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Excerpts from Gwynne Dyer’s WAR, Copyright 1985, follow:

“To begin quite close to the end: we may inhabit the Indian summer of human history, with nothing to look forward to but the ‘nuclear winter’ that closes the account. The war for which the great powers hold themselves in readiness every day may come, as hundreds of others have in the past. The megatons will fall, the dust will rise, the sun’s light will fail, and the race may perish.

Nothing is inevitable until it has actually happened, but the final war is undeniably a possibility, and there is one statistical certainty. Any event that has a definite probability, however small, that does not decrease with time will eventually occur - next year, next decade, next century, but it will come. Including nuclear war.

It is therefore the dilemma and the duty of our generation, and as many more as have time to be born, to learn how to make the probability of nuclear war shrink and eventually vanish. Since the scientific and organizational abilities that have swollen war to this monstrous scale cannot be forgotten, the task is even larger: to discover how to dispense with war altogether. The starting point must be to see the institution of war as a whole and to understand how it works.

Wars are not an interminable series of historical accidents, nor the product of the machinations of evil men, nor yet the result of some simple single cause like capitalism or overpopulation. Neither is warfare merely the heritage of our evolutionary past, as an outlet for our ‘natural aggressiveness’. War is a central institution in human civilization, and it has a history precisely as long as civilization.

For most of that history, war has been a more or less functional institution, providing benefits for those societies that were good at it, although the cost in money, in lives, and in suffering has always been great. In recent centuries it has begun to trouble our consciences occasionally, since the essence of war is killing other people in order to force the community they represent to do our bidding. But most people all down through history have accepted killing in war as legitimate, partly because it is hallowed by tradition, but also because those who do the killing are themselves willing to sacrifice their lives There is a heightened humanity, both good and bad, about the way soldiers behave in battle which seems to transcend ordinary morality and place them in a special category.

Only in this century have large numbers of people begun to question the basic assumptions of civilized societies about the usefulness and inevitability of war, as two mutually reinforcing trends have gained strength. One is moral: for all the atrocities we still practice on each other, the people of the twentieth century are nevertheless more able than their ancestors to imagine that war - that is, killing foreigners for political reasons - may be simply wrong. The same great changes in society that have made war so lethal have also enabled us to see broader categories of peple - even those on the far side of the nuclear palisade - as being essentially human beings like ourselves. And even if morality is no more than the rules we have made up for ourselves as we go along, one of those rules has always been that (*unnecessarily) killing (*murdering) people is wrong.

The other factor is severely practical: we will almost all die, and our civilization with us, if we continue to practice war. A civilization confronted with the prospect of a ‘nuclear winter’ does not need moral incentives to reconsider the value of the institution of war; it must change or perish.

This does not mean, of course, that we will change or that we will survive. The universe does not issue guarantees. But the time is certainly ripe for change, and change is certainly possible, so long as we understand the nature of the institution we are trying to change and are willing to accept the consequences of changing it.”
- Gwynne Dyer, WAR, Introduction, Copyright 1985

“Our gravest error, in the late twentieth century is to overestimate our distance and difference from the past. We believe that the present round of competition between the great powers is different from all others in history, that it is invested with special significance because of its ideological dimension and because of its appalling consequences if it were to lead to war. But we are wrong: modern technology has changed only the results of war. Everything else about it is basically the same.

“... our present dilemma - the distinct possibility that we might destroy the world - is compounded by the fact that all the escape routes we have dreamed up to extricate ourselves from our predicament - ‘conventional’ war, ‘limited’ war, and the like - are blind alleys. The solution lies in understanding that our problem is a direct result of mankind’s 9,000 year old practice of ‘civilized’ war. Only by looking at this long history can we begin to understand that the institution of war is as much a part of civilized behavior as sculpture or computer programming. Dyer argues that war, like other such human activities, can (and indeed must) be modified. WAR is a remarkable and absorbing analysis of the greatest and most tragic human drama.” - Excerpt from overleaf cover of Gwynne Dyer’s documentary, WAR.

“....war has always had an innate tendency to expand to the absolute limit of the resources available to the societies waging it, and sometimes far beyond their capacity to accept punishment. Force is the ultimate argument and once it had been invoked, the only effective reply is superior force; the internal logic of war has frequently caused it to grow far bigger in scale than the importance of the issue originally in dispute would justify. World War I is a striking example; the third world war will be even more convincing, if there is anyone left to convince.

“Yet modern soldiers do not behave any more ruthlessly than their ancestors. The residents of Dresden and Hiroshima in 1945 sufffered no worse fate than the citizens of Babylon in 680 BC, when the city fell to Sennacherib of Assyria, who boasted:
‘I levelled the city and its houses from its foundations to the top, I destroyed them and consumed them with fire. I tore down and removed the outer and inner walls, the temples and the ziggurats built of brick, and dumped the rubble in the Arahtu canal. And after I had destroyed Babylon, smashed its gods and massacred its population. I tore up its soil and threw it into the Euphrates so that it was carried by the river down to the sea.’

“It was a more labor intensive method of destruction than nuclear weapons but the effect was about the same (as modern warfare).” - Gwynne Dyer, WAR, p.p. 4 - 5

“But if the willingness of soldier to kill and tendency of war to become as destructive as the existing technology and resources will permit have both been relatively constant throughout human history, then we must consider an unwelcome possibility: that war is the inevitable accompaniment of any human civilization, and that a technologically advanced culture like our own will sooner or later become involved in a war in which all the available technology and resources are committed to the task of destruction. There is a daunting amount of evidence to support this belief, but there is also a fundamentally important fact that offers some kind of hope. War is part of our history, but it is not in at all the same sense part of our prehistory. It is one of the innovations that occurred between nine and eleven thousand years ago when the first civilized societies were coming into being. What has been invented can be changed; war is not in our genes.” - Gwynne Dyer, WAR, p. 5