VIEW
War causes 1 percent of all deaths annually. So what's the big deal?
Try to look upon the phenomenon of war with dispassion and detachment, as if observing the follies of another species on a distant planet. From such an elevated view, our battles seem puny enough. On a global scale, war casualties hardly make a dent in the human population. In a typical year, the official toll amounts to less than 1 percent of all deaths. More die by drowning, and more still by suicide and auto wrecks. If saving lives is the bottom line, then the carnage of war doesn't add up to much.
But no one sees war with such austere equanimity. The clash of arms has a special power to rouse the stronger emotions — pity and love as well as fear and hatred — and so our response to battlefield killing and dying is out of all proportion to its rank in tables of vital statistics. Learning that the attack on the World Trade Center killed fewer than 3,000 rather than 6,000 has not made the event seem half as horrible.
Nevertheless, numbers do matter, and a quantitative view of war can help answer some of the most basic questions: How often do wars start? Where do they happen? How many people die?
A pioneer in gathering such statistics was the British mathematician and meteorologist Lewis Fry Richardson. He had some personal experience of World War I, not as a soldier but as an ambulance driver. Between ambulance runs, he completed his best-known work: an attempt to forecast the weather by numerical methods much like those used today in the big computing centers of the National Weather Service — only Richardson did it with a slide rule.
When it came to wars, Richardson's key idea was to measure their size in the same way we rank the intensity of earthquakes and the brightness of stars: according to magnitude. The magnitude of a war is the base-10 logarithm of the number of deaths. This scheme brings together on a single scale all "deadly quarrels," from the murder of one person (a magnitude-0 event, since 100 equals 1) up to World War I and II, both of which measured magnitude 7 (since 107 equals 10 million, covering the range from about 3 million to about 30 million).
RICHARDSON'S KEY IDEA: A RICHTER SCALE FOR WAR
It's no surprise that the world wars are at the top of Richardson's list; what is surprising is how they dominate the overall death toll. Between 1820 and 1950, Richardson listed 315 wars, each rated magnitude 2.5 or greater (corresponding to at least 300 deaths per war). He also counted a host of lesser clashes, including almost 10 million individual homicides. But among all these fatal battles, the two world wars stand out in isolation, representing 60 percent of all the deaths.
The list of magnitude-6 wars yields its own surprises. Seven of these turn up in Richardson's 130-year period of study, each responsible for roughly a million deaths. Clearly these are all major conflicts, and you might think that everyone could name them. Try it before you read on. Richardson's seven megadeath wars are, in chronological order: the Taiping Rebellion, the US Civil War, the Great War in La Plata, the sequel to the Bolshevik Revolution, the first Chinese-Communist War, the Spanish Civil War, and the partition of India.
CLASHES ARE RANDOM, LIKE MOLECULES IN HEATED GAS
The point of compiling a big list is to look for trends and correlations. Richardson found that outbreaks of war follow a Poisson distribution, the kind of random process that describes radioactive decays, cancer cases, tornado touchdowns, and Web server hits. In other words, there are no trends or correlations. (In the 50 years since, many others have continued the search, with inconclusive results.)
According to Richardson's data, warring nations bang against one another with no more plan or principle than molecules in an overheated gas. This is not a comforting thought. It seems to leave us with no control over our own destiny, nor any room for individual virtue or villainy. If wars just happen, who's to blame? But this sells Richardson's findings short. The fact that 2.6 wars per year can be expected on the average is no excuse for starting one.
Richardson's data does suggest one clear policy imperative: At all costs, avoid the clash of the titans. However painful a series of brushfire wars may be to the participants, it is the world wars that threaten us most. Those two magnitude-7 conflagrations were responsible for three-fifths of all the deaths that Richardson recorded. We now have it in our power to stage a magnitude-8 or -9 war (100 million, or 1 billion dead). In the aftermath of such an event, no one would say that war is demographically insignificant. After a war of magnitude 9.8, no one would say anything at all.
VIEW
What is the future of the skyscraper?
Killing By the Numbers
Open Source vs. Microsoft vs. al Qaeda
Dead Men Skipping
