French troops wear an early form of gas mask in the trenches during the 2nd Battle of Ypres in Story highlights Since , U. In the Stone Age, humans were a rough lot. When people 10, years ago disagreed, they usually solved their arguments without violence; but when they did decide to use force, they faced far fewer constraints than the citizens of functioning modern states. Violence was normally on a small scale, in homicides, vendettas, and raids, but because populations were also tiny, the steady drip of killing took an appalling toll.
If we fast-forward to the 20th century, we see a stunning contrast. The century suffered world wars, genocides, and nuclear attacks, not to mention civil strife, riots, and murders. Altogether, we killed a staggering million of our own kind. Ian Morris. Which war resulted in 6. Prev Next. But New Zealand doctor Harold Gillies was the man who worked to combat that.
His team of surgeons, nurses and artists opened a specially-designed hospital in Kent and pushed the medical world toward better and more innovative plastic surgery and facial reconstruction methods.
Before Gillies and his team, plastic surgery had been a practice viewed with suspicion, but soon it became an important medical avenue for reversing the consequences of war. Walter Yoe was the first man to undergo facial reconstruction - he was injured in the Battle of Jutland where he lost both eyelids and half of his face. Sanitary towels During WWI, an ultra-absorbent material called Cellucotton was used as wadding for surgical dressing. When the war was over, the company that had been supplying the material experienced a huge drop in sales - no war, no large-scale injury, no need for wadding.
Until the company discovered that during the war Red Cross nurses on the battlefield had realised its benefits for their own personal, hygienic use. So they re-purchased all the surplus material from the military and created a whole new product, launching the sanitary towel in This is now a multimillion-pound industry, helping women around the world.
Ultrasound You benefitted from this technology before you were even born, as your parents used it to check your health when you were just a little foetus. By sending high-frequency sound waves underwater, the Allies could find out the location of enemy U-boats and either avoid them or destroy them. The body is simply unable to function without a certain volume of blood. Luckily, we have blood banks to fill you back up again if you run short.
But during WWI soldiers were injured and losing blood miles from a hospital and from healthy donors. So the Rockefeller Institute in New York began looking for ways of preserving fresh blood and found that a mixture of salt solution, sodium citrate and dextrose would do the job. The stored blood was used in battlefield surgery and was credited with saving many lives, and we still use this technique today.
Fake rubber Every car, bus and plane uses synthetic rubber for their tyres. Synthetic rubber was first properly developed during WWI when a blockade cut off Germany's supply of natural rubber from Southeast Asia. Therefore, much work was done on developing stronger and cheaper types of synthetic rubber, which helped hugely in the later stages of the war and kick-started an industry that now supplies the bulk of the world's rubber needs.
The morality of going to war: is it ever right to fight? His writing career started when novelist C. Forester asked Dahl to submit an anecdote of his war experiences - Forester was so impressed by the account that he published it unchanged.
This opened the gates for a literary legacy that has survived generations. James Blunt was an officer in the British Army and was deployed to Kosovo, where he strapped a guitar to the outside of his tank to play for locals. They arrived to find that Russian forces had taken control of the airport, but when ordered to take the airport by force, Blunt refused. She also coordinated the distribution of wool to 40 knitters and collected the finished goods for the troops.
After shooting down two enemy snipers, Doohan led his men through a field of tank mines before he was shot. He survived six 7. A final bullet was stopped from hitting his heart by a silver cigarette case that his brother gave to him just before his Juno Beach landing. None of this seems in the cards today. For Washington, war has somehow been decoupled from its once expected results, no matter what weaponry has been brought to bear or what kind of generalship was exercised.
If you want the definition of a Trumpian bad deal, consider that all of them are eager to pour further staggering sums into preparing for future military endeavors not so different from the present ones. It will, that is, be the most expensive weapons system in history. In , not only has military action of just about any sort been decoupled from success of just about any sort, but the unbelievably profitable system of weapons production woven into the fabric of the capital , the political process and the country has also been detached from the results of war; the worse we do militarily, that is, the more frenetically and expensively we build.
This is, however, the thinking of outsiders. For the weapons makers and the rest of that complex, failure or success may increasingly be beside the point. Count on this: were the US now triumphant in an orderly Greater Middle East, the same Republican candidates would still be calling for a build-up of the US military to maintain our victorious stance globally.
If you want proof of this, you need only step into your time machine and travel back a quarter-century to the moment the Soviet Union collapsed.
Thought of a certain way, that should have been the finale for a long history of arms races among competing great powers. What seemed like the last arms race of all between the two superpowers of the Cold War, the one that brought the planet to the brink of annihilation , had just ended.
An arms race of one rolled right along. America may get into Middle Eastern quagmires, but its Navy and Air Force, not to mention the reputation of its land forces and intelligence apparatus, project power sufficiently throughout the world so as to reduce the level of conflict and so far eliminate major interstate war. The United States, for its part, has become the complex and productive society it is largely thanks to the rigors it has passed through in planning for armed conflict, especially World War II and the Cold War.
Morris might have added to his text that mass college education, the explosion of suburban life and civil rights for minorities were all expressions of the further democratization of American life that would have been hard to imagine without the national unity enforced by having to fight the Nazis and the Japanese.
Morris explores various scenarios for future warfare, from guerrilla insurgencies to robotic warriors to missiles in space. He tends to be optimistic, believing that humanity after millennia of war may reach a culmination point, in which the number of humans killed by other humans continues to drop dramatically. In this, he is in league with Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker's book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, which also sees a continuation in the decline of human violence. Keep in mind, though, that these optimistic scenarios and others may, among other things, be products of their times.
For we still live in the relatively benign aftermath of World War II, in which the greatest interstate war in history has led to 70 years without interstate war between the great powers. The 19th century in Europe, between the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars and the outbreak of World War I, was a similar period when many people lost their sense of the tragic only to be shocked by what came afterward.
We can only hope that Morris' defense of war actually proves accurate so that we can continue to enjoy relative peace. This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here. More From Forbes. Jun 25, , am EDT.
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