A farewell is given to something that is leaving. After thousands of years of freedom for nations to go to war, new proximity, interdependence, risks of nuclear war have led them to exercise restraints and to commit themselves to the UN Charter and the requirement to abandon interstate uses of force. This book concludes that while states will continue as always to compete, the great powers are saying farewell to direct interstate wars. For over 75 years there have been no wars between them and no nuclear weapon has been used. The Charter as rule-based international order has often been violated and the veto has often stood in the way of action. Yet, the General Assembly has asserted the order and declared that it does not recognize illegal annexations. The nuclear arsenals remain and pose existential risks to humanity. At the same time, the fear that they would be used in second strikes makes it implausible that any nuclear-armed states would initiate hostilities that could risk leading to nuclear war. Russia’s aggression in Ukraine is seen as out of tune with the twenty-first century – an aberration. The growing interdependence of states is creating restraints against causing ruptures and, at the same time, enables states to use crippling economic measures as substitutes for the use of force. In 1962, the Cuban missile crisis shocked the parties and prompted them to use diplomacy to avert the acute risk of nuclear war. Today, one may speculate if the war in Ukraine and threats to the human environment might shock nations to turn to diplomacy and disarmament and switch to the defence of the threatened human environment a major part of the some 2 trillion dollars that they now spend annually to defend themselves against each other. For this to become reality, an engaged public mind would be as important as it was against slavery and nuclear weapons.

Wartime leaders need to carry their armies and sometimes their nations through trying ordeals. Accordingly, there are occasions that call for effective rhetoric. This section consists of fourteen speeches during wartime or in the face of impending war. The speakers include Shakespeares Henry V, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Neville Chamberlain, Duff Cooper, Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and George W. Bush.

Despite significant reductions in nuclear arsenals after the Cold War, the world’s nuclear nations still are pointing thousands of warheads at each other, using systems that are vulnerable to human error, miscalculation, or cyberwarfare. Over the past decades, humankind has come hair-raisingly close in several well-documented instances to unleashing full-scale nuclear war. The logic of arms races makes it very hard for nations to resist the temptation of modernizing and building up their arsenals. On the other hand, new designs for nuclear reactors – whether for fission or fusion processes – hold out the tantalizing possibility of safe, cheap, and abundant electricity. Nuclear-generated electricity does not release greenhouse gases, and therefore could play a key role in creating a sustainable energy system over the coming century.

What is the essence of group decision-making? How does group dynamics affect policy outcomes? This chapter contributes to foreign policy analysis and national security decision-making by advancing a comparative group dynamic perspective. Specifically, we examine three models of group decision-making: Groupthink, Polythink, and Con-Div, and apply each model to the Kennedy administration’s decision to impose a naval blockade during the Cuban Missile Crisis. We claim that applying different group decision-making models to real-world cases presents a new way of explaining governmental decisions. Based on our comparative analysis of the three models, we find that the Con-Div model performs best in explaining the naval blockade decision.

This chapter describes the use of nuclear weapons and other nuclear explosive devices. To date, the dropping of the two atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945 is the only hostile use of nuclear weapons by one State against another. But in the 1960s to 1980s, around 160 nuclear explosive devices were detonated for so-called ‘peaceful purposes’. Also described is the Cuban missile crisis as well as broken arrow incidents in which major accidents occurred with nuclear weapons.

At the conclusion of World War II, the Western victors found that the defeated peoples of Germany and Japan ready for a return to the comparative liberalism of the 1920s. In the meantime, there was an emerging conflict—the Cold War—with another victor: the Soviet Union. Soviet support of a military invasion of South Korea by the Communist North in 1950 provoked unwarranted fears of an imminent World War, and these were taken to require the assemblage of a vast arsenal of weapons designed to deter a war that neither side had any intention of starting. The Cold War also came furnished with a set of alarming crises. In the most famous, the Soviets sought in Cuba to solve two problems that essentially didn’t exist: a potential US invasion and a strategic “imbalance” that was irrelevant because neither side had any intention of initiating a nuclear exchange whatever the disparity of the arsenal. But leaders on both sides were successful at keeping the crisis from escalating. Even if the missiles had been installed in Cuba, however, the only consequence would be that, like other nuclear forces, they would have spent the next decades gathering dust.

The EU often claims to play a central role for peace in Europe. To date astonishingly little research has systematically addressed this issue; the dominant narrative is essentially that cast by the protagonists of the integration process themselves. This chapter argues that the European integration process was initially much more a beneficiary of the European peace settlement, than shaping it in any significant sense. At the same time it is important to distinguish between three concepts of peace: reconciliation between the member states and especially between the ‘arch-enemies’ France and Germany; the EC’s contribution to peace in a world largely defined by the Cold War; and finally social peace within the member states. The chapter examines these three dimensions and argues that the EC was particularly important with regard to the third of these categories. Later and in different forms than we normally assume – this is how the EU really contributed to peace over the past decades.