New weapons technologies

[auroraglacialis]

Originally Posted by Human No More

The slippery slope fallacy really is fun, isn't it?

I still dont get it. Maybe you can explain to me how this applies to this discussion. Obviously you are the one who has learned some theories of debates. I dont see how what I read on that Wikipedia article applies to this

I disagree. When countries like Iran, North Korea, China, Egypt, Pakistan or Syria exist, people need a deterrent. There was no deterrent in WW1 or WW2, and the result was an actual war.

Yes, the "Cold War" strategy works. But do you really want to define peace as the absence of actual war? I don't. For me, calling the time that lasted until I was ending my teenage years in the early 1990'ies did not really feel like peace, even if there was no actual war. Living daily with the knowledge that the city I live in would be among the first ones to be hit by a nuclear bomb if someone freaks out or one of the people in what was then the very small "internet" actually managed to hack into the military and simulate an attack or if some nutcase just thinks that it is a great idea to nuke someone because someone builds military bases on Cuba or there are misguided sattelite rockets flying in the wrong direction.
An "equilibrium of deterrents" is a situation that looks like peace because there are no "actual wars" with people shooting at each other, but it is a psychological war that affects all. This is at best a temporary solution to a conflict that would otherwise be worse, but it cannot be a permanent solution.

You're seriously misinformed.
WW1: ~950,000 direct; ~5.9 million indirect
WW2: ~30 million
Vietnam: ~4 million
Gulf War: ~4800
Iraq: ~66,081 (Wikileaks, including terrorist attacks)

I just glanced over Wikipedia to check these and found that for Iraq, the numbers diverge - some sources speak of 1 million deaths if you include all secondary causes, like the 6 resp 30 million for the WWs (which include things like people starving or dying of sickness because their cities have been bombed)

Also one has to note the extent of the conflict in comparison with the casualties. WWI and WWII are called "world wars" for a reason - they involved several countries, not merely two or three major players. Vietnam was a war about a rather small (in population) country and that is even more true for Iraq. And I would call everything beginning with WWI "modern warfare" actually. More technology allowed these wars to escalate like they did with mass bombings and one of the first uses for computers (made by IBM) was to do a census and to do accounting to determine who and how many people were sent to the death camps in WWII.

So the main reason why more recent wars had less casualties was because they were smaller conflicts and that in turn can, as you mentioned, be traced back to the use of fear as a weapon. Mutually assured destruction and a equilibrium of deterrants prevented conflicts between larger countries to play out in a direct way. One of the results of this by the way is that there are more conflicts in smaller countries which are used as proxies for these larger powers. Like Afghanistan where the US fought Russia in a puppetmaster war, each party giving funds and weapons to a strawman who then fought the war for them. It is another form of externalization of undesireable things (like the western countries externalized production of polluting industries to China and India so now they can claim to be all so green and clean while they import all the products from these countries)

as long as there are 7 billion people on one planet (and no post-scarcity society), as long as there are territorial disputes, fuel scarcities, and ideologies such as communism or various religions, there will always be problems.

Then we'd better find a proper solution to these because there will not be a "post scarcity society" and people will always on any levels squabble about land rights. And almost anything political is an ideology like capitalism, the free market or neoliberalism - or communism. I guess what we are left is is to find ways to properly deal with scarcity (by a fair distribution of scarce stuff and general trends to move away from scarce resources) and land right disputes (diplomacy). We'll have to choose an ideology that works and that is fair. Capitalism and neoliberalism based on competition are rarely fair and lead to large inequalities that promote envy and disputes. If one country outcompeted another and becomes wealthy, while another stays poor and has to pay for that wealth, I think the solution cannot be to threaten each other with nuclear bombs or therelike but the solution has to be that some fair situation can be achieved in which no one is poor or rich but all do well. In this sense, a post scarcity world is even possible, namely if the resources that are available are distributed in such a fair way, that no one perceives them as scarce. A large part of the perception of scarcity is the comparison to others. One perceives a subjective scarcity of gasoline for example because one cannot afford to buy it as easiyl as someone else can. And even money is only scarce for those that have less than others - they do not perceive themselves as poor if there are no "others" that are very rich.

But on topic:
I still think, that some of these weapons can be used in hidden conflicts or in puppetmaster conflicts. They can be unleashed in secrecy (e.g. biological agents targeted at people with special genetic traits) by a proxy or be sold to people who then use them for some goal but certainly will not forget the generous provider of these weapons. There can be a lot of "Oops" moments.