The fuse: A chain of nations in tension∗

Abstract

A chain of nations stretching from the Southern tip of Africa through the Middle East and South Asia to China and the USSR has certain peculiarly dangerous properties‐like a fault, generating earthquakes, or a fuse of nations leading to a bomb, which is the Earth. Nearly all (23 out of 24) nations in the chain are supra‐critical according to the Inter‐Nation Tensiometer, that is, over‐armed in comparison to the rest of the world and thus are “at risk” of war involvement. Half of the chain nations either have nuclear weapons or have the capability to produce them (possess power or research reactors). According to COPDAB events data, geographic neighbors along the chain are hostile to each other, and the two hostile neighbors on each side of any given country are allies: thus giving a chain of (+,‐,‐) triangles (two against one alliances). This structure, conducive to the spread or diffusion of war along the chain, could be substantiated by COPDAB for only the Middle East to Asia part of the fuse, since COPDAB has no data on Africa. There are still two partial gaps in this chain structure. The structure for the African part of the fuse was established by the conflict synopses in Butterworth's “Managing Inter‐State Conflict, 1945–1974”. The bulk of the paper contains summaries of the Butterworth synopses for nations all along the chain, supplemented by some more recent reports for conflicts since 1974. A frequent pattern is a linkage of two civil wars in neighboring countries, each government supporting the rebels in the other nation. Such links to the neighbor on the other side also often exist. Border disputes are also frequent. One set of nations tend to be U.S. allies, the other set Soviet allies; this increases the polarization and the danger, but the local problems are mainly stressed here. The chain of nations is: South Africa (including Namibia), Angola, Zaire, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, Uganda, Sudan, (side chain Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya), Egypt, Israel, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, China, USSR, Cambodia, Vietnam. The U.S. is not part of the chain; apart from a slight geographic discontinuity at the Bering Strait: U.S.‐S.U. relations in 1973 were not hostile according to COPDAB.