[391] Expecting more accurate weapons to increase attrition - as, in fact, was the case both in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War and the 1982 Falklands War, each in turn the most modern conflict in history until then - logically late twentieth-century states ought to have produced and fielded more weapons, not fewer. The fact that this has not happened almost certainly shows that they are no longer either willing or able to prepare for wars on a scale larger than, say, Vietnam and Afghanistan; and even those two came close to bankrupting the two largest powers, the United States and the USSR respectively.

To look at it in still another way, during World War II four of seven (five of eight, if China is included) major belligerents had their capitals occupied. Two more (London and Moscow) were heavily bombed, and only one (Washington, DC) escaped either misfortune. Since then, how­ever, no first- or second-rate power has seen large-scale military oper­ations waged on its territory; the reasons for this being too obvious to require an explanation. In fact, the majority of countries which did go to war - or against which others went to war - were quite small and relatively unimportant. For example, Israel against the Arab states; India against Pakistan; Iran against Iraq; the United States first against Vietnam and then against Iraq; and, for a few days in 1995, Peru against Ecuador. When the countries in question were not unimportant, as in the case of India and China during their prenuclear days, military operations were almost always confined to the margins and never came near the capitals in question.

The significance of this change was that strategy, which from Napoleon to World War II often used to measure its advances and retreats in hundreds of miles, now operates on a much smaller scale. For example, no post-1945 army has so much as tried to repeat the 600-mile German advance from the River Bug to Moscow, let alone the 1,300-mile Soviet march from Stalingrad to Berlin. Since then, the distances covered by armies were much shorter. In no case did they exceed 300 miles (Korea in 1950); usually, though, they did not penetrate deeper than 150 or so. In 1973 Syria and Egypt faced an unacknowledged nuclear threat on the part of Israel. Hence, as some of their leaders subsequently admitted, they limited themselves to advancing ten and five miles respectively into occupied territory - to such lows had the formerly mighty art of ‘‘strat­egy’’ sunk.^[392] In other places where nuclear powers confront each other, as between India and Pakistan, what hostilities still take place (across the remote and practically worthless glacier of Siachen) do not involve any territorial advances at all.^[393]

As nuclear weapons restricted the scope of war, it is perhaps no wonder that conventional military theory stagnated. The thinkers who, during the interwar years, taught the world’s armed forces how to wage wars with weapons and weapons systems based on the internal combustion engine - Giulio Douhet, John Frederick Fuller, Basil Liddell Hart, Heinz Guder­ian - did not really have successors worthy of them. It is often believed that, throughout the Cold War, the one thought that occupied the brains of the general staff in Moscow was how to conduct a 1940-style Blitzkrieg, only much bigger, faster, and more powerful; conversely, 90 percent of all NATO planning concerned the question how to stop such a Blitzkrieg in its tracks and then, perhaps, go over to the counteroffensive as the British had done at Alamein in 1942.^[394] Through all this, the basic analytical terms used to understand large-scale military operations - such as ad­vance, retreat, breakthrough, penetration, encirclement, front, line of communications, internal and external lines, direct and indirect approach - remained very much as they had been, with the result that Liddell Hart’s Strategy, published for the first time in 1929, tended to be reprinted each time a conventional war broke out.^[395] Arguably, the only new concept that appeared on the scene since 1935 or so has been that of vertical envelop­ment.^[396] Involving the use of aircraft and, later, helicopters in order to land troops to the enemy's rear, seize key points, and cut communica­tions, vertical envelopment was used on a number of occasions during World War II. However, not since the Suez campaign of 1956 has any army tried to implement it on any scale; its use in counterinsurgency apart, the most innovative idea of all (which itself is over half a century old) has remained purely on paper.

Initiated by the development of nuclear weapons and accompanied by a drastic decline in the size of military establishments, the decline of major interstate war was also reflected in international law and mores. For centuries if not millennia, the most important reason why politically organized societies, including (after 1648) states, went to war against each other had been to carry out conquests and acquire territory. It was by sword and fire that Louis XIV conquered Alsace, Frederick II Silesia, and Napoleon (however temporarily) most of Europe; this was also the case in 1815 when Prussia emerged from the Napoleonic Wars in posses­sion of the Rhineland, a territory that had never previously belonged to it, and when the United States occupied huge tracts of Mexican territory in 1846-8. As late as 1866 it was by war and the peace agreement concluded in its wake that Prussia annexed some of the north German states and Italy obtained Venice from Austria. Over the next half-century the ac­quisition of territory in Asia and Africa, where society had not yet been organized in states, continued and even accelerated. Not so in Europe itself. There, the spread of nationalism - meaning the growing iden­tification of people with the state whose citizens they were - was probably already beginning to make conquest more difficult both to bring about and to legitimize.

In retrospect, the turning point in the process that eventually made the annexation by one state of territory belonging to others into a legal and practical impossibility probably came in 1870-1. Having won their war against France, the Germans like countless conquerors before them demanded payment in the form of real estate. That real estate was duly signed away by the newly established, but legitimate, republican gover­nment of Adolphe Thiers; however, it very soon became clear that, in sharp contrast to similar events in the past, the French people simply refused to let go. On the contrary, the very fact that they had been conquered by force caused Alsace and Lorraine to be designated ‘‘sac­red”; during the second half of the twentieth century, that was to become the fate of every bit of occupied territory, no matter how insignificant. The land being sacred, they waited for la revanche which it was now the patriotic duty of every Frenchmen and Frenchwoman to prepare as best they could. As Bismarck himself had expressly foreseen,²⁹ the change in attitudes turned the annexation of the two provinces - carried out at the insistence of Moltke and the general staff- into the worst political error he ever made. From now on, every other state that nursed a grudge against Germany could invariably count on French support.

The idea that complete sovereignty, including the unrestricted right to wage war, was too dangerous to entertain in the age of modern technology suffered another blow as a result of World War I and the 10 million casualties (in dead alone) that it wrought.³⁰ Ever since the first half of the seventeenth century, numerous suggestions had been made to limit the right of states to make war against their neighbors. The idea was to establish some kind of international organization that would stand above individual states, arbitrate in disputes that broke out among them, and bring force to bear against disturbers of the peace. Sully apart, those who floated schemes of this kind included Abbe Cruce, William Penn, Jean- Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, and the Swiss jurist Johann Bluntschli - in short, many of the leading intellectuals of the period between about 1650 and 1900.³¹ Finally, in 1919, the vision was partly realized and the League of Nations established. Its Covenant, and especially Article 10, represented a new departure in international law. For the first time ever, the territorial integrity and political independence - in other words, the right to be free of conquest - of states were recognized as a fundamental international norm.

The next step was taken in 1928 and took the form of the Kellogg- Briand Pact. In this pact, originally designed by the foreign ministers of

²⁹ O. von Bismarck, Reflections and Reminiscences (London: Smith, 1898), vol. II, pp. 252ff.

³⁰ For what follows, see F. Przetacznik, ‘‘The Illegality of the Concept of Just War Under

Contemporary International Law,” Revue de Droit International, des Sciences Diplo- matiques et Politiques, 70, 4, October-December 1993, pp. 245-94.

³¹ For these and other attempts at international organization, see A. Saita, ‘‘Un riformatore pacifista contemporaneo de Richelieu: E. Cruce,” Rivista Storica Italiana, 64, 1951, pp. 183-92; W. Penn, An Essay Towards the Present and Future Peace of Europe (Hildesheim: Olms, 1983 [1699]); Abbe de Saint Pierre, A Scheme for Lasting Peace in Europe (London: Peace Book, 1939 [1739]); O. Schreker, ‘‘Leibnitz: ses idees sur l’organisation des relations internationales,” Proceedings of the British Academy, 23, 1937, pp. 218-19; E. Kant, Plan for a Universal and Everlasting Peace (New York: Garland, 1973 [1796]); J. Lorimer, The Institutes of the Law of Nations (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1883-4), ch. 14; and J. G. Bluntschli, Gesammelte kleine Schriften (Nordlingen: Beck’sche Buchhandlung, 1879-81), vol. II, pp. 293-5.

the United States and France, the signatories formally undertook ‘‘to renounce war as an instrument of national policy.” During the years that followed this obligation was joined by sixty-one additional states; since there was no time limit, technically speaking the pact remains in force to the present day.³²

In the event, these and other ‘‘international kisses,” as they have been called by their self-styled ‘‘realist” critics, failed to prevent the unleashing ofWorld War II as the greatest war of conquest of all time. This, however, does not mean that, as indicators of the public mood, they were com­pletely without significance. Once World War II was over, those persons considered most responsible for launching it were brought to justice in Nuremberg and Tokyo. The courts which were set up by the Allies used the Kellogg-Briand Pact as the legal basis for charging them with a new crime, such as had not been heard of since Hugo Grotius,³³ namely, planning and waging ‘‘aggressive’’ war.³⁴ The arguments of the defen­dants’ lawyers, namely that this was a post facto indictment for a crime which had not been recognized as such at the time when it was allegedly committed, remained unheeded. The most important Nazi and Japanese war criminals were convicted - for this as well as other crimes - and, the majority of them duly executed. Moreover, thirteen months had not yet passed since the end of hostilities when the prohibition on aggressive war and the use of force in order to annex territory belonging to other sovereign entities were written into Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter. As additional states joined the UN, in time the latter was to develop into the most subscribed-to document in human history.

Article 39 of the Charter left the decision as to what constituted aggression in the hands of the Security Council which, especially in view of the disagreements between its members, found the task remarkably difficult.³⁵ Nevertheless, it could be argued that the attempt to prevent states from enjoying the fruits of aggression in the form of territorial aggrandizement has been remarkably successful. The last time inter­national war led to the annexation of territory on any scale was in 1945 when the USSR took over lands belonging to Poland (which itself an­nexed German lands), Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Japan; since then, though, international borders have become all but frozen. Remarkable as it seems, neither the Korean War, nor the three India-Pakistani wars, nor the India-Chinese war, nor any of the Arab-Israeli wars, ended with

³² For these developments, see Przetacznik, ‘‘Illegality of the Concept of Just War.’’

³³ H. Grotius, De Jure Belli ac Pacis (Amsterdam: Jansunium, 1632), 2, 23, 13; 1, 3, 1.

³⁴ See G. Best, War and Law Since 1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 181-2.

³⁵ For two attempts to grapple with this question, see Y. Melzer, Just War (Leiden: Sijthoff, 1975), pp. 83ff., and I. D. deLupis, The Law of War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 58ff. important pieces of territory being ceded by one side to another; indeed the great majority did not lead to any territorial changes at all. At most, a country was partitioned and a new international border created. This, for example, was what took place in Yugoslavia between 1991 and 1995. This, too, was what happened in Palestine in 1948-9 when Israel, having been established by means of a United Nations Resolution, occupied somewhat more territory than had been allocated to it by the Partition Plan. At that time King Abdullah of Jordan, who may have been acting in concert with Israel, used the opportunity to take over some 2,000 square miles known as the West Bank. However, in the whole world the only two countries to recognize the annexation were Britain and Pakistan; and in any case it has since been formally annulled.

Elsewhere the idea that force should not be used for altering frontiers, which was reaffirmed once again by UN Resolution 2734 of 1970, prevailed.³⁶ Before 1945, the attainment of military victory usually led to the surrender of the vanquished, a peace treaty, and the cession of territory; now, however, almost without exception, the most that an occupant could obtain was an armistice. Particularly in the Middle East, the state of no war, no peace that ensued proved itself capable of lasting for decades on end; as a result, many of the maps in current use have two lines marked on them, namely a green one showing the international border (which was in effect only during the first nineteen years after 1948) and a purple one indicating the cease-fire line that was established in 1967. Indeed, so strong has the prevalent bias toward the status quo ante become that it prevailed even in those cases when the defeated plainly did not have the ability to eject the victor. This is what happened when India occupied several thousand square miles of Pakistani territory in 1971, and also after China invaded Vietnam in 1979.

Moreover, the decline of major war has led to a change in the ter­minology by which it was surrounded. All but gone are a whole series of terms, such as ‘‘subjugation” and ‘‘the right of conquest,” which even as late as 1950 or so formed a normal part of legal discourse in a work on international law written by such a highly civilized authority as His Britannic Majesty's Government's official adviser.³⁷ Of the two, the former has acquired an archaic, not to say outlandish, ring. The latter is regarded almost as a contradiction in terms; given that might, as exercised by one sovereign state against another, by definition can no longer create right. Gone, too, are the ‘‘war ministries” of the various states, every last one of which has had its name changed into Ministry of Defense, Ministry

The relevant paragraphs are printed in S. D. Bailey, Prohibitions and Restraints on War (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), appendix 1, p. 162.

H. Lauterpacht, International Law: A Treatise (London: Longmans, 1947). of Security, or something of that kind. Needless to say, the change in nomenclature did not always mean a different kind of activity. As they had done for centuries past, ‘‘defense” officials of many countries con­tinued to plan and prepare for wars at least some of which were aggres­sive. What it did was to emphasize the growing force of international law to delegitimize war, or, at any rate, of war as waged by one state against others.

The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, which took place in 1990-1, marked yet another step toward the delegitimization of interstate war. Against the background of changing international norms, perhaps not since the time of Korea had there been a similar clear-cut attempt to occupy a sovereign state and wipe it off the map. The question of oil apart, no wonder Saddam Hussein faced the opprobrium of the whole world; as it turned out, he was unable to get his annexation recognized even by the handful of countries that supported him, such as Cuba, Jordan, Yemen, and Sudan.

On the other side of the dispute, the states that formed the coalition against Iraq did not respond by declaring war on their own accord. Following a precedent set in the matter of Korea in 1950, they asked the Security Council (in which, of course, their own influence was para­mount) for a mandate to end the aggression or, in plain words, to throw the Iraqis out. As was noted at the time,^[397] the procedure selected by President Bush raised the question of whether states still had the right to use force in order to pursue their interests, or whether they had to ask for permission in the manner of medieval princes appealing to the pope. Nor, as events were to show, was the precedent thus set without significance. Much of 1995 was spent wrangling over the question of whether NATO, as a mere alliance of sovereign states, was entitled to send troops to Bosnia without requiring a mandate from the United Nations. Early in 1998, as it was trying to punish Saddam Hussein for allegedly ‘‘stonewall­ing” the arms inspections to which Iraq had been subject for the last seven years, the United States found that going to war without permission from the Security Council would incur a heavy political price.

In law as well as in fact, as the twentieth century was approaching its end, interstate war appeared to be on the retreat. The right to wage it, far from being part and parcel of sovereignty, had been taken away except insofar as it was done in strict self-defense; even when states did wage war in strict self-defense (and precisely for that reason), they were no longer allowed to benefit by bringing about territorial change. Thus has such war lost its chief attraction. At the same time, as far as important states were concerned, the stakes were raised many times over by the introduction of nuclear weapons; no wonder that its incidence, among those states at least, was diminishing.

As to the interstate wars that still took place, with hardly any exception neither the size of the forces involved, nor the magnitude of the military operations that they witnessed, nor the threat that they posed to the belligerent’s existence even approached pre-1945 dimensions. From the Middle East to the Straits of Taiwan, the world remains a dangerous place and new forms of armed conflict appear to be taking the place of the old.³⁹ Nevertheless, compared to the situation as it existed even as late as 1939 the change has been momentous.