In the several years following World War II, most Americans anticipated that they would undergo a repetition of that calamitous experience within 25 years. In this, they were likely extrapolating from the fact that the beginnings of World War I and World War II were separated by about that much time. They had quite a bit of company in this estimation. For example, Josef Stalin, then the dictator of the rival Soviet Union, opined at the time, “We shall recover in fifteen or twenty years and then we’ll have another go at it” (Mueller 1989, 98). The Korean War of 1950-53, which began with the invasion of South Korea by Soviet ally North Korea, greatly increased this apprehension; in fact, many Americans during the war believed that they were “now actually in World War III” (Mueller 1989, 283n13). By 1978, 33 years had passed since the global cataclysm of World War II and no repetition had taken place—indeed, there had been rather few international wars of any kind even though there had been a very substantial increase in the number of independent states as colonialism was dismantled. It was in that year that the prominent political scientist, Kenneth Boulding, penned his book, Stable Peace (1978, 65, 122), in which he expressed his considered “cautious optimism” about the decline of such wars: “time’s arrow,” he concluded, “points clearly and unequivocally toward peace.”

KEYWORDS: Kenneth Boulding, Stable Peace, Decline of War, Taboo, Russo-Ukraine War