When I wrote this piece for my English 102 class back in 2015, I had just finished Barbara Tuchman’s “The Guns of August” and was listening through Dan Carlin’s podcast “Blueprint for Armageddon”. Both of these pieces are about the immense tragedy that was the first World War, a war that saw 40 million dead and was only surpassed by the second world war in terms of sheer destruction. I was left wondering why these two wars happened, and why a third hadn’t happened? What I tried to explain in this piece was that the people who survived these two wars realized “That sucked and was probably avoidable” and invented the UN and created channels for communication that would allow us to prevent that type of conflict in the future. If I were going to rewrite this piece today I think I would go deeper into case studies of when the world was on the brink of world war or nuclear annihilation (It happened an uncomfortable number of times).
You can download the PDF here.