Scholars and policymakers have been vexed over the question of how wars can be prevented. Political scientist James D Fearon went looking for rationalist explanations of war because he realised that “The central puzzle about war, and also the main reason we study it, is that wars are costly but nonetheless wars recur.”

This much is obvious: wars and violence have continued and the question of how one can escape violence or prevent wars, whether intra- or interstate remains moot. The paradox is that almost invariably we have to resort to violence to put an end to it. This is what Jean-Paul Sartre meant when in response to his own question, “Will we recover?” in his Preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, he replied “Yes. For violence, like Achilles’ lance, can heal the wounds that it has inflicted.”

It is important, therefore, to understand why, if wars are found to be costly and inefficient ex-post, leaders cannot settle the disputes ex-ante? Also, if they are inevitable, how does one win? For my present purpose, since the problem of war is multifaceted, I will confine myself to the idea of innovation as central to winning. I will also leave aside the more troublesome question of what winning means because very often it is either subjective, strictly temporal, or deals with situations where tactical victories may still result in a strategic loss.

In Book VI of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, after the first day of the great war in Heaven, the rebel angels, having been beaten back, gather for the next move. Satan is convinced that the grievous injury they have suffered is owed to inferiority in weapons: “... perhaps more valid armes/Weapons more violent, when next we meet/May serve to better us, and worse our foes/Or equal what between us made the odds/In Nature none…”.

The technical development of the implements of violence has now reached the point where no political goal could........

© The Friday Times