War: The Lethal Custom

War was one of the first social innovations of civilisation. Organised warfare developed alongside organised society, and we have become very good at it. Technological innovation has made war so deadly that, were the great powers to go to war with each other today, a million people could die each minute.

In War, journalist and military historian Gwynne Dyer takes the reader on an extraordinary tour- from the prehistoric origins of organised aggression, through the development of tactics and technology of mass killing culminating in the nuclear insanity of Mutually Assured Destruction during the Cold War, up to present-day terrorism, genocidal ethnic war, and one-sided campaigns of well-armed and organised Western nations against the armies of the Third World.

As he surveys the scene from the walls of Jericho to the car bombs of Baghdad, Dyer goes beyond the strategy and psychology of battle to distil the essence of warfare. He reveals how societies have cultivated the martial instinct and carefully conditioned their soldiers to overcome their strong, innate resistance to killing. War is as fundamental a product of civilisation as art, commerce, law and science. However, Dyer argues that 'what has been invented can be changed; war is not in our genes'. Brilliant, lucid and powerful, Waris a masterly survey of humanity's most lethal custom.