Where Are We Going?

ENG 01/A

Paper #3

Where Are We Going?

In the final years of the twentieth century, I thought we had come to the end of the history, and I firmly believed there would be no war on this planet anymore. When I heard of continuing clashes between countries, I would ask myself how those people could be so stupid in this age. Yet the history continued and so did war. I now see that as human civilizations develop, we built more destructive weapons and wars have become more violent and vicious so much so that it has began to threaten even the life of this planet.

The Wikkipeddia defines war as “a conflict, between relatively large groups of people, which involves physical force inflicted by the use of weapons … War may cause from a dispute between two tribes that come to blow over a plot of land, to a world war.” War is as old as human society. When we open a world history book, we see a lot of wars in all the periods of human history, but the ways they were fought and their impact is different.

In prehistoric times, first humans fought physically with their bodies, and with simple weapons like clubs and spears according to cave paintings, but there is no archaeological evidence of large scale fighting. In ancient times, the major weapons were bows, arrows, spears, swords, clubs, axes, and knives. The first known large scale war is the Battle of Kadesh that took place between Egypt and Hittite forces in BC 1285. In the Middle Ages, humans used weapons like swords, arrows, shields, lances, longbows, maces, axes, and catapults. Having horses in a war in those times was a very important resource. In ancient times and in the Middle Ages the damage caused by war would be little, and would only affect small areas.

After the industrial revolution, the face of war changed dramatically. Industrial technologies made incredible weapons like machine guns, war planes, tanks, rockets and submarines that caused millions of human deaths in the World Wars. Those state-of-the-art weapons shifted the war fields to anywhere on earth and even to under the seas. In the twenty-first century, with the uncontrolled and widespread acquisition of the biological, chemical and nuclear weapons, the face of war could