Originally Posted by
etudiant
Agree that the world was safer 40 years ago, but the nuclear powers behavior showed that no state was safe from outside attack unless it had nuclear weapons.
There is no disincentive to acquiring nuclear weapons, rather the contrary. Iran must be desperate to have them, as a deterrent to US and others, just as Taiwan needs to deter China.
Perhaps nations will be forced to compete in other ways. China's gradual influence expansion via loans and salami slicing tactics seem to be the most effective current model.
The world didn't feel safer 40 years ago. That wasn't far off the time that the Soviet Union went into Afghanistan at which point there was a huge amount of nervousness. And 40 years ago if the alarms across a city went off then people would be thinking the unthinkable. Now I suspect that most of them would simply be curious as to what was going on.
Given the disparity in power of a nuclear vs conventional arsenal it appears the nuclear powers have been quite restrained compared with what might have happened in another era.
I would suggest that things felt rather safer about 30 years ago and we entered a globalisation of the economy without too much big power abrasion. Now we see the abrasion growing but it's not yet at anything like the shadow that hung over us in 1981.