Wartime Fatalities in the Nuclear Era

Abstract

Senior leaders in the U.S. Department of Defense, as well as nuclear strategists and academics, have argued that the advent of nuclear weapons is associated with a dramatic decrease in wartime fatalities. This assessment is often supported by an evolving series of figures that show a marked drop in wartime fatalities as a percentage of world population after 1945 to levels well below those of the prior centuries. The goal of this article is not to ascertain whether nuclear weapons are associated with or have led to a decrease in wartime fatalities, but rather to critique the supporting statistical evidence. We assess these wartime fatality figures and find that they are both irreproducible and misleading. We perform a more rigorous and traceable analysis and discover that post-1945 wartime fatalities as a percentage of world population are consistent with those of many other historical periods. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.

Keywords:

• Conventional warfare
• Deterrence
• Nuclear peace
• Nuclear weapons

Supplementary Material

The supplementary material provides detailed information on our attempts to recreate the G.I. Joe chart and Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) figures; interpretation of histograms with nonuniform bins; issues with normalization by population; and a detailed comparison of wartime fatality databases.