30-12-2017, 10:10 AM
War is a state of armed conflict between states or societies. It is generally characterized by extreme aggression, destruction and mortality, using regular or irregular military forces. The absence of war is generally called "peace". War refers to the common activities and characteristics of war types or wars in general. Total war is a war that is not restricted to purely legitimate military objectives, and can lead to massive suffering and casualties of civilians or other non-combatants. While some scholars see war as a universal and ancestral aspect of human nature, others argue that it is the result of specific sociocultural or ecological circumstances.
The deadliest war in history in terms of the cumulative number of deaths since its inception, is World War II, from 1939 to 1945, with 60-85 million deaths, followed by Mongol conquests in up to 60 million. With regard to the losses of a belligerent in proportion to its pre-war population, the most destructive war in modern history may have been the Paraguay War (see casualties of the Paraguayan war). In 2013, the war resulted in 31,000 deaths, down from the 72,000 deaths in 1990. In 2003, Richard Smalley identified war as the sixth (of the ten) greatest problems humanity faces in the next fifty years. War usually results in a significant deterioration of infrastructure and ecosystem, a decrease in social spending, hunger, large-scale migration from the war zone and, often, the mistreatment of prisoners of war or civilians. For example, of the nine million people who were in the territory of the Byelorussian SSR in 1941, some 1.6 million were killed by the Germans in actions outside the battlefield, including some 700,000 prisoners of war, 500,000 Jews and 320,000 people counted as supporters (the vast majority of whom were unarmed civilians). Another byproduct of some wars is the prevalence of the propaganda of some or all parties to the conflict, and the increase in revenues by the arms manufacturers.