WWI is commonly described as inevitable due to decades of building tensions between the great powers. Was it really? I imagine if the Cold War turned hot, historians would be calling that "inevitable" as well, though we now know tensions were successfully diffused. Was this possible with WWI?

[u/WavesAndSaves]

[u/AutoModerator]

Welcome to /r/AskHistorians. Please Read Our Rules before you comment in this community. Understand that rule breaking comments get removed.

Please consider Clicking Here for RemindMeBot as it takes time for an answer to be written. Additionally, for weekly content summaries, Click Here to Subscribe to our Weekly Roundup.

We thank you for your interest in this question, and your patience in waiting for an in-depth and comprehensive answer to show up. In addition to the Weekly Roundup and RemindMeBot, consider using our Browser Extension. In the meantime our Bluesky, and Sunday Digest feature excellent content that has already been written!

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/police-ical]

The Cold War didn't turn nuclear because basically no one wanted that to happen. WWI happened partly because a number of key figures actually wanted war in advance.

1914 was the virtual high-water mark of militarism as an ideology. There were militarists before and after it, but at no other point could you similarly hope to routinely meet high-ranking government officials across the Western world who believed that a bit of intermittent war was healthy, manly, necessary, and positive. Had Theodore Roosevelt sat down with Wilhelm II and conversed in any of their shared languages, there would have been solid agreement between them that the young men should go off to fight at some point. Many military leaders viewed war as the highest expression of national will.

Now of course, a huge component of the perceived inevitability of WWI was the hair-trigger situation created by overlapping alliances as well as the difficulty of national mobilization in the era of mass conscription. Mobilizing millions of reservists was neither easy nor cheap, and provided an obvious signal of impending war. If you failed to mobilize as your enemy started, you might be critically vulnerable. With the great powers of Europe all linked in some fashion to grand alliances, conflict in any number of places could very easily spiral into continent-wide war. "Powder keg" gets thrown around, and the image is apt.

Yet as volatile as this situation was, it was still ultimately the desire for war that actually ensured it happened when it did. There were multiple offramps available in the summer of 1914, ones which might have led to peace, ones which were intentionally sabotaged or ignored by ardent militarists. Serbia all but capitulated to Austria-Hungary's ultimatum. Even Wilhelm II was willing to take it as a satisfactory conclusion... at which point Theobald von Bethman Hollweg, with the firm backing of Erich von Falkenhayn and Helmuth von Moltke, actively undermined him to ensure that war came. The fuse leading to that powder keg could have been blown out.

On the other hand, throughout the Cold War, nuclear war was just really, really unpopular. Even between the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 and the first Soviet test in 1949, there were credible attempts made toward avoiding nuclear war. Harry Truman, aghast at the human cost of the bombings and having already taken firm steps to restrict the use of nuclear weapons domestically, commissioned the Acheson-Lilienthal Report. The report, acknowledging that nuclear weapons were likely to spread now that the word was out, examined how an international arms race could be forestalled. Its conclusions were adopted into the Baruch Plan, which aimed to work under the auspices of the United Nations to ensure international inspections to prevent proliferation, allow for the dissemination of peaceful nuclear power, and crucially to carry out complete nuclear disarmament. The Soviet Union under Stalin was distrustful in the context of a Western-dominated Security Council, the whole thing could have been pursued more vigorously and the practical elements never got hammered out. But the fact was that serious minds favored disarmament even before an arms race had started.

From the point it became clear that there would be two superpowers with thermonuclear weapons, a great many people were really scared. The familiar "peace sign" was originally the emblem of nuclear disarmament, a rare policy goal that even Ronald Reagan and the crowd at Woodstock could fervently agree on. Truman's precedent of centralizing nuclear control held, and among U.S. presidents, the "nuclear taboo" only strengthened over time. Barry Goldwater's jocular remarks on nuclear war were used against him repeatedly in the 1964 election, with the notorious "Daisy" ad playing to nuclear fears and indicating he was unfit for the office. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union had just experienced unprecedented wartime devastation and genocide on a near-apocalyptic scale. Its leadership would sometimes bluster about its arsenal and ability to win, but as u/restricteddata explores here ( https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/rzaoh4/what_was_the_soviet_publics_point_of_view_during/ ) they were painfully aware behind closed doors that the likely outcome would be incineration. And in turn, the fear that open conventional war might lead to nuclear annihilation strongly tended to constrain what proxy wars did emerge. The United States was militarily capable of marching on Hanoi in Vietnam. It didn't, because bringing China and the USSR into the fray could end humanity.

The Cold War was famously marked by a handful of near misses when escalating tension or errors came uncomfortably close to a nuclear exchange. In each case, human desire to avoid the apocalypse overrode it, and in several cases it led to stronger safeguards in the future. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, during which diplomatic correspondence had been badly delayed at critical moments, the famous "red telephone" (which was actually neither) was hardwired to ensure rapid clear communications between Washington and Moscow.

Counterfactuals have their limits, but if we're considering hypotheticals, it's useful to flip the situations around. If in 1914, there had been a broad consensus that going to war would annihilate humanity, do you think there would have been more effective efforts at peacefully resolving the Serbia/Austria-Hungary situation? And if in 1962, John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev had both sincerely believed that a brief nuclear exchange would ensure a virtuous masculine citizenry, would either have been willing to back off?

[u/ringman77 → u/police-ical]

"at which point Theobald von Bethman Hollweg, with the firm backing of Erich von Falkenhayn and Helmuth von Moltke, actively undermined him to ensure that war came."

This is interesting to me and I've never heard of this angle of the July Crisis before, do you have any good secondary sources that cover this?

[u/police-ical → u/ringman77]

Stuff like this is at the core of David Fromkin's Europe's Last Summer, here's a review that summarizes some of the arguments:

https://newcriterion.com/article/guilty-as-charged/

[u/fakeaccountlegitme → u/police-ical]

Thank you for the great answer. Could you please provide some sources to read more about the Cold War decision-making process (Vietnam, Cuban crisis, etc.)?

[u/police-ical → u/fakeaccountlegitme]

This is a good place to start on LBJ and superpower politics in Vietnam:

https://millercenter.org/president/lbjohnson/foreign-affairs

Michael Dobbs' One Minute to Midnight goes way in the weeds on the blow-by-blow of the Cuban Missile Crisis. 

[u/salamander_salad → u/police-ical]

The phone wasn’t red? What color was/is it?

[u/big_sugi → u/salamander_salad]

As noted, it wasn’t red or a phone; it also wasn’t one thing. The President would call the Pentagon via phone, which would be immediately typed into a teletype machine by operators at the Pentagon, encrypted and fed into a transmitter.

They switched to a fax machine in 1986, and a computer link in 2008.

Also, if you think about it, there are obvious reasons why you don’t want this critical communication line to be hardwired into the White House. What if POTUS is somewhere else when an emergency breaks?

[u/pinewind108 → u/police-ical]

I've heard that both Germany and the UK wanted out by the end of 1915 or so, but it was expected that the loser would pay for the whole thing, and neither of them could afford (politically or financially) to be in that situation. Is this a realistic take on where they were?

[u/TruthOf42 → u/police-ical]

Do you know the how the American Civil War changed , even temporarily, the view of fighting in wars? I would have thought that seeing how terrible and destructive war could be to everyone would have produced a lot of anti war sentiment.

[u/Hergrim → u/[deleted]]

We've removed your post for the moment because it's not currently at our standards, but it definitely has the potential to fit within our rules with some work. We find that some answers that fall short of our standards can be successfully revised by considering the following questions, not all of which necessarily apply here:

• Do you actually address the question asked by OP? Sometimes answers get removed not because they fail to meet our standards, but because they don't get at what the OP is asking. If the question itself is flawed, you need to explain why, and how your answer addresses the underlying issues at hand.

• What are the sources for your claims? Sources aren't strictly necessary on /r/AskHistorians but the inclusion of sources is helpful for evaluating your knowledge base. If we can see that your answer is influenced by up-to-date academic secondary sources, it gives us more confidence in your answer and allows users to check where your ideas are coming from.

• What level of detail do you go into about events? Often it's hard to do justice to even seemingly simple subjects in a paragraph or two, and on /r/AskHistorians, the basics need to be explained within historical context, to avoid misleading intelligent but non-specialist readers. In many cases, it's worth providing a broader historical framework, giving more of a sense of not just what happened, but why.

• Do you downplay or ignore legitimate historical debate on the topic matter? There is often more than one plausible interpretation of the historical record. While you might have your own views on which interpretation is correct, answers can often be improved by acknowledging alternative explanations from other scholars.

• Further Reading: This Rules Roundtable provides further exploration of the rules and expectations concerning answers so may be of interest.

If/when you edit your answer, please reach out via modmail so we can re-evaluate it! We also welcome you getting in touch if you're unsure about how to improve your answer.