Escalation of war has come to mean an increase in scope or violence of a conflict, either deliberate or unpremeditated until it may mount finally to the fullest fury attainable with existing military forces. The term came into wide use concurrently with the emergence of nuclear arms as the dominant weapons of war. There has been a tendency to treat the term almost exclusively within the context of nuclear weapons since the paramount problem has been whether or not the use of these weapons can be controlled and limited. This preoccupation with the potential progression of nuclear conflict is perhaps too limited an application of a concept that could provide greater insights into the historical war process as a whole. The perspective gained from historical analysis of escalation in the past could contribute to a better understanding of the problems that confront contemporary and future generations concerned with the prevention and control of military conflict.
Escalation has been present in some form or other since the earliest days of human conflict, and it includes both the actions that lead to intensification of warfare and the effects of such intensification. The actions may range from the introduction of a new weapon into battle to a decision in the middle of a war to resort to conscription.
The actions that lead to escalation fall into two major categories. Immediate actions are tactical in nature and affect the battle as soon as they occur. The injection of more troops, guns, and tanks into a battle will normally cause more casualties almost as soon as the escalation takes place. Other escalatory actions—launching a new weapon development program or initiating unrestricted submarine warfare—are more remote from the battlefield, and their effects may not immediately be manifest. The immediate actions that escalate the battle are usually the final expression of the long-term actions that are remote, in both time and distance, from the battlefield.
The concept of escalation, especially in the tactical sense, has acquired greater precision in recent years; this springs directly from the nature of the nuclear weapons with which it is concerned. These weapons are unique, not only because of their great capacity for destructiveness but also because of the enormously varied range of destruction that can be accomplished with them and the efficiency and effectiveness with which they can be used. Graded in kilotons and megatons, their yield may range from less than five kilotons to 50 megatons, on a scale reading from one to 10,000. The degree of destruction actually achieved with measured quantities of nuclear yield may be further varied by the type of burst employed—the altitude at which the bomb is exploded—and the amount of residual radioactivity built into it. This precise grading of nuclear weapons in terms of destructive power makes possible exact measurement of how escalation might take place in future conflicts. Because of their enormous implications, nuclear weapons have been placed under the most careful and positive control of the highest political authorities. At present, the combination of technological factors and political requirements has produced a capability for measured, precise escalations of conflict in almost immediate response to deliberate decision by responsible national authorities.
At the bottom of the ladder of nuclear escalation is the controlled and limited use of small nuclear weapons for purposes of demonstration or against purely military objectives with no progression to more powerful weapons. At the top of the ladder is the immediate use against enemy military and civilian targets of the total arsenal of nuclear weapons available at the beginning of conflict. Between the two extremes are a great many gradations of conflict determined chiefly by the number and yield of the weapons employed and the nature of the targets attacked. There could, conceivably, be a long, involved, and complex escalation in the use of nuclear weapons, beginning with the smallest tactical nuclear bombs and shells and ranging up to the largest megaton bombs.
While the nuclear weapons, because of their awesome power, dominate the discussion on escalation, it is certainly conceivable that a potentially great conflict could start well below the nuclear threshold and progress over a considerable period of time toward and beyond that threshold. It follows, therefore, that the problem of escalation must be concerned with more than nuclear weapons.
It has become increasingly clear in recent years that the nuclear superpowers—the United States and the Soviet Union—are disinclined, even opposed, to the use of nuclear weapons except under the most extreme provocation, presumably when their survival is at stake. No nuclear weapons of any kind have been used in conflict since the second atomic bomb was detonated over Nagasaki on 9 August 1945. There is more than a likelihood that future conflicts will continue to be waged with conventional weapons—especially those conflicts in which the superpowers themselves are not involved. It is possible that even a direct conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union might begin at a sub-nuclear level. This has, of course, always been a possibility, but until recently, the overpowering presence of nuclear weapons tended to obscure this sub-nuclear level of escalation. Today, it is widely recognized that the nuclear weapons, whether large or small, occupy only the upper rungs of the escalation ladder rather than the whole ladder. Escalation should therefore be examined within the much broader context of war postulated by this concept. This broader view lends greater validity to an examination of the nature and role of escalation in wars of the past.
Escalation of Warfare has varied greatly from era to era, from war to war, and even from battle to battle during the same war. As an effect, escalation has generally been present in the great wars of history, varying only in degree of destructiveness. As action or process, escalation has become more complex and involved as war has become more total. It has become possible, nevertheless, to distinguish more clearly the many ways in which wars tend to escalate. The major types of escalation include:
Manpower Escalation. This is perhaps the oldest form of escalation. From the earliest days of warfare, opponents sought to attain numerical superiority, and the conflict intensified as more men entered the fray. On the battlefield, the effect of this tactical escalation was immediate and often decisive. As society became better organized and more capable of waging prolonged wars, the manpower factor took on a strategic aspect also. During the Peloponnesian Wars, one of the best examples of escalation in ancient times, both sides continued to throw fresh armies and fresh fleets into the struggle over a period of more than a quarter of a century. In modern times, conscription introduced manpower escalation into war as a constant strategic factor. The control of manpower by the state and technological developments made possible the use of maximum manpower resources in war. The numbers engaged in war, both absolutely and in proportion to population, have grown enormously during the past two centuries.
Technological Escalation. This has been the most constant force causing escalation throughout the ages, although it has not been a consistent progression from the simple to the complex. There were, of course, technical regressions in warfare, but weapon technology generally moved ahead, albeit at a snail’s pace during long periods of history. Firepower and destructiveness increased as the result of the continual introduction of new or improved explosives, weapons, vehicles, and equipment. The advent of the missile weapons, beginning with the stone thrown by hand and progressing through the spear, sling, and bow, led to longer-range combat and more prolonged and intense conflicts. In modern times, technological escalation has probably been the single most important action affecting the intensity of warfare. Although a constant historical force in peacetime as well as wartime, technological advance has been especially pronounced during wartime. The great and continuing technological revolution that accelerated so dramatically in the 18th and 19th centuries produced successive generations of more powerful weapons and explosives, each able to kill and destroy much more swiftly and extensively than the preceding generation. And perhaps of even greater technological importance were the remarkable developments in both transportation and communications that made possible the whole complex system of modern warfare.
Economic Escalation. As warfare became more intense and prolonged, nations committed an increasing proportion of their economic resources to the struggle. The emergence of the modern nation-state permitted a degree of control and commitment of resources in both peacetime and wartime never before possible. The economic mobilizations of the major wars of the 20th century approached the maximum, with the proportion of resources devoted to the war effort steadily mounting during the course of the conflict. The increasing mechanization of war placed especially heavy requirements on the industrial segments of national economies, making them indispensable to the war effort. A major problem in both world wars was to strike a proper balance between the military mobilization and the economic mobilization.
Geographical Escalation. As a war progresses, the arena of conflict tends to widen. This may occur simply as a normal result of the intensification of conflict between two nations or because additional nations become involved on one side or the other. Where naval powers are involved, the tendency has been for the war to be fought in overseas areas—each other’s colonies—as well as in the home countries. More often, however, modern wars have been fought by alliances which expanded as the wars progressed. World War I received its name because the fighting eventually involved every continent in the world. But the original arena of war was confined to only two countries, Austria-Hungary and Serbia, and the initial fighting took place only in Serbia. The war escalated quickly—in a matter of days—- until it engulfed the greatest powers in Europe. And it continued to widen its scope each year thereafter as other countries entered the fray. The fighting spread from the main theater of war in Europe to Asia and Africa and to the oceans and seas of the world. World War II followed a similar pattern of enlargement of the battle arena but on a much grander scale, for Africa and Asia and the Pacific were major theaters of warfare rather than secondary ones as in 1914-1918.
Societal Escalation. Conflicts may expand beyond the military combatants to include the total populations and resources of countries as military objectives. This was not a development of 20th century warfare since there were many occasions in ancient and more recent history when whole populations were destroyed or enslaved. To be sure, the numbers involved were much smaller than today. But the Babylonians, Assyrians, Romans, and Mongols could be devastatingly thorough in destroying cities and their populations and in decimating whole nations. Indeed, it seems that respect for the noncombatant civilian populations is more a characteristic of modern times—the outgrowth of the savage wars of the 16th and 17th centuries that culminated in the horror of the Thirty Years’ War (1618- 1648). During the 18th and 19th centuries, the civilian populations of nations probably enjoyed more protection from the ravages of war than at any other time in history. In the 20th century, this situation changed as wars approached the maximum in their demands on resources; the morale and finally the lives of the civilian population became targets of military action. The escalation actions that brought this about were the blockade, unrestricted submarine warfare, and the strategic bombardment of cities. For the future, unrestricted use of nuclear weapons might well represent the final step in this escalation, for such weapons possess the power to destroy whole populations, not merely those of urban areas.
Political Escalation. As wars grow more intense, the political objectives escalate until finally the very existence of a nation and its ideals are at stake. The objectives of both sides escalated during World War I as they continually made promises of territorial and economic gain to entice neutral countries into the war. These gains were, of course, always to be at the expense of the other side. In World War II, the Germans, and to a lesser extent the Japanese, started with political objectives that in themselves represented an enormous escalation of warfare. Their goal of complete domination of huge areas of the world through annexation or control of other nations could not help but produce on the Allied side the intense reaction that led to enunciation of the doctrine of unconditional surrender.
Ideological Escalation. As nations became more heavily engaged in warfare, the depth of feeling and conviction among both combatants and noncombatants escalated and acted as a spur to still further intensification. Even where the basic ideological differences were not great to begin with—they were not as great in 1914 as in 1939—the pressures of war tended to emphasize and sharpen the differences and to lead to powerful emotional reactions. The continuing ideological conflict between the Communist and non-Communist worlds today has a counterpart of sorts in the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, which started at an unusually high pitch of emotional feeling and tended to become even more extreme as the conflicts persisted. As ideology came to play a more powerful role in relations among nations in the 20th century, the tendency has been for political objectives in wartime to grow more extreme.
Strategic Escalation. This occurs as the result of the deliberate decisions a nation makes on the use and disposition of its military forces. In 1914, Germany escalated World War I at the very beginning by deciding to violate Belgian neutrality in order to secure a strategic advantage over the French. This German disregard of a treaty obligation immediately brought Great Britain into the war on the side of France. The Germans again escalated the war in 1940, when they attacked no less than four neutrals without warning—Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, and Belgium. Once again, the Germans were seeking strategic advantage. The decision to send United Nations forces across the 38th parallel into North Korea in 1950, and to pursue North Korean forces to the Yalu River resulted in attacks by the Chinese Communists, and this led to expansion and prolongation of the conflict.
These factors, acting and interacting to spread and intensify the conflict, make up the process of escalation. Throughout history, this process has been neither automatic nor inevitable, although it has occurred frequently. The various factors came into play generally as a result of conscious, deliberate decision, although instinct and emotion were fundamental spurs to action, and more often the process, as a whole, was spasmodic rather than controlled. The forces bringing about escalation were present in the wars of the 20th century in number and degree surpassing all previous conflicts. The physical potential for escalation that exists today is so much greater than ever before and the implication for humanity is so much more dire that fuller understanding of the process—its nature, its historical development, its causation—is essential if warfare in the future is to be controlled and guided.
Throughout history the operation of many escalation factors has been slow and gradual, usually over periods of centuries. There were some exceptions to be sure. The use of the horse in warfare, beginning before the 20th century B.C., represented the greatest immediate advance in mobility—and therefore in extension of the battle area—until the 19th century. And the use of cavalry spread rapidly among the more advanced civilizations of antiquity. But most changes took hold slowly. The great siege engines that permitted the more expeditious capture of fortified cities and the slaughter of their inhabitants required many centuries of development before they attained their highest level in Roman times. The introduction of gunpowder weapons came in the 14th century A.D. in Europe, but these weapons did not completely dominate warfare until the latter part of the 17th century—a lapse of almost 300 years.
The 16th and 17th centuries witnessed an escalation of warfare that was in marked contrast to the restricted and intermittent conflict of the medieval period. The steady increase in wealth and in the power of the state permitted the marshaling of greater resources—both men and material—than had ever been possible in feudal days. Increased efficiency of gunpowder weapons resulted in increased casualties in battle. The religious hatreds that racked Europe from the middle of the 16th to the middle of the 17th century opened the floodgates of unrestricted warfare and unleashed the savagery of mercenary armies on whole populaces. Central Europe especially suffered terrible destruction during the Thirty Years’ War. Whole cities and towns were fired and their populations murdered or dispersed. During the tremendous orgy of devastation and extirpation, almost every form of escalation occurred. Among all wars of the modern era, the Thirty Years’ War was most like the wars of the 20th century in its totality of effect on whole societies.
The revulsion against the barbarism of the Thirty Years’ War impelled the European countries to seek to establish codes of conduct and means for waging war that would minimize its destructive effects. The emergence of strong central governments among the nation-states of Europe permitted the creation of permanent professional armies responsive to the will of the ruler. This was in contrast to the mercenary armies of the Thirty Years’ War that had given allegiance to their commanders rather than to kings or princes. In the 18th century, military strategy was dominated by the concept that war should be fought with a minimum expenditure of men and money and with a minimum of inconvenience to the civil populace and economy. This put the emphasis on fortification and maneuver rather than on battle, and the ideal became to win a campaign without actually fighting a battle. Still, many of the limitations were by necessity as well as design.
At the same time that these curbs on the violence of war were attaining wide acceptance, improved gunpowder weapons and tactics were causing far higher battle casualties than before. During the Seven Years’ War of 1756-1763, battlefield casualties ranged from 15 to 50 per cent, the latter suffered by the Russians at Zorndorf in 1758. This high rate of loss further inspired nations to restrict their objectives in an effort to minimize combat during war. Some of the campaigns, one of which took place as late as 1787 in Holland, were almost bloodless.
On the whole, 18th century warfare represented a regression from the steady escalation of the preceding centuries. Most of the strategic escalation factors operated with marked restraint. The ideological, political, and societal aspects especially were held in check and not permitted to become hyperbolic as they had been during the 17th century. The more purely tactical aspect of escalation, the violence of combat, did wax more intense, but this was offset in some measure by the decreased frequency of battles. This, in turn, was the result of the deliberate policy of avoiding battles in favor of maneuver.
The efforts of 18th century society to impose curbs that would slow down and, hopefully, stop the escalation that had threatened to run away during the Thirty Years’ War, did not long endure. This attempt was utterly destroyed by the two great revolutions at the end of the century—the French Revolution and the industrial revolution. Their effect on warfare was truly revolutionary rather than evolutionary in both speed and impact, and unfortunately they ushered in an era of great and rapid escalation in the scope and intensity of conflict.
The French Revolution unleashed the strategic forces that would bring about escalation of war, and the industrial revolution provided the weapons that intensified the conflicts. The impulses to escalation that had been held in check during the dynastic wars of the 18th century were given free rein as the French Revolution progressed in the face of the disapproval and eventually armed opposition of the other monarchies of Europe. The powerful ideological currents released by the French Revolution—some of them derived from the experience of the American Revolution— evoked an enormous upsurge of nationalism and patriotism among the French people that reached its climax in the military reaction to counterrevolutionaries, both domestic and foreign.
The supreme expression of this surging tide of nationalism which was soon to engulf the rest of Europe and eventually the world, was the levee en masse, or popular conscription. To meet the challenge of the professional armies of the neighboring monarchies that threatened to extinguish the revolution and restore the French monarchy, the new and inexperienced leaders of the nation called for a total national effort. The government decree of 23 August 1793, ordaining the levee en masse, was one of the most significant laws ever enacted by any nation. Article I of the law reads:
From this moment until that in which our enemies shall have been driven from the territory of the Republic, all Frenchmen are permanently requisitioned for service in the armies.
The young men shall fight; the married men shall forge weapons and transport supplies; the women will make tents and clothes and will serve in the hospitals; the children will make up old linen into lint; the old men will have themselves carried into the public squares to rouse the courage of the fighting men, to preach the unity of the Republic and hatred against Kings.
The public buildings shall be turned into barracks, the public squares into munition factories, the earthen floors of cellars shall be treated with lye to extract saltpetre.
All firearms of suitable calibre shall be turned over to the troops: the interior shall be policed with shotguns and with cold steel.
All saddle horses shall be seized for the calvary; all draft horses not employed in cultivation will draw the artillery and supply wagons.
The effort demanded of the French people by this decree created a huge force of a million men in 14 armies. During 1794-1795, the extraordinary economic mobilization succeeded in producing the new weapons needed for the armies. Through a mobilization of scientific talent and economic resources the French succeeded in making Paris the largest small-arms center in the world by 1794, producing 750 muskets a day; previously, all Europe had never produced more than a thousand a day. Only Britain could match and eventually exceed France in industrial strength, and it was inevitable that the British should underwrite the anti-French coalitions with money and weapons.
The industrial revolution provided the weapons to equip the mass armies of the Napoleonic era. The advances in artillery were especially important—Napoleonic warfare was distinguished by the use of better guns in greater mass and with greater mobility than ever before. This accounted in no small part for the heavy casualties sustained by both sides in many of the batties. The construction of numerous metaled roads also helped greatly to make possible the use of heavier ordnance and transport.
The new mass armies of the French, fired at first with revolutionary patriotic fervor, swept the old professional armies of Europe into oblivion. For more than two decades, warfare escalated as the impulse toward intensification grew steadily more powerful. Certainly the initial political escalation grew out of the avowed intention of the monarchies to restore the king to his throne in France. As the French response grew increasingly aggressive, the arena of conflict eventually expanded until it reached as far as Egypt in 1798 and Moscow in 1812. Under the great Minister of War, Lazare Carnot, and later Napoleon, the resources of France—both human and material—were harnessed to the war machine more effectively than ever before. The French practice of living off the land during the campaigns of this era marked a return to pre-18th century practices. It also evoked a violent reaction from civil populaces, as in Spain, that constituted a significant escalation of conflict.
It was only when the other great powers of Europe—Russia, Prussia, and Austria— adopted methods of raising large masses of manpower that they were able to cope with Napoleon and his Grand Army. Their combined superiority in numbers eventually brought them the victory that had been denied their smaller professional armies of the earlier years of the conflict. Even the British were forced by the threat of Napoleonic invasion to resort to a form of conscription in order to build up a military force to support their regular army.
The reaction against the French Revolution after 1815 occurred in the military as well as the political sphere, but the powerful forces of change unfettered in the last decades of the 18th century could not be stifled for long. That notorious offspring of the revolution—conscription—was distasteful to all of the monarchies of Europe, not least among them the Bourbons in France, because of its political and social leveling potential, but their efforts to dispense with it could not be sustained in the face of the political and military imperatives of the 19th century. The phenomenal successes of Prussian arms in a scant half-dozen years between 1864 and 1870 provided irrefutable confirmation of the advantages accruing from a mobilization system based on conscription. The other leading powers of Europe, with the exception of Great Britain, hastened to imitate the Prussian system, either by instituting conscription or modifying their existing conscription systems.
The pace of military technology quickened during the 19th century: existing weapons became much more effective and new weapons came into existence. The missile weapons came into their own with the emergence of the breech-loading rifle, the machine gun, and the long-range, quick-firing artillery guns. But the technological innovations that had the greatest effect on warfare did not spring from weapon technology. They grew out of essentially industrial inventions that could be adapted to military use, primarily in the fields of transportation and communications. The railroad, telegraph, telephone, and steamship contributed more to the changes in warfare during the 19th century than did all the products of weapon technology.
The European powers avoided conflict with each other for almost 40 years after Waterloo. The Crimean War (1854-1856), fought on the periphery of Europe, showed little of the effects of the revolutionary forces that had been at work transforming the ways of warfare. Although it was tactically intense and losses were heavy, the Crimean War was an old-style conflict with only a few glimmerings of the new-style warfare that was still a few years away.
The new style of warfare was forged in a brief period of a dozen years between 1859 and 1871. It was based on the railroad, the telegraph, and conscription, which together made possible the mobilization system that dominated European strategy and politics for generations to come. Napoleon III demonstrated the potential of the railroad in war for the first time in 1859 when he sent a French army by rail across France to the Italian border, from whence it marched to help the Italians against the Austrians at Solferino.
The great war of the period was the American Civil War, often referred to as the first modern war because of the extent to which almost all aspects of warfare escalated, especially the capacity of both sides to endure sustained conflict for four long years. The huge forces mobilized, the vast arena of conflict, the sovereign role of the railroad, the innovations and improvements in other transportation, weapons, and communications, the imposition of an effective blockade by the North, and the mobilization of industrial resources— all of these represented a great expansion over previous wars. The civil nature of the conflict also caused the ideological and political context of the struggle to escalate, leading to a war of peoples that was bloodier and longer than anyone would have believed possible at the beginning. And as the war progressed, the destruction wrought by Union troops in the South brought the war to the homefront; it was a long step toward societal escalation of conflict, toward the strategic warfare of the 20th century.
In Europe, the Prussians fashioned in a remarkably few years the military instrument that won for them a succession of wars with the Danes, the Austrians, and the French. Between the Seven Weeks’ War in 1866 and the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, the Prussians reduced their mobilization time from five weeks to 16 days, while massing twice as many men—400,000. Their ability to maintain powerful reserve forces at a high level of readiness and to assemble these forces with great speed and efficiency gave them an advantage in strategic mobility that their opponents could not match. Although the Franco-Prussian War dragged on into 1871, the key battles were fought during the first six weeks of the war in 1870, and the fate of France was sealed at that time.
The latter stages of the war were distinguished by French guerrilla-type operations and the siege of Paris. Both of these events involved the civil populace of a European country in war to a greater extent than at any time since the Peninsular Campaign of the Napoleonic Era. They were ominous portents of the blockade of Germany in World War I and the strategic bombardment and German Schrechlichkeit of World War II. The Prussians shelled both Strasbourg and Paris, avowedly aiming at the morale of the people of the cities. Although the Franco-Prussian War seemed a very model of how to fight and win a war quickly and the objectives of both sides were limited, it contained the seeds of the prolonged conflicts of the 20th century. The stubborn, if futile, efforts of the French to continue the hopeless struggle reflected an intensification of the ideological spirit that carried over into the postwar years.
The mobilization system fastened itself upon the great nations of Europe after 1870 and dominated the strategic thinking and planning of the European general staffs until 1914. In many ways the system resembled the current one of reliance on forces-in-being, which permits the initiation of hostilities at the highest level of conflict with existing forces. The dominant military strategy was essentially that of blitzkrieg—to strike the enemy with the maximum strength as quickly as possible and force a decision within a matter of weeks—as the Prussians had done so convincingly in 1866 and 1870. This, of course, was essentially the Napoleonic principle of concentrating overwhelming forces with maximum speed at the decisive point. The mobilization system was a sword suspended over Europe for almost two generations; in itself it constituted both a powerful deterrent and a powerful stimulant to war.
European nations strove to maintain powerful military forces that would deter aggression by neighbors. As today, these forces had to be modernized continually, for technology provided the impulse for improved weapons as surely as population growth was the impulse for larger armies. The arms race between France and Germany, which came to involve other countries also, contributed to an instability in international relations after 1871 that was certainly greater than had existed during the four decades that followed Water loo. But the forces making for deterrence re mained more compelling than those making for conflict until 1914. The confrontations that occurred before 1914—Bosnia-Herzegovina, First and Second Moroccan crises— brought the great powers to the brink of war, but they always drew back in time and reached an accommodation.
The long-range strategic influences that lead to escalation of warfare were powerfully at work after 1871, growing steadily more commanding and all conspiring to raise the threshold of violence at which nations might initiate a conflict. Between 1871 and 1914 the standing armies of the major continental powers doubled in size, and their firepower undoubtedly increased by a much greater factor. The continuing technological revolution and the establishment of European imperial control over most of the underdeveloped areas of the world had greatly multiplied the resources that nations could mobilize in support of their military efforts. This portended the prolongation of conflict far beyond any time envisaged by the European general staffs—and at a more intensive pitch than had ever been waged before on a large scale. The development of coalitions among the great powers, to which many of the smaller powers adhered as satellites, represented a potential geographical escalation of conflict that became a reality in 1914. Thus, by 1914, for the first time in a century, there existed all of the elements of an international environment that could erupt into a general European war.
World War I reached a very high level of violence on a huge scale within a few weeks and escalated rapidly thereafter in almost every possible way. The number of countries involved multiplied overnight, the arena of war quickly burst the bounds of Europe, and the antagonisms of the peoples deepened and hardened. The frantic efforts to achieve victory by multiplying soldiers and guns required a continual mass infusion of blood and treasure by all combatants and a degree of control of the economies and societies of nations unsurpassed in human history. The demand for more guns and ammunition seemed insatiable. Before the war the French general staff anticipated a daily supply of 13,600 rounds for all of their 75-mm. guns. By 19 September 1914, the requirement had risen to 50,000 rounds, to 80,000 in January 1915, and to 150,000 in September 1915. By the end of the war British divisions had seven times as many machine guns as at the beginning. The number of workers in French defense plants increased from 50,000 at the beginning of the war to 1,600,000 in 1917.
Until 1917 the tactical escalation remained primarily quantitative, even though many of the great technical innovations, such as the submarine, were in use from the beginning of the war. During the last years of the war, the airplane, the tank, motor vehicles, and wireless communications all produced a qualitative escalation that was significant but not dominant. These developments pointed the way to the future, but it was the use of huge masses of men, machine guns, and artillery that decided the outcome on the battlefield. The massive forces of men and machines immensely increased the capacity for destruction in briefer periods of time. Battlefield casualties reached an all-time high during World War I and have probably not been surpassed. In the Battle of the Somme, the British suffered more than 57,000 casualties, including almost 20,000 dead, in a single day—1 July 1916.
There were other military actions that were instrumental in making the war more total. The Germans initiated the use of poison gas at Ypres in 1915, and thereafter both sides used it until the end of the war. The British extended the concept of the blockade to include foodstuffs and thus brought the war home to the Germans behind the lines, indirectly but eventually most effectively. The economic strain on Germany in the last year of the war proved to be a major factor in its defeat. The primitive beginnings of strategic bombardment brought the war home directly to the people of London and some of the cities of western Germany, albeit on a small scale. A harbinger of the future, strategic bombardment pointed the way to the top of the escalation ladder.
Unlike its predecessor, World War II did not begin at the highest level of violence possible. For strategic and political reasons, the opening stages of the war in 1939 were limited; only Poland felt the fury of maximum violence. Once again, in 1940, there was a great spasm of violence when Germany crushed France and the Low Countries, followed by an extended blitzkrieg against Great Britain. The Battle of Britain was one of the momentous escalations of the war because it provided additional justification for the Allied air assault on Germany that reached a mighty crescendo in 1944-1945. The major geographic and strategic escalations occurred in 1941 when the aggressions against the Soviet Union and the United States turned an essentially European conflict into a world war. As the battle areas came to encompass the whole globe, the fighting became more intense and consumed greater masses of men and material.
As World War II progressed, it became more severe in its effects. The usual escalatory forces came into operation and ascended to even higher levels. The military forces grew to enormous proportions, and their weapons became more numerous and more deadly. To support their tremendous military exertions, nations had to mobilize and control their people and resources to a degree exceeding that of the most desperate days of World War I.
But transcending these essentially predictable forms of escalation was the societal escalation that occurred—the narrowing if not the destruction of the distinction between combatants and noncombatants. Violence became universal during World War II. Escalation of the ideological differences between the two sides was primarily the result of the irrational Nazi doctrines of blood and conquest that justified the employment of any means to achieve victory. The planned, deliberate slaughter of millions of central and eastern European peoples of whom 6,000,000 Jews were not even a majority, the enslavement of other millions of Europeans as industrial and agricultural workers in Germany, the malicious ill treatment of Russian prisoners of war—including starving hundreds of thousands to death during the winter of 1941-1942 on the pretext that the Russians were not signatories to the Geneva Convention—all of these deeds drenched Europe with the blood of more civilians, including millions of women and children, than of soldiers. And even the occupied countries of western Europe, originally spared the worst excesses of racial fanaticism, came to feel the fury of Nazi reprisals against their civilian populations during the latter years of the war. Many of these actions were the work of the military forces as well as of the Nazi units that specialized in brutality.
The Allied contribution to societal escalation of the war—strategic bombardment— was concerned more with the destruction of industry and property than of people. Even the morale or area bombing by the Royal Air Force and the bombing of Japan by American B-29 bombers did not take a fraction of the lives that the more traditional and often ingenious methods of the Nazis succeeded in destroying. These bombardments were certainly no more indiscriminate than were the German attacks on London and Antwerp with V-l and V-2 rockets during 1944-45. Strategic bombardment represented a momentous advance up the ladder of escalation toward total war. The Nazi massacres of civilians could only occur in the course of, or after the conquest and occupation of, other nations and did not represent a new form of warfare as did strategic bombardment. From the purely military standpoint, strategic bombardment offered the most effective means of obliterating the distinction between the military and the civilian. It approached the ultimate in this direction with the employment of the atomic bomb against Hiroshima and Nagasaki—the final escalation of the war.
The essential difference between the Nazi and Allied methods of waging war against civilian populations was in the attitude toward the individual or group as an object of attack. The British and American airmen who bombed German cities did not personally degrade the people they were attacking. The waging of war from a distance, without any personal contact between attacker and attacked, lacked the personal and paradoxically inhuman touch that the Nazis gave to their planned destruction of masses of civilians. It was this personal touch, this deliberate inhumanity, that degraded the individual and whole populations in a manner impossible for long-range bombardment. And it was this degradation of humanity that bred much of the hatred and suspicion that characterized postwar Europe and that has contributed to the protraction of today’s Cold War.
The emergence of nuclear and thermonuclear weapons, beginning in 1945, represented the greatest single increase in capacity for destruction and violence in history. With the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles in the 1950s and the coupling of nuclear warheads with these vehicles, the world approached the ultimate in long-range destruction. It seemed that the top rung of the escalation ladder had been reached in a single bound in an incredibly few short years. Further developments in destructive power or in range and accuracy of vehicles could only emphasize what had already been achieved. The rung of the ladder that marked the transition from non-nuclear to nuclear warfare became the focus of concern among the military and political leaders of the world. The near-universal recognition that nuclear weapons represented a new and revolutionary order of destructive power became a powerful determinant in the relations among the great powers of the world.
The two world wars of the 20th century were regarded as total wars and, indeed, were as violent and universal as was possible with the weapons and other resources at the disposal of the belligerents. But, war-weariness and exhaustion of resources and manpower caused a cessation of fighting before irreparable destruction of the homefront and its people had occurred. Even the long drawn-out campaigns against urban areas, industrial resources, and civilian populations did not inflict insupportable damage on the belligerents. As long as weapons remained limited in their ability to destroy, warfare never achieved the level of destruction which has been made possible by the advent of nuclear weapons.
The coming of nuclear weapons has made it possible to attain the ultimate violence of total war in a minimum of time and with the expenditure of only a fraction of a nation’s resources. A conflict may begin at the topmost level of violence and may be so telescoped in time that the immediate action will constitute the total escalation process. For the first time in history it may be possible to attain with tactical weapons the most extreme national strategic objective—destruction of an enemy nation—completely and almost immediately. An entire strategy of war can be erected on a system of nuclear weapons that is complete in itself. As a result, the distinction between immediate or tactical escalation factors and long-range or remote escalation factors—a distinction that was still valid during World War II—may no longer exist within the context of a nuclear war.
The major conclusions of a historical analysis of escalation are no less significant for being demonstrative. First, once conflict was joined between the great powers, escalation occurred. Second, when conflict began at a high level of violence, it escalated to the maximum level of violence of which the belligerents were capable and which they deemed advantageous. Exercise of restraint and control became difficult after hostilities began and almost impossible as escalation ran its course.
There is then much empirical support for the basic premises of the current policies of the nuclear powers. The exceptionally tight controls exercised over every aspect of the nuclear weapons and the unceasing efforts to arrive at international restraints on their testing and use reflect a full awareness of the dangers of nuclear war. Nuclear war at any level must be avoided—not at any cost, but at reasonable, acceptable cost—because the chances that it would escalate are greater than that it would not. This is equally true of subnuclear conflict between the great powers not only because such a conflict is also likely to escalate but also because it is generally believed that nuclear conflict is likely to result as an escalation from a subnuclear conflict rather than starting full-blown at the nuclear level. Modem wars have demonstrated that nations will make a supreme effort when they believe that their survival is at stake. Under such circumstances, is it likely that the nuclear powers could limit themselves to use of non-nuclear weapons?
Nuclear weapons are a fact of life and we must learn to live with them until the time we reach a stage when we can do without them. Meanwhile, their greatest service to mankind is as a deterrent to conflict. And if escalation is properly understood in its historical context and given due weight, it may well be that the nuclear weapons will constitute a deterrent to any conflict—nuclear or non-nuclear—between the great powers of the world.