Ending the scourge of war

Abstract

If we wish to abolish war as a legitimate means of settling disputes, what must we do? One can imagine this question guiding the drafting of the United Nations Charter. At the end of World War II, the founders of the United Nations certainly must have felt that the world had had enough of war. Some 50 million people had died in that war, more than half of whom were civilians. The most devastating war in history, it had included massive bombing of cities throughout Europe and Japan, culminating in the use of nuclear weapons. On June 26, 1945, representatives of fifty nations signed the new United Nations Charter, expressing their determination “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” Now, nearly fifty years later, the United Nations has not succeeded in its primary mission of ending “the scourge of war.” Since World War II there have been some 150 wars throughout the world resulting in some 22 million deaths. Each decade in the latter half of the twentieth century has witnessed an increase in the percentage of civilian deaths in warfare, reaching some 75 percent in the 1980s. In part, warfare has continued in the post‐World War II period because of flaws in the initial structure of the United Nations. The Security Council was given “primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security.” But the Security Council was often blocked from taking action to fulfill its responsibility by the veto power given to its five permanent members. Even without the veto power, the Cold War between East and West took precedence over ending the scourge of war. The Cold War also led to obscene expenditures for armaments, and an accumulation of firepower capable of destroying the human population of earth many times over. The good news, of course, has been that the genocidal weapons of mass destruction, accumulated primarily by the five permanent members of the Security Council, have not been used on human populations since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. With the Cold War ended, perhaps we can again seriously address the question of ending the scourge of war. To succeed in this goal will require individual commitment and global action. It will require changes in attitudes and institutions.