The history of warfare, from the perspective of strategy and tactics, is to some extent the history of firepower. Our definition of firepower will be “offensive power applied from a distance.” From the dawn of time, whoever can amass the better firepower tends to win the battles. While there are examples of great strategists who have managed to overcome better firepower with a clever plan, for the most part, if I’ve got better weaponry, and more of it, I’ll probably come out on top.
The study of firepower is also the study of the advancement of weaponry. Let’s look at our ancestors in the caves.
Step one: fists.
Step two: tool use and rock throwing.
It doesn’t take a genius to see how throwing a rock has some advantages over throwing a fist. I don’t have to get so close, so if I have rocks and all you have is fists, I win. Similarly, if my tool use brings me to a knife, and all you’ve got is a fist, I probably win then too. But the further away I can get from you while still launching an offensive attack, the better chance I have of harming you while not being harmed myself. A bow and arrow is better than throwing rocks, because I get better accuracy and better results. I can kill better with an arrow than with a rock. I can be further away from my enemy than with a rock (or, of course, than with a close-range weapon like a sword/knife/mace/battle-axe). A gun is an improvement over the bow and arrow (once guns get to the point of rifling, at least): better accuracy, more distance, more deadly. In war, if one side has guns and the other side has swords, the guns will probably win because the gunners will never be in range of the swords, but not vice versa.
So, there’s the history of world warfare in a nutshell. Add to this developments in artillery so that guns become cannons, and you’ve made it about as far as the American Civil War. But we miss something here, which is who, exactly, are the combatants. For most of Western history, the combatants were professional soldiers. One batch of professional soldiers fought another batch of professional soldiers, and there didn’t tend to be too many of them, and they played by various accepted rules, and then the kings found out who won and that was that. Very civilized, in a manner of speaking. The American Civil War can be said to have introduced a new concept, the standard-issue non-professional soldier. Not that there weren’t volunteers, but the Union had the resources of factories (for war materiel) and population (for soldiers) and drafted the latter to attend to the former. Small elegant battles went away during the Civil War, and bloodshed on a mass level was introduced. (It was perfected in the trenches of WWI.) But still, it was soldiers fighting soldiers.
Artillery fire can do serious damage. I can shoot you from very far away, and make a very big bang. Start thinking battleships, where I can deliver the artillery anywhere on the water. Start thinking airplanes, where I can start dropping bombs from the sky. Develop aircraft carriers, and you’ve got one of the greatest advances ever in the history of firepower.
Planes start to make wars very dicey, primarily beginning during WWII. Previously the world was a contest of our firepower vs your firepower, with whoever shoots the most from the furthest having the advantage, but at the point where we start dropping bombs from airplanes, beginning with military targets, it isn’t long before we find ourselves firebombing Dresden.
And then we take the giant step, and we’re bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki to demonstrate the ferocious power of the atomic bomb.
At the point where we have nuclear weapons, we have taken a quantum leap in firepower (no pun intended). Provided we have airplanes or long-range missile launching capabilities, we can launch our weapons virtually from the comfort of home. And we can kill everyone for miles around. We go beyond military targets almost by definition. Nuclear weapons take out cities, not military targets. War, as a result, is totally redefined.
The technology for creation of nuclear weaponry is complex and expensive. The US had the bomb in 1945; the Soviets were right behind us. Even before WWII ended, US Foreign Policy had determined that the USSR was the next enemy, and the USSR took a similar view of us. These two major powers were the only ones in a position in the wake of WWII to develop and afford these weapons, which is why they were the ones who had them. Before long, we had them pointing at each other. But we didn’t use them. We came close once or twice, but we never pulled the trigger.
We now start to see why nuclear weapons are different from other weapons. With nukes, there’s no longer even a pretense of attacking military targets. Pretty much any analysis you can find on the justness of war will tell you that attacking civilians should not be on the program. It’s bad enough that many of our conflicts nowadays are urban, with that wonderful euphemism of collateral damage, i.e., we took out an orphanage when we took out the suspected insurgents headquarters. But nukes take it to the next level. Their destruction is beyond even the intended military. One of the special aspects of the US and USSR facing off with nukes was that they both had enough in their arsenals to destroy each other, so if either of them did start a nuclear conflict, it would assure the end of both of them. This became known as Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD, to indicate to anyone what the problem was. A subset of the problem would probably be that, if any nuclear power attacked another nuclear power without as much of an arsenal—say, Israel attacked Russia—the bigger player would still nevertheless destroy the smaller player. In other words, Israel might take out Moscow, but Russia would take out Israel.
The destructive power of nukes is so great that their existence theoretically negates their use; Baudrillard talks about this. As soon as you’ve acquired these weapons, you’ve backed yourself into a corner of being unable to use them. If only that were true.
Over time, a handful of national players have managed to acquire nukes. The thing is, possession of a weapon of such power is a magical thing. If the progress of warfare is the progress of firepower, than nukes are a giant step in that progression. And that leads to some issues to consider:
1. Countries that have nukes have a vast advantage over countries that don’t have nukes.
2. Countries that don’t have nukes whose enemies have nukes are at a vast disadvantage. If a conflict were arise, conventional warfare could lead to nukes, and a guaranteed outcome.
3. Countries that have nukes demonstrate that they are in a position of power on the world stage. For instance, even if, theoretically, the US never plans to use its nukes, it possesses them, and could use them. The enemy never knows. The same holds true regardless of who the possessor is.
What gets thrown into this mix is the idea of nuclear non-proliferation, that is, the idea that no countries who don’t have nukes should acquire them. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty says that people who have them won’t use them and people who don’t have them won’t get them, and that we will eventually all disarm. That is, the nations of the world have agreed that nuclear warfare is bad, period. It breaks the rules of warfare. It is the line drawn in the sand by civilized society.
Too bad all society isn’t civilized. Thank goodness the technology is complicated and expensive, and the preexistence within a nation of conditions supportive of those complications and expenses logically connects with a responsible government and the Baudrillardian construct that you would have to be insane to use these weapons and their very possession is an indication of sanity. Maybe. But as technology advances, no doubt nuclear technology will also get cheaper, just like HDTVs. One year only the rich can afford them, a couple of years later every schmegeggie has one. And look at the incentives! If you have nukes, you get to be a player. Instead of being poor old backwater Boogaboogaland, you get to be a member of the nuclear fraternity, just like the US and France and the UK. American hegemony must end! Death to all yankee dogs!!!
And we begin to understand the nature of the geopolitical scene today. There are no easy solutions to the economic problems that exist. Poor countries with nothing to offer don’t want charity, they want to be viable economic entities with a solid balance of trade with other nations. Achieving this usually means alliances that are occasionally disturbing (which is something we didn’t go into, but is certainly the case today as China and non-Communist Russia invest in developing nations for their own benefit, especially in Africa, without necessarily paying any attention to human rights issues, but then again, count up how many dictators has the US supported in strategic situations, including Saddam Hussein). Countries with chips on their shoulders over the disposition of land in the past or for any other reason historical or social, want to get even or change the status quo. At the point where these issues are dealt with conventionally, they are probably within the realm of acceptability, if not necessarily desirability. Stuff will happen that we may not like, but there’s a limit to how bad it can be. But when you insert a nuclear option into the equation, you go beyond the realm of acceptability. At the point in the future where someone uses nuclear weapons, we will be living the nightmare we are only now beginning to drift into.
And that’s the way it is in the world today. Firepower changes everything.
Welcome to the Bahamas!
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