I see myself as a pacifist by nature and perceive the world with humanitarian and altruistic ideology. I’d like to think that people are very empathic, and nations can function without devastating wars, weapons, torture, and abhor. This thinking is, of course, unrealistic, as history exhibits. Nations are almost constantly at war with other nations or internally among themselves. According to historians and researchers Will and Ariel Durant, in their Lessons of History, there have been approximately 268 scattered years without a war over the past 3,421 years. That’s not many, considering the timespan.
John Keegan, who is considered a pre-eminent military historian of this era and the author of more than 20 books, argues that wars started along with the uprise of civilization. In his books “War and Our World” and “A History of Warfare,” he discusses different topics from conflicts in early civilizations to modern wars in the previous millennium. With first civilizations and with more advanced knowledge on how to get food and other resources, people and communities created a surplus. Nomad people, of course, found surplus as desirable, so they wanted to steal it somehow, therefore creating conflicts between communities and groups of people.
Before that, before civilization and first towns – people didn’t have wars. This is not to say that early people didn’t have violence. They sure did; their whole life was of somehow violent nature. They needed to be like that to survive. But there weren’t “organized” wars per se. If John Keegan is correct, then people (Homo sapiens) lived for 180,000 years without wars. Based on that, we could conclude that war is mainly found in only 5 to 10% of our history. So obviously, very early history was without wars, and modern history is filled with devastating wars. But what about today? What if we just stop producing weapons and abolish them completely? I am completely aware that it is a romantic idea but let’s indulge it. But first let’s spend some time examining Nuclear weapons and their impact to society and modern warfare.
Nuclear weapons
Without weapons and especially powerful weapons such as automatic rifles, armored fighting vehicles, and bombs, wars would surely become relics of history, one could claim. Unfortunately, it is not that simple. Some people argue that powerful atomic and hydrogen bombs are the main reason why we currently don’t lead mass world wars such as World War I and World War II. The argument proceeds with elaborating how those weapons are so powerful that no nation can gain anything positive since, with the push of a button, nations who have atomic bombs could destroy the world. Previously nations could rage in the war for years and years since they ‘only’ had weapons such as small guns or bow and arrows. No nation was in such power that they could destroy another nation in a matter of seconds. Now, if there is a big war happening, the USA could, for example, threaten to initiate their most powerful nuclear weapon, a bomb called B83. Or perhaps Russians still keep their monster bomb somewhere – the Tsar Bomba with code name Ivan. This was the most powerful nuclear weapon ever created and tested. Tsar Bomba unleashed unimaginable energy – now widely agreed to be in the order of 57 megatons, or 57 million tons of TNT. That is more than 1,500 times that of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs combined and ten times more powerful than all the weapons expended during World War II.
Think about that for a second (or a minute). Just what on earth is happening with the human consciousness that people even think about creating such a monster. And then they don’t stop on the thought – but they decide to dedicate numerous scientists and efforts to build it and then test it on Earth. Yes, the monster was tested. I mean, thrown in an uninhabited area. And they (USA, Russia) aren’t the only ones. Now we have many nations on Earth producing nuclear weapons. As far as we know, nine countries currently have nuclear weapons: the US, UK, Russia, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea. If those nations decided to go to nuclear war, it would be game over for the planet.
It’s hard to fathom that Earth formed over 4.5 billion years ago, and human apes have a real chance of destroying it with their weapons and war games. Oppenheimer was the wartime chief of the Los Alamos Laboratory and is among those who are acknowledged as being the “father of the atomic bomb.” The first atomic bomb was detonated on July 16, 1945, in the Trinity test in New Mexico. Oppenheimer later stated that it brought to mind words from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” This quote could be taken literally or figuratively, but people behind nuclear weapons really are or could be destroyers of the world. At that time and also today, the scientific community is divided with their opinions on nuclear weapons and their development. Some are big proponents, and some are big critics from the beginning. Ivan Supek, a Croatian physicist and philosopher, belongs to the latter. Supek was an advocate of total and unconditional nuclear disarmament as he warned about the danger of misuse of atomic energy already in 1944 (fourteen months before the bombing of Hiroshima). He was also one of the founders of the international organization World without the Bomb.
Today we have many such organizations:
- Global Zero, international non-partisan group of 300 world leaders dedicated to achieving the elimination of nuclear weapons.
- Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism, international partnership of 83 nations.
- International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.
- Parliamentarians for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament, global network of over 700 parliamentarians from more than 75 countries working to prevent nuclear proliferation.
- Sōka Gakkai, a peace-orientated Buddhist organization, which held anti-nuclear exhibitions in Japanese cities during the late 1970s and gathered 10 million signatures on petitions calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons.
- Pax Christi International, a Catholic group that took a “sharply anti-nuclear stand.”
There are dozens and probably hundreds of others. While this is great, we still have thousands of warheads in the world capable of destroying everything on Earth. In 1986 world was at its peak with the number of nuclear weapons. Around 70,000 nuclear weapons existed at that time. In 2019 there were approximately 3700 active nuclear warheads and around 14000 total nuclear warheads. Many of the decommissioned weapons were simply stored or partially disassembled, but not destroyed.
Wars, weapons, greed and profit
Based on available data, you could conclude that there is simply too much influence and profit to be gained in the world from producing so many weapons. And you would be right. According to the data released by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), it is estimated that arms sales by the world’s 25 largest arms-producing and military services companies (arms companies) totaled US$361 billion in 2019. This is huge. To give you perspective, this is similar to the GDP of Norway or around six times the GPD of Croatia. So obviously, there is a lot of interest to continue producing arms and weapons. Not only that it is a huge profit in peacetime, but it is also an even bigger profit when there is a big war happening anywhere in the world. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why we still have perpetual wars in the world.
– Nah, I am just thinking out loud here. It couldn’t be.
Consequently, if we would like to see the world without weapons, someone would need to do extensive lobbying with companies producing weapons. That is not an easy task as a good percentage of money from weapon-producing companies goes to political parties and candidates. Some transfers of money, in that case, are transparent while a lot is not. Ergo, octopus’ arms in this game of war go very, very deep and wide. But let’s imagine all of those ‘arms are cut off, and we wake up in a world without any producers of weapons, and all old weapons are destroyed. Romantic world, isn’t it? Perhaps at first look.
Probably the USA government would make the biggest move because they have so many troops all over the world. Why would those troops stay in ‘enemy’ territory if there were no weapons anymore? Would they still “maintain the peace” in those territories by using their MMA skills? No, I don’t think so. Currently, there are more than one million active US soldiers, comprised of 476,000 regular troops, a 343,000-strong National Guard, and US Army Reserves with 199,000 soldiers. So, all of those people would need to be taken care of somehow. And this is only in the US. China is even bigger. They have 2.18 million active soldiers. And what about the number of soldiers on earth? Well, worldwide, 30,277,850 million people are serving in the armed forces, not including paramilitary units. The total number of armed forces personnel, including reserve military and paramilitary units, is 75,543,487. This is significantly bigger than the whole population of Italy (60,3 million) and just slightly smaller than the population of Germany (83 million).
So here we are only talking about people directly tied with the military in some way or another. There are so many other people and businesses who are doing some contract work for the military, whether it is food catering, schools, or producers of military clothing, just to name a few. And then, there are families of military personnel who, in many cases, depend on money from the military. So, taking all of those into consideration, we could try a ballpark calculation and guess that there are probably hundreds of millions of people somehow dependent on the military. Is it 200 million, is it half a billion? Nobody knows exactly, but it is a significant percentage of the world population. What to do with all those people if we stop producing weapons? I mean, without weapons, the military in its principle does not make any sense, now do they? Of course, the military is very helpful whenever there is some crisis or unpredicted horrific event in the country, but that is not their main purpose. The main purpose is to keep their countries safe and, in some cases, invade other countries. With weapons, of course, not with kung fu movements. So now, in this imaginary scenario, we have a problem with millions upon millions of unemployed people, and many companies tied to the military are out of business. Not a good first step, one could conclude.
But let’s what else might happen, especially having in mind current wars and conflicts between countries and political leaders. Currently, in the world, there are many armed conflicts and ‘smaller’ wars happening, but they are not so interesting to mass media, so people are mostly not informed. We are all aware of devastating conflict and war that is happening currently between Russia and Ukraine but that is not the only one in the world. Afghanistan conflict is basically ongoing from 1978 starting with Afghan Civil Wars, continuing to War on ‘terror’ and today Taliban – ISIL conflict is still happening with thousands of fatalities. The Yemeni Crisis is also still ongoing with devastating consequences. Then we have the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Iraq conflict, Boko Haram insurgency, Tigray War, Syrian Civil War, Libyan conflict, and so on and so on.
Consequences for different segments of society
So, if we had a magic wand and suddenly all world weapons disappeared, basically all those wars and conflicts would also disappear. At least on paper. People would, of course, build new weapons but for the purpose of this hypothesis, let’s imagine this isn’t possible. Consequently, in this case, soldiers and warriors are left with nothing but throwing stones at each other, and this is a road with no end, so probably all conflicting parties would withdraw slowly. So far, so good. Retreating from wars and conflicts is for sure a positive thing, at least in most situations.
Moving forward to one very important segment of our society, which for sure couldn’t function normally without weapons – the police. As we all know, the police are a constituted body of persons empowered by a state, with the aim to enforce the law, to ensure the safety, health, and possessions of citizens, and to prevent crime and civil disorder. In recent times they are also focused on arresting and beating people who do not wear masks, but that’s another story. Their lawful powers include arrest and the use of force legitimized by the state via the monopoly on violence. To enforce rules and control violence majority of police officers carry weapons. In many jurisdictions, those weapons are primarily handguns. There are some exceptions, such as Norway, where police officers carry firearms in their vehicles but not on their duty bells. But overall, in most of the world, weapons are vital for functioning police as we know it today.
Consequently, without weapons, the whole police force would undergo significant change. Perhaps more police officers would be needed. Perhaps they would need to learn different martial art techniques so they could restrain ordinary citizens since they don’t have weapons anymore. On the positive side, possibly there would be fewer deaths caused by cops, but on the other hand, we would probably see more violence on the streets. Average burglars and criminals would not be so afraid on the streets; therefore, violence would for sure grow. This is not good, so I would score this segment as a negative impact from “the world without weapons initiative.”
And what about normal people and their day-to-day life? Would their lives change significantly if there were no weapons? That’s a challenging thing to hypothesize since, in many countries, standard folks do not carry any weapon. I mean, they have knives and all that but mostly not ranged weapons designed for shooting. In 2018, Small Arms Survey reported that there are over one billion small arms distributed globally, of which 857 million (about 85 percent) are in civilian hands. The Small Arms Survey also stated that U.S. civilians alone account for 393 million (about 46 percent) of the total worldwide civilian-held firearms. This is to be expected as the United States has generally relaxed measures on who can own a gun.
The Second Amendment of the United States Constitution states: “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” This is not the case in many countries; hence such a big percentage comes from the United States. So, for sure, banning weapons would produce significant resistance in the United States and probably not so much in the majority of other countries. I would say that majority of people wouldn’t be significantly impacted by banning weapons. Potentially majority of people would even benefit from it because criminals couldn’t rob banks so easily or threaten other people.
A world without weapons is for sure not easy to imagine. If all weapons suddenly disappear today, then the governments would have to think about another way to maintain order. Perhaps they would go back to the more primitive way where normal citizens could be involved in catching criminals. Military power world as we know it still relies more on population and weapon strength rather than technology. That said, perhaps one day, we will not use weapons at all. If AI technologies, surveillance systems, and social credit scoring go live into production worldwide – maybe that will become a turning point in the world without weapons. Is that a good thing or complete doom for humanity, time will tell! Most likely, the latter. But certainly, the best thing that could perhaps diminish weapons and wars for good is people becoming wiser about what life’s purpose on Earth really is. As the quote from Harry S. Truman goes, “All will concede that in order to have good neighbors, we must also be good neighbors. That applies in every field of human endeavor.” If we could just be good to each other as a person to person and country to country, then we would not need any weapons. But unfortunately, that’s a far-fetched utopia.
Note: If you’re interested in similar articles, on topic of “What would world look like”, you can check:
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