DiscussWorldIssues - Socio-Economic Religion and Political Uncensored Debate - View Single Post - Unconditional Surrender & Civilian Casualites

**vansVoish** · 06-03-2011, 07:26 AM

That is a great point. So, given this what are you answers to my 2 questions?

To insist on an unconditional surrender there needs to be circumstances where a negotiated surrender will not be thought of as being beaten. In the old days when wars did not have the massive destructive power of even WW2 weaponry, a war could be negotiated to a conclusion and one side would acknowledge that they had been beaten. Of course that is why there were many wars in Europe that did not end with unconditional surrender throughout history and after a period of time would start up again with a slightly different pretext.

I think that we always had the concept of total war, just not the capacity to carry it out. Many great sieges of history ended with the slaughter or enslavement of the losing population. Now we have the weaponry to destroy the civilization from a great distance. Total war like WW2 is I believe a thing of the past. Any two sides with nuclear weapons can initiate the other which would precipitate a retaliatory strike. MAD worked despite the ridicule that the name garnered.

We now have the concept of limited war. Many of the proxy wars of the Cold War era, Viet Nam, Korea manmy Africian conflicts were essentially between the West (US) and the communists (USSR) but were not allowed to become total wars because of the certainty of mutual assured destruction.

06-03-2011, 07:26 AM	#23
vansVoish Join Date Oct 2005 Posts 500 Senior Member	That is a great point. So, given this what are you answers to my 2 questions? To insist on an unconditional surrender there needs to be circumstances where a negotiated surrender will not be thought of as being beaten. In the old days when wars did not have the massive destructive power of even WW2 weaponry, a war could be negotiated to a conclusion and one side would acknowledge that they had been beaten. Of course that is why there were many wars in Europe that did not end with unconditional surrender throughout history and after a period of time would start up again with a slightly different pretext. I think that we always had the concept of total war, just not the capacity to carry it out. Many great sieges of history ended with the slaughter or enslavement of the losing population. Now we have the weaponry to destroy the civilization from a great distance. Total war like WW2 is I believe a thing of the past. Any two sides with nuclear weapons can initiate the other which would precipitate a retaliatory strike. MAD worked despite the ridicule that the name garnered. We now have the concept of limited war. Many of the proxy wars of the Cold War era, Viet Nam, Korea manmy Africian conflicts were essentially between the West (US) and the communists (USSR) but were not allowed to become total wars because of the certainty of mutual assured destruction.
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