Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but Bill seems to be assuming that any disarmament means total and complete disarmament and so the first guy to find a crossbow in his attic becomes king of the world.
The original position was that (and I quote) "If EVERYONE, that is ALL NATIONS, didn't have any armed forces." so the position was total disarmament.
The obvious one is that the monopoly on force that is currently held by national governments is instead held by a supranational body. In that arrangement if any nation rearms then the supranational body carries out 'regime change'.
So, in this case, you're handing over a monopoly of power to an organization like The League of Nations or the United Nations. Who guards the guards - I'd suggest to you that's an extremely unstable situation that will explode as soon as said organization starts to get delusions of grandeur. Again, this works fine if we lived in a perfect world inhabited by perfect people. We don't and the history of the United Nations is a dreadful warning as to what happens when reality bites.
thande said:
Wasn't disarmament taken pretty seriously in the 1930s?Eliminate the Depression and the Nazis' rise to power and you might get somewhere, though there's still the Soviet Union to consider (and fascist Italy could at least rock the boat...) Of course if you eliminate the Depression, you also eliminate one of the most important reasons why some governments were desperate to cut their military spending, so maybe disarmament wouldn't be as big in that case.
You're spot-on with your depression comment. Without the fear of an economic recession following the end of WW1 and the Great Depression that followed that, there would have been no disarmament - in fact quite the reverse. The Washington Treaty was already falling apart by 1929 with only the US and Uk making any serious efforts to comply with it (and even in their cases they were just going through the motions - take a look at magazine capacities for example, the US "saved weight' by reducing battleship magazine allowance from 100 rounds per gun to 80 - but kept the magazines the same size. Then there were the British tricks with boiler feedwater.........). Without the depression to force things, its likely that the Washington Treaty would have collapsed around 1930/31.
Puget Sound said:
What I would suggest is having most nations relying on citizen militias for emergency defense. That way, control of arms is in the people, who usually don't like to fight wars. It also provides a reason for governments to disarm themselves.
The problem is that regular armies go through armed civilian militias like the proverbial shit through a goose. Militias are fine in irregular warfare and for rear area security etc but for front line fighting they are utterly useless. How do they operate tanks for example? Or artillery? Or aircraft and warships? How do they acquire the command control to actually fight? Without all those good things, they're just a rabble that gets sliced up.
If we treat this as an alt-history problem, I'd suggest that a major disarmament in the 1920s is about the only PoD that could result in a German victory in WW2. The rest of Europe is virtually disarmed, Germany starts rearming and gets a head lead that way. The European countries twitter and whine but take their own time before doing anything and Germany pulls father ahead. In 1939, Germany strikes west at the European countries that are still virtually defenseless. France, Italy, Spain and the rest collapse almost on the spot. Using their industrial and economic resources, Germany then takes out the Eastern European countries, thus setting up the stage for a war against the Soviet Union. By that time, the USSR is rearming but too little, too late.
Remember, the pacifist has always brother to the tyrant.