Stephen Boyden

Contents:

Hunter-gatherers, farming societies, early cities, peaceful cities, Christianity

Scale of homicide in warfare, warfare and disease

Weaponry before explosives, explosive weapons, aircraft,

Nuclear weapons, other weapons of mass destruction

Civilisation and warfare

Hunter-gatherers

We do not know to what extent our Palaeolithic ancestors engaged in warfare. However, evidence from recent hunter-gatherer groups suggests that violent conflict between groups involving fatalities occurred from time to time, but that it was not a constant feature of hunter-gatherer societies.

Farmers

Certainly large scale and highly organised homicide has been one of the hallmarks of civilisation. Some authors have suggested that it all began with the domestic transition, when people came to possess commodities that were coveted by others, like domestic animals and stored grain. However, organised violence between groups is not an inevitable outcome of agriculture. There have been plenty of farming societies that have lived at peace with their neighbours for long periods of time, and archaeological evidence suggests that the farmers of the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers before the advent of cities, as well as the early Neolithic people of central Europe, were among them.

On the other hand, it is also clear that violent hostilities were common in some farming communities from early times. Towards the end of the Neolithic phase in Europe the relative peace was shattered by the aggressive ‘battle-axe’ people who were intent on warfare and political domination; and there is evidence that around 5000 years ago farming people in the south of England built, and attacked, fortified settlements. In more recent times, several groups of slash-and-burn agriculturalists in South America, such as the Yanomami, have been almost constantly at war with their neighbours.

It has been suggested that the fact that villagers in some regions were nearly always at war with neighbours, while in others they were not, can be explained in terms of differences in local ecological conditions. Competition for scarce resources is seen to be the underlying cause of conflict. My own view is that the chief determinants lay in differences in cultural assumptions rather than biophysical conditions.

Early cities

It was soon after the establishment of the early cities in Mesopotamia that organised violence between large groups of people came to be accepted as normal. By around 5000 years ago highly organised fighting among the city states and between city states and barbarian raiders was commonplace. People were immersed in cultural systems which glorified the military exploits of their forefathers and which characterised other human populations as enemies. The heroes of society were the successful commanders and intrepid warriors.

For centuries history books have extolled the prowess of ‘great men’ who commanded armies or navies which succeeded in annihilating large numbers of perceived enemies. An example is provided by the words of the Greek historian Plutarch, a writer otherwise generally known for his humanitarianism. He writes in the following appreciative terms of Julius Caesar:

Top

Justification of war

Nevertheless, from the beginning warfare usually had to be ‘justified’, in that wars were waged in the name of a god, or at least of an empire. The following words from the Book of Joshua provide a good example of the former.

And Joshua at that time turned back and took Hazor, and smote the King thereof with the sword: for Hazor beforetime was the head of all those kingdoms. And they smote all the souls that were therein with the edge of the sword, utterly destroying them: there was not any left to breathe: and he burnt Hazor with fire. And all the cities of those kings, and all the kings of them, did Joshua take and smote them with the edge of the sword, and he utterly destroyed them, as Moses the servant of the Lord commanded.

The professional soldier came to be accepted as a natural and necessary component of most urban societies and for millennia the sword held pride of place among human artefacts as the symbol of masculine virtue.

Peaceful cities

On the other hand, the remains of Caral – the oldest known city in the Americas – show no trace of warfare. No battlements and no weapons have been found. Similarly, excavations at Harappa and at Mohenjo-daro in the valley of the Indus River in Pakistan have revealed no indication of military activity until the very end of their history. Another striking example is provided by the cities of the Minoan civilisation on the island of Crete. At a time in the Bronze Age, when warfare and empire building were gaining momentum throughout the Near East, the people of Minos were creating ‘one of the most graceful civilisations man has ever achieved’.   The enthusiasms of the people of the city of Knossos were athletics, elegant clothing and the natural world.

Asoka

There have, of course, been occasional leaders who have personally renounced violence in all its forms. An especially interesting example was Asoka, who discarded a strong cultural tradition of violence to embrace the cause of peace. He had inherited an empire which extended from Afghanistan to Mysore and which had been built through military force by his grandfather. Around 262BC, Asoka was in the process of further extending this empire when he found himself involved in a war with the Kalinga people. His army was victorious, and a hundred thousand persons were slain. The experience of this particular war brought about a remarkable change in Asoka. Suddenly he became acutely aware of the intensity of human distress caused by the fighting, and he turned towards non-violence as the creed of his life. He changed his personal religion and adopted Buddhism which, of the religions of India at that time, was most strongly identified with the principle of Ahisma.

Christianity

Non-violence did not become important in the religions of the Near East before the teachings of Jesus, but after that time it was probably believed in and practised by Christians for a few hundred years. However, by the 4th century AD cultural developments had completely overridden these fundamental tenets of Christianity, and large-scale homicide was once again acceptable, so long as one was fighting on the side of God.

Top

Scale of homicide in warfare

Cultural evolution in Europe and Asia over the past 5000 years has been associated with a progressive increase in the number of people actively participating in, or affected by, wars. In the 1914-1918 World War, about 53 million men were mobilised in the armed forces, and 8 to 10 million were killed. In 1914, 640 000 French soldiers lost their lives during the four months from August to November. The army of the United Kingdom lost over 400 000 men in the battle of the Somme, 50 000 of them on the first day.

World War II differed from previous conflicts in that aerial bombing of cities resulted in high civilian casualties. The armed forces of the warring nations numbered about 30 million and the total number of individuals killed, military and civilian, was probably between 35 and 40 million.

Role of disease

Of course, not all deaths in warfare have been due to physical injuries inflicted by enemies. Malnutrition and infectious disease have also taken their toll. The story of the Spanish invasion of Mexico under Hernando Cortez early in the 16th century AD provides an example. One of the Spanish expeditions that landed at present-day Vera Cruz in April 1520 included an African slave who was infected with smallpox. The disease soon appeared in the native American-Indian population, and because these people had not had any previous contact with the smallpox virus, it spread extremely rapidly. By September of that year, the disease had reached the towns around the lakes in the Valley of Mexico, including the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan. About half the population of this city and of the surrounding region died within six months. This happened at a time when the Aztecs had been gaining the upper hand in the conflict with the Spanish forces. Because most of the Spaniards were immune to the disease, they were able to exploit the situation to their military advantage, eventually overcoming the indigenous armies.

In fact, until quite recently microbes have caused more deaths among warriors than combat itself, as reflected in the following figures:

• Crimean War (1854-1856) – about 60 000 men on both sides killed or died of wounds, about 130 000 died of disease
• American Civil War (1861-1868) – about 220 000 men killed or died of wounds, about 400 000 from infectious disease;
• South African War (1899-1902) – of the British forces, 7534 were killed or died of wounds, 14 382 died of infectious disease.
• The influenza epidemic immediately after World War I killed at least 21 million people, and probably many more, compared with the eight to ten million soldiers killed in action.

Top

Weaponry

Before explosives

Early in human history, people applied their tool-making prowess to the manufacture of weapons. In primeval times these were used mainly in hunting animals for food, although sometimes they would have been used in combat between human groups. The weapons were broadly of two classes. First, there were close-range weapons, like clubs and hand axes, which consisted in essence of an extension of the human arm or hand. They were used for directly striking the enemy. Second, there were projectile weapons, such as stones, sticks and boomerangs, which were thrown at the target, initially by the human arm, but later by other means, as in the case of the bow and arrow.

After the advent of urban civilisation most weapons were designed especially for killing people. They also fell into the two classes – close range and projectile weapons. There was a simultaneous development of armour, made of leather or metal, intended to provide soldiers with some protection against the enemy’s weapons.

The spear is the most ancient of the weapons used in warfare. In one form or another it had been used for tens of thousands of years in hunting animals for food, originally with a shaft of wood and a spearhead of stone. When techniques of metallurgy were developed spearheads, and sometimes spear shafts, were made of copper or bronze. The soldiers of Sumer 5000 years ago, and of those of the Old Kingdom of Egypt 4700 years ago, were equipped with metal spears. The cavalry version of the piercing spear, the lance, was developed later.

The other important short range weapon, invented and developed especially for cutting, or thrusting into, flesh, was the sword. This consisted of a pointed blade, which might be straight or curved, with a handle, or ‘hilt’ and a cross-guard. Soldiers often became emotionally attached to their swords and even gave them names. Famous examples from history and legend are Charlemagne’s ‘Joyeuse’, and King Arthur’s ‘Excalibur’.

Gunpowder

The discovery of the explosive potential of gunpowder was a seminal development in the history of warfare. Roger Bacon, who lived from AD 1214 to 1292, wrote a formula for gunpowder as follows: seven parts of saltpetre, five parts of young hazel wood (charcoal) and five parts of sulphur. He stated that this mixture would explode, and that it could cause an enemy to be blown up, or at least to flee in terror. It is believed that gunpowder was used in warfare around AD 1250 by the Moors, who put half to one kilogram of the explosive mixture into an iron bucket that had a small touch-hole at the bottom. They placed a pile of stones on top of the gunpowder, which was then ignited. The resulting explosion propelled the stones through the air, ideally towards the target.

The first cannons were made of bronze and were introduced at the beginning of the 14th century. They were replaced by iron cannons half a century later. The first military event of importance in Europe in which artillery played a significant part was the capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1453.

Gunpowder was also applied to the development of guns to be held in the hand, although for a long time they were not very effective. This was partly because of the need to keep a match alight in the combat situation, partly because of the difficulty in keeping gunpowder dry, and partly because of the clumsiness of stuffing lead bullets into the gun’s barrel with a ramrod. Effective rifles were not used for military purposes until the Thirty Years War (1618-1648).

Machine guns, air raids and rockets

These developments were associated with some other important changes in the ‘art of warfare’. By the time of the First World War some combat was no longer on face to face or one to one basis. The single touch of a trigger of a machine gun could kill a dozen men and one artillery shell could destroy many individuals who were completely out of sight of the gunners. This fundamental change in the nature of armed conflict had further progressed by the time of World War II, when bombing by air became important and new projectile weapons in the form of various kinds of rockets were introduced. Technology now exists which makes it possible for deliberate hostile action by a small number of individuals to cause the death of millions of people thousands of kilometres away.

Nuclear weapons

During the last part of World War II, Germany and the United States were competing to be the first to produce nuclear weapons. Then, three months after the capitulation of Germany, on the 6th August 1945, a nuclear bomb was dropped from an American aircraft onto the city of Hiroshima in Japan. At least 140 000 people, or about 40 per cent of the city’s population, were killed immediately or died soon afterwards. Buildings were flattened over an area of 13 square kilometres. Three days later, another bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki, and about 80 000 people were killed outright.

After this war governments representing opposing political ideologies directed immense financial resources and human effort into the development of nuclear weapons. As a result bombs now exist with an explosive power a thousand times greater than that which was dropped on Hiroshima. Nuclear weapons range in strength from the equivalent of around one hundred tonnes to twenty million tonnes of TNT, depending on the particular use for which they are designed.

The increase in the power of bombs during the twentieth century can be illustrated by the following analogy. If we imagine the explosive power of the biggest bombs in World War I to be represented by a pea, then the most powerful weapons (other than the atomic bombs used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki) used in the Second World War would equal the size of a large plum. The Hiroshima bomb would be equivalent to a sphere of about 0.5 metres across, and the most powerful bombs now ready for use would have a diameter of 5 metres.

Ecological impacts of nuclear war

The ecological and human impacts of a nuclear conflict in the future would depend on the scale of the war and on the geographical distribution of the nuclear explosions. Even if only one tenth of the existing nuclear weapons were used, the numbers of people killed by fire, blast and fall-out would be astronomical. Most commentators consider it likely that a major nuclear war would leave some survivors, especially in the southern hemisphere.

There would also certainly be massive damage to the planet’s ecosystems resulting from nuclear radiation and widespread fires. It could well be that the biosphere as we know it today would collapse and would no longer be capable of supporting a human population.

Other weapons of mass destruction

Mention must also be made of the enormous amount of effort and resources that have been devoted in modern high-energy societies to the development of other sophisticated weapons of mass destruction. Thus, apart from the advances in nuclear armaments, great progress has been made in the development and production of chemical and biological weapons. However, horrendous they may be, their impact on civilisation and on other life forms would be small in comparison with that of a nuclear war.

Human society as a whole spends over US$1 million per minute on the development and manufacture of homicidal devices. In six hours, more money is spent on the manufacture of arms than was spent by the world community in bringing about the eradication of smallpox.

Conclusion

Clearly there is nothing in human nature that precludes humans from deliberately slaughtering each other.

On the other hand, there is also nothing in human nature that rules out the possibility of different human groups living at peace with each other for long periods of time.

Whether or not humans engage in armed conflict is obviously determined by a range of factors, including pressures associated with scarcity of resources and over-population. But especially important among these factors are the conflicting beliefs and assumptions of different cultural systems and the extent to which people allow themselves to be brainwashed by absurd cultural delusions of the kind that lie behind most warfare.

Top