War and Peace

L.F. Richardson's pacifist leanings motivated him to search for the dynamics and reasons for wars. We have already mentioned the Richardson model of the arms race earlier. Richardson also found that the statistical distribution relating the number of wars to a given intensity, defined as the number of battle dead, followed a power-law. Richardson considered 82 conflicts between 1820 and 1929, and the power-law trend has been confirmed by Levy who investigated 119 wars between 1495 to 1973. Although Richardson hoped that his mathematical studies of deadly conflicts would lead to a way of reducing aggression, he apparently came to the conclusion that war was an intrinsic feature of mankind. In [13] the authors argue that the outbreaks of war are analgous to the "avalanches" of all sizes that occur in a complex system that continually self-organises to a critical state. If indeed world order behaves as a self-organsied critical system, relatively unaffected in the long term by efforts to moderate and change behaviour, then the conclusion appears pessimistic for the human species. Will humans ever learn from the past or are we doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past? Will the human species be the first to annihilate itself ? (see the exercises).