A violent peace
de Paul Rogers
What does the end of the Cold War mean for world peace? What kind of new world is being constructed out of the former East-West confrontation? The opportunities now exist to create a genuinely peaceful and just new world order. Paul Rogers and Malcolm Dando, widely respected defence analysts, show how this can be achieved. A Violent Peace begins by examining threats to global stability in the post Cold War era. It looks at the transformation of the nuclear arms race in the 1980s. Do the current arms control processes really curb the development and deployment of the new weapons or will the armaments momentum built up in the last four decades result in more pressure for proliferation throughout the world? Recent events have focussed on the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, ballistic missiles and area-impact munitions. As the East-West rivalries appear to diminish, will the industrialised countries of the North slip into a new pattern of confrontation, with the development of military force projection capabilities designed to 'keep the violent peace' in the Middle East and other parts of the Third World? Above all, in a world of finite resources and increased environmental limitations on economic growth, will conflict between the haves and the have-nots usher in a new world disorder just as the ending of the Cold War appeared to be offering a chance of international peace? The agenda set by the authors for coping with the challenges now facing the world community includes not only traditional security issues such as arms control but also the wider issues of poverty, the destruction of the environment and the North-South axis of conflict. The intense East-West confrontation over the past 40 years has dominated strategic thinking and excluded large sections of the world's population from consideration. It is now time to develop new thinking on international security to deal effectively with a changing but not necessarily a less dangerous world.
