3 In rarer cases, writers have sought to situate war within a broader technological, economic, social and cultural framework. Military history provides a rich literature on war and technology, but its focus has tended to be on the importance of technology in helping militaries win wars. These developments affected our understanding of war's character and its interaction with the state. In this setting, technological development reduced the opportunities for war, but the arms race it generated also brought into being new technologies, and these facilitated new forms of conflict. In the period under scrutiny in this article, I argue that the role of technology in war increased dramatically because of the nuclear revolution. While I do not challenge the premise that a range of factors played a role in shaping the connection between war and the state, the precise interaction and relative importance of these forces have altered over time, and this has caused the demands of war on the state to shift in significant ways. Instead, it demonstrates how the complexity of war after 1945 led to a deep but more subtle interaction, which had a profound effect on war, the state and society in the western world. 2 However, it does not see this change as evidence of atrophy. It does not challenge the logic that the decline in war affected the war–state connection. The article presents an alternative view of the war–state relationship in the post-Second World War era. However, this expansion was checked by the declining incidence and scale of interstate war after 1945, which eventually allowed new political and economic priorities to emerge that resulted in the reshaping of, and a changed role for, the state. The synergistic relationship established at that time then blossomed over the next four centuries, during which both state and war grew exponentially. Our understanding of the connection between war and the state assumes that war played an instrumental role in the formation of the state in the early modern period. Specifically, it analyses how that relationship evolved during and after the Cold War, and extrapolates from current trends to speculate what impact war will have on the future evolution of the state. This article explores the changing relationship between war and the state in the western world since the end of the Second World War. The author speculates on how these elemental forces will play out in the future, what will happen to war and the state, and whether we will reach a point where war leads to the unmaking of the state. However, most importantly, the diffusion of military technology also affected the wider economy and society, leading to a form of internal power transition within states. This massive peacetime investment in defence technology exerted a huge impact on the character of war, which led to new strategic forms. Within this setting, the state drove the process of technological innovation in defence to its limits in an effort to demonstrate its military superiority. It proposes that the peculiar strategic conditions created by the nuclear age caused states to wage a ritualistic style of war, in which demonstration rather than the physical application of violence became increasingly important. This article argues that the relationship was closer and deeper than has been assumed. War made the state, and the state made war, but does this statement hold true today? Will it apply in the future? The consensus is that the absence of major war within the western world, post 1945, did cause the war–state relationship to change, but each became significantly less important to the other.
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