The Long Peace

Monument at Alamogordo, N.M. commemorating the first nuclear explosion

Paul Schroeder quoted in Robert Jervis’ The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution: Statecraft and the Prospect of Armageddon:

Since the second century A.D. under the Pax Romana, the Western World has known no long periods of general peace. The modern record was 38 years, 9 months, and five days…from the aftermath of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo to the effective beginning of the Crimean War…That record was broken…on May 15, 1984.”*

*Paul Schroeder, “Does Murphy’s Law Apply to History?” Wilson Quarterly, 9 (New Year’s 1985), 88.