Decline
See also: Nuclear peaceThe state and Clausewitzian principles peaked in the World Wars of the 20th century, but also laid the groundwork for their dilapidation due to nuclear proliferation and the manifestation of culturally aligned conflict. The nuclear bomb was the result of the state perfecting its quest to overthrow its competitive duplicates. Ironically, this development seems to have pushed conventional conflict waged by the state to the sidelines. Were two conventional armies to fight, the loser would have redress in its nuclear arsenal.
Thus, no two nuclear powers have yet fought a conventional war directly, with the exception of brief skirmishes between for example, China and Russia in the 1969 Sino-Soviet conflict and between India and Pakistan in the 1999 Kargil War.
Read more about this topic: Conventional Warfare
Famous quotes containing the word decline:
“We can recognize the dawn and the decline of love by the uneasiness we feel when alone together.”
—Jean De La Bruyère (1645–1696)
“Or else I thought her supernatural;
As though a sterner eye looked through her eye
On this foul world in its decline and fall,
On gangling stocks grown great, great stocks run dry,
Ancestral pearls all pitched into a sty,
Heroic reverie mocked by clown and knave....”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“I rather think the cinema will die. Look at the energy being exerted to revive it—yesterday it was color, today three dimensions. I don’t give it forty years more. Witness the decline of conversation. Only the Irish have remained incomparable conversationalists, maybe because technical progress has passed them by.”
—Orson Welles (1915–1984)