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GWYNNE DYER: What happened to the promise of no more wars?

We've forgotten an important lesson learned in the Second World War about the causes of war - and how to keep them from happening

‘When you’re up to your ass in alligators, it’s hard to remember that your original goal was to drain the swamp.’ (Not very old folk saying)

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Eighty years ago, we set out to drain the swamp because we feared that otherwise we would all be pulled under. At least 50 million people were dead after the greatest war in history, around half the cities in the northern hemisphere had been smashed flat, and the first nuclear weapons had just been dropped on Japanese cities.

People were in shock. They hadn’t known how destructive war could get, and now they realized that the next big war would be incomparably worse: nuclear war. So they decided that in the future, the goal must be not to win wars but to end war.

Don’t think they were naive. They were having this conversation standing hip-deep in the wreckage of the last war. Many of them had fought in it, and almost all of them had lost people close to them. So between 1945 and 1948, they wrote new rules that made war illegal.

Early in my career as a journalist, I interviewed........

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