Less than twenty years later, the Second World War began and there was no optimism about its consequences. While the protagonists all believed in the need for war, there were no illusions about the cost in blood -- at least, not initially. Even Hitler took note of the silence of the Berlin crowds as their soldiers marched to war. In Britain and France, there was certainly no rejoicing when war was declared.
Participants in World War II did not make express any optimistic expectations about the results of this war at its outbreak, in stark contrast to the prequel. Nonetheless, this war dramatically reduced the number of war-related casualties experienced by the states involved. With something like 50 million dead, Europe and Asia in ruins, perhaps the dramatic decline in warfare ought not to be surprising. Human beings have some sort of collective memory and at the end of the war, the idea of war on this scale became associated with self-destruction. Peace was achieved. And remembering the dead was a tribute to the sacrifices made to reach this end.
John Lewis Gaddis called it the "long peace" and attributed it to the advent of nuclear weapons and the threat of mutally assured destruction. However, Gwin Dyer, in a television documentary and book simply titled War (now out-of-print), noted that there is nothing historically uncommon about the fifty-something years of relative peace that followed the end of World War II. The anomaly is the short time span between the two world wars. Many scholars have noted the connectedness of the world wars. Versailles settled none of the issues raised by World War I; the Second World War settled those issues. At the end of that war the balance of power was very clear. The international institutions constructed on the ruins of war reflected the reality of two new "superpowers" and their relative strength in the community of nations. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the United Nations Security Council. Its permanent members were the United States, the USSR, Great Britain, France and China.
