The Clash of Civilizations

Those who favour this highly unrealistic conjecture tend to forget the reality that, after the Second World War, there have been many such occasions when the great powers of the world could have used atomic weapons to precipitate a Third World War. But this never happened. America did not drop an atom bomb on Vietnam to win the battle. In Afghanistan, Russia never used atomic weapons to achieve a military victory. Both the super powers accepted defeat and refrained from using atomic armaments, in spite of storing such weapons in great quantities. The reason is that any such horrendous event takes place only once in human history. An atom bomb too, could be dropped only once, and that has already been done. Hiroshima put a full stop to the use of atomic weapons. It was not a comma, as has been demonstrated by the events of the last sixty years. Nations possessing these weapons hold that they serve as atomic deterrents against any possible enemy, but the truth is that they have lost their war-deterrent value. It is an accepted fact that the military use of nuclear weapons is an extremely disastrous boomerang-like game. This is enough to tell us that no atomic war will take place in the world. For a nation can be an enemy of another nation, but it cannot be its own enemy. Samuel Huntington’s book can be summed up thus: the rivalry of these super powers is about to re-emerge in the form of a clash of civilizations. But as a serious proposition this is untenable. Even during the cold war period, the actual clash was one of material interests. Friction between nations in the post-cold war period is also due to the same clash of material interests. The military engagement of two civilizations is an unreal concept, for our civilization is based on ideas and values, on the strength of which we may engage in peaceful dialogues— not military confrontations.