HUMAN VALUE & PROFESSIONAL ETHICS

PROJECT
Report
On
“consequences of war”

AMBEDKAR INSTITUTE OF ADVANCED

COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES & RESEARCH

SUBMITTED BY: SUBMITTED TO:

Saurabh Anand(01010107315) Dr. Pradeep Chaswal
Harvinder(00410107315) ………………………
Sandeep Kumar(00910107315)
Ankit Kataria(01610107315)
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I owe a great many thanks to a great many people who helped and supported me during
the development of this Report

My deepest thanks to my team memberes, the Guide of the Report- Dr. Pradeep
chaswal for guiding and correcting various documents of mine with attention and care.

We are also thankful to our college Ambedkar institute of advanced

communication technologies & research, who directly or indirectly have been helpful in some
or the other way.

We thank our Dearest Parents, who encouraged me to extend our reach. With their help
and support, We have been able to complete this work
 PREFACE

While most analytical attention is devoted to explaining why wars and militarized disputes occur,
there is also some need to focus on what effects or consequences wars and disputes generate. The
two strongest reasons for this need are 1) that wars and, to a lesser extent, disputes have had
exceptionally strong influences on the way the world works and 2) previous wars and disputes
are likely to strongly influence the subsequent probability of more wars and disputes.
Nevertheless, impact assessment is rarely straight forward. Nor is anyone likely to be
overwhelmed by the number of pertinent studies that have been completed to date. A literature
review can offer some sense of what is known, but one of the consequences of war that is equally
revealing is how little is known with any degree of certainty. A great deal more work remains to
be done.
Table of Contents
What is War………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………...…5
Effects of war: moral knowledge, revenge, reconciliation, and medicalised concepts of
“recovery” .................................................................................................................................................... 6
Truth commissions, catharsis, and reconciliation ..................................................................................... 8
Defining armed conflict ............................................................................................................................ 9
On the economy ........................................................................................................................................ 9
Destruction of infrastructure ............................................................................................................... 10
Labor force .......................................................................................................................................... 11
On society ............................................................................................................................................... 11
Displacement....................................................................................................................................... 12
Education ............................................................................................................................................ 13
Gender ................................................................................................................................................. 13
Long term effects ................................................................................................................................ 14
Politically ................................................................................................................................................ 14
On state formation............................................................................................................................... 15
Case studies............................................................................................................................................. 15
Israel/Palestine .................................................................................................................................... 15
World War II ....................................................................................................................................... 16
The Pentagon’s Radioactive Bullet ............................................................................................................. 17
No Protection .......................................................................................................................................... 18
The Gulf War Test .................................................................................................................................. 19
The Aftermath ......................................................................................................................................... 20
Summary……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….23

Refrences………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………24
What is War:
Wars break out for various reasons .According to experts, the main reasons or factors that
contribute to wars are human greed for wealth and intolerance. the effects of war are both
physical and psychological . Human society are deeply affected by wars as , as residential areas,
public infrastructure , hospitals and the very basis of human existence is destroyed .Wars bring
untold miseries as well as political and economical instability.Peoples lives and daily existence
come under threat .Population is displaced and have to constantly move about for security
reasons . Some are scared and some are emotionally and some physically for life.

Thousands of people die in the war zone leaving behind their families behind and many a
thousands of people live physically handicapped for the rest of their lives .It was reported that
out of 60 million European soldiers who were mobilized in the world war I , 8 million people
were killed 7 million were permanently disabled and around million were seriously injured .
Residential areas become hard to live in. the public infrastructure is destroyed and the hospitals
become packed with patients . Wars not only destroy the mankind but also natural resources
creating a lot of pollution . Trees are cut on an extensive scale to meet the war demands . Iron
and steel are also used on a large scale . Nuclear weapons like the ones that were used on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki not only killing two hundred thousand people but also causing severe
damage to the natural environment. Even today people suffer from diseases caused by the radio
activity. Further more , the disease are are inherited by their off springs millions of people dead
due to wars.

Wars disturb common man’s life. Population gets displaced and have to constantly move about
due to security reasons and sometimes go into hiding creating uncomfortable conditions .
Children deprived of education for years together ruining their future . It would become difficult
for common man to find job and continue with their normal day to day existence. On an overall
look wars create a second hell on the earth while we are still living.

Thus, humans must avoid wars at any cost. the only way we can protect our lives and ensure
stability in our world is to practice tolerance and respect for each other.Or else , we too would
become extinct like dinosaurs.
Effects of war: moral knowledge, revenge, reconciliation, and
medicalised concepts of “recovery”
Western health professionals and the public have a misguided image of war and its aftermath
that is often far removed from the actual experience of non-westernised societies. A British
psychiatrist looks at the effects of war and at the belief that the emotional reactions of victims of
war should be modified
In 1999, a survey of 600 households of Kosovo Albanians by the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention found that 86% of men and 89% of women had strong feelings of hatred towards
the Serbs. Overall, 51% of men and 43% of women had a desire to seek revenge most or all of
the time.1 Similar findings are seen, for example, with people from both sides of the Israeli-
Palestinian conflict.
The idea that feelings of revenge are bad for you comes from the quietist Judaeo-Christian
traditions of confessing, forgiving, and turning the other cheek. The report of the Kosovan
survey cast feelings of revenge as indicators of poor mental health, and it concluded by making
recommendations for mental health programmes. In Croatia—a part of former Yugoslavia—a
foreign led project told Croatian children affected by the war that not hating and mistrusting
Serbs would help them recover from the trauma.
In a recent study of victims of the apartheid era in South Africa—some of whom testified to the
Truth and Reconciliation Commission—post-traumatic stress disorder and depression were
significantly more common in those who were unforgiving towards the perpetrators than in those
with high “forgiveness” scores. Such studies seek to give scientific weight to the notion that the
mental health of victims is at risk if they do not forgive those who hurt them. The moral
economy that operated during the hearings is indicated by the fact that commissioners were not
uncomfortable if testifiers wept while giving evidence but that they did not like them to become
angry.
Victims of war are often expected to be vengeful because of their “traumatisation” or
“brutalisation” and to promote new “cycles of violence.” The emotional reactions of people
affected by war are perceived as harmful to themselves and dangerous to others; this leads to a
belief that the reactions of victims should be modified. In Rwanda and former Yugoslavia, in
particular, such a belief provided the basis for counselling interventions used—often on a large
scale—by humanitarian organisations.
But one man's revenge is another's social justice. The question is whether anger, hatred, and a
felt need for revenge in people who have been grievously wronged are necessarily bad things.
Such feelings carry a moral interrogative that points to social and individual wounds and to
shared ideas about justice, accountability, and punishment that hold a social fabric together. They
demand answers. Should Jewish survivors of the Nazi genocide have been counselled in 1945
not to hate Germans? Were the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war leaders, which handed down capital
punishment after the second world war, the result of the brutalisation of victims of Nazism and
their unhealthy feelings of hatred and revenge? Or did the trials show justice in action and help
victims to make sense of a man made catastrophe?
Children affected by war are often reported as being “brutalised”: the implication is of damaged
psychologies and moral norms and of diminished humanity. The United Nations Children's Fund
has stated that “time does not heal trauma” for millions of such children, who are often described
as a “lost generation.” Did this turn out to be true for the children caught up in the second world
war in Europe? The medical literature is replete with similarly sweeping statements that lack
validity and are pathologising and stigmatising. Moreover, the people being studied have not
given consent for their mental health to be objectified and characterised as unhealthy (typically
by an observer far away), which raises ethical questions.

War as illness or as moral problem

The task that faces victims of war and atrocity is often spoken of as a “healing” or “recovery”
through “processing” (of traumatic experience), “acceptance,” and “coming to terms with the
past.” This posits an unduly mechanistic and medicalised view of human experience that
suggests that the pathological effects of war are found inside a person and that the person
recovers as if from an illness.
Thirty years of civil war in Northern Ireland has had no significant impact on referral rates to
mental health services.7 Elsewhere too, data that suggest that psychiatric morbidity is higher in
populations exposed to war than in those not exposed are lacking. Nonetheless, as an effect of
war, “trauma” seems to be displacing hunger as the issue of concern among the public; and
Western approaches to mental health are seen as an automatic part of the humanitarian response,
even for victims of war in non-Western countries.Yet “talk therapy” implicitly aims to change
not just a person's behaviour but their mind—the way a person construes. Such therapy trades on
an ethos of acceptance: it is the person, not the society, that is meant to change; a truism is that
“successful” therapy moves the world view of the client closer to that of the therapist.The
traditions of the clinic are for political and moral neutrality. Whose interpretations of the world
will count at this critical moment?
“We are not mad, we are betrayed,” was the response of one refugee approached by researchers
for the pilot of a mental health project intended for Bosnians in Britain. This statement aimed to
reassert the problem as moral and collective rather than medicopsychological and individual. At
issue here are the limitations of a discourse in which the effects of war and atrocity come to be
represented as a person's illness and vulnerability. Like other kinds of crisis—a serious accident
or a diagnosis of cancer—war generates moral knowledge that may throw into question a
person's assumptions about the world and their values and priorities. War victims—who carry
the bitter knowledge that no limits exist for what can be done to people without power—beg
resonant “why?” or “why me?” questions that address a moral domain. Medical science is good
at answering “how?” questions—technical questions—but it only deals with “why?” questions
through impersonal statistics and epidemiological studies. Patients may be alone in their need to
find a social and moral meaning for what they have experienced.
Victims of war may have to struggle with whether “recovery” and “acceptance” are merely
markers of their own impotence and humiliation or whether, worse still, they are an acquiescence
in injustice by themselves, by people they know, and, frequently, by the Western led world order
that, behind the rhetorical screen of “human rights,” retains the realpolitik of “business as usual.”
Trauma programmes certainly can be seen cynically by those for whom they are intended, they
can be experienced as patronising or indeed as a form of pacification. In Bosnia, people
derisively referred to the aid delivered to them through a model that did not offer physical
protection, restitution, or justice as “bread and counselling.”

Truth commissions, catharsis, and reconciliation

The 21 official truth commissions established around the world since 1974 to document state
terror and atrocity have grappled with concepts of reparation and reconciliation. Although the
commissions seek to create a public narrative of acknowledgment, they have also traded on the
idea that victims given a chance to speak would have a cathartic experience that would help their
recovery. Here too, “recovery” is defined within a medicalised idiom, and it is presumed to be an
individual centred process that is independent of, for example, justice (very few trials of
perpetrators have been held) or broader factors such as economic improvement. In the South
African study, the act of testifying was not found to alter victims' psychiatric status or attitudes to
forgiveness.
No generalisations can be made about issues of accountability and the purifying power of “truth”
in relation to social reconciliation. For example, South Africa's neighbour Mozambique has not
had a truth commission. In this country, in which one million civilians have been tortured,
maimed, or murdered, virtually no calls for accountability and punishment have been made.
Traditional healing mechanisms (which do not include talking about traumatic experiences) have
been deployed extensively at the grass roots. Here, as in most countries of the non-Western
world, “health” is defined as much in terms of social relations as in terms of biomedicine. The
people believe that ill health can be caused by the socially polluting effects of the angry spirits of
people wrongfully killed and not properly buried. If these spirits are appeased, health and peace
can return.
Recovery as a social process

Notions of healing, reparation, and justice to address the sociomoral aftermath of war vary
between cultures and over time. Social memory—the domain of cenotaph ceremonies, truth
commissions, etc—plays a role, but so too does silence about the past, as the Mozambique case
shows. This silence does not mean that the events are forgotten—it shows reticence and a
conservation of energy for the urgent task of rebuilding. With 90% of recent wars being civil,
negotiations between ordinary people about their feelings of mistrust or revenge and about issues
of responsibility, culpability, and restitution must typically be pragmatic.
Health professionals should beware of looking at responses to war through a Western
medicotherapeutic prism. The question of how people recover from the catastrophe of war is
profound, but the lesson of history is straightforward. “Recovery” is not a discrete process: it
happens in people's lives rather than in their psychologies. It is practical and unspectacular, and it
is grounded in the resumption of the ordinary rhythms of everyday life—the familial,
sociocultural, religious, and economic activities that make the world intelligible.
Post war effects are widely spread. and can be long term or short term. Soldiers experience war
differently than civilians, although either suffer in times of war, and women and children suffer
unspeakable atrocities in particular. In the past decade, up to two million of those killed in
armed conflicts were children. The widespread trauma caused by these atrocities and suffering
of the civilian population is another legacy of these conflicts, the following creates extensive
emotional and psychological stress. Present-day internal wars generally take a larger toll on
civilians than state wars. This is due to the increasing trend where combatants have made
targeting civilians a strategic objective. A state conflict is an armed conflict that occurs with the
use of armed force between two parties, of which one is the government of a state. "The three
problems posed by intra‐state conflict are the willingness of UN members, particularly the
strongest member, to intervene; the structural ability of the UN to respond; and whether the
traditional principles of peacekeeping should be applied to intra‐state conflict". Effects of war
also include mass destruction of cities and have long lasting effects on a country's
economy. Armed conflict have important indirect negative consequences on, infrastructure,
public health provision, and social order. These indirect consequences are often overlooked and
underappreciated.

Defining armed conflict

Armed conflict is not clearly defined internationally. According to the Geneva Conventions of
1949, common article 2 states that "all cases of declared war or of any armed conflict that may
arise between two or more high contracting parties, even if the state of war is not recognized, the
convention shall also apply to all cases of partial or total occupation of the territory of a high
contracting party even if the said occupation meets with no armed resistance".International
humanitarian law works to protect the rights and dignity of civilians during peace and armed
conflict with parties of the conflict having legally binding obligations concerning the rights of
persons not involved in the conflict.Current day conflicts continue to occur with breaches of
human rights and destruction of property continuing to happen due to state interests.

On the economy
The economy may suffer devastating impacts during and after a time of war. According to
Shank, "negative unintended consequences occur either concurrently with the war or develop as
residual effects afterwards thereby impeding the economy over the longer term". In 20 the
economic impact of war and violence was estimated to be eleven percent of gross world
product (GWP) or 9.46 trillion dollars. Everyday activities of a community or country are
disrupted and property may be damaged. When people become misplaced, they cannot continue
to work or keep their businesses open, causing damages to the economy of countries involved.
A government may decide to direct money to fund war efforts, leaving other institutions with
little or no available budget.
In some cases war has stimulated a country's economy (World War II is often cr ed with bringing
America out of the Great Depression). According to the World Bank the event that conflicts
subside in the country, and in the event that there is a transition to democracy the following will
result in an increase economic growth by encouraging investment of the country and its people,
schooling, economic restructuring, public-good provision, and reducing social unrest. Conflict
very rarely has positive effects on an economy according to the world bank "Countries bordering
conflict zones are facing tremendous budgetary pressure. The World Bank estimates that the
influx of more than 630,000 Syrian refugees have cost Jordan over USD 2.5 billion a year. This
amounts to 6 percent of GDP and one-fourth of government's annual revenues". One of the
most commonly cited benefits for the economy is higher GDP growth. This has occurred
throughout all of the conflict periods, other than in the Afghanistan and Iraq war period. Another
benefit commonly mentioned is that WWII established the appropriate conditions for future
growth and ended the great depression. In previous cases, such as the wars of Louis XIV,
the Franco-Prussian War, and World War I, warfare serves only to damage the economy of the
countries involved. For example, Russia's involvement in World War I took such a toll on the
Russian economy that it almost collapsed and greatly contributed to the start of the Russian
Revolution of 1917.
As a result of the Sri Lankan Civil War, Sri Lanka's military spending as a percentage of GDP,
increased from 1.6 percent in 1983 to 3.5 in 2008 and reached an all-time peak at 5.9 percent of
GDP in 1995 representing over 20 percent of the government's total spending. Until the war,
arms were not nearly a significant amount of government spending and their defense personnel
increased from 22,000 in 1989 to 2 ,000 in 2008. After the war began, however, arms were
imported annually in response to increasing violence. By the year 2000, the Sri Lankan
government's "import bill for arms was around $US 274 million", a record high during the war.
Destruction of infrastructure

Les Grandes Misères de la guerre depict the destruction unleashed on civilians during the Thirty
Years' War.
Destruction of infrastructure can create a catastrophic collapse in the social interrelated structure,
infrastructure services, education and health care system. Destruction of schools and
educational infrastructure have led to a decline in education among many countries affected by
war. 6 If certain infrastructural elements are significantly damaged or destroyed, it can cause
serious disruption of the other systems such as the economy. This includes loss of certain
transportation routes in a city which could make it impossible for the economy to function
properly and also for people to be evacuated.
Labor force
The labor force of the economy also changes with the effects of war. The labor force is affected
in a multitude of ways most often due to the drastic loss of life, change in population, the labor
force size shrinking due to the movement of refugees and displacement and the destruction of
infrastructure which in turn allows for a deterioration of productivity.
When men head off to war, women take over the jobs they left behind. This causes an economic
shift in certain countries because after the war these women usually want to keep their jobs. The
shortage of labor force during the 1980–1988 Iran–Iraq War enabled women to enter fields of
employment that had previously been closed to them and absorbed them into a large number of
much-needed jobs. In Women and Work in Iran, Povey points, "The Iran–Iraq war reduced the
supply of male labor is one factor. The war increased the number of women seeking work or
resisting exclusion. Many women even occupied important positions for the first time". This can
also be seen in the Second Liberian Civil War, and in the Rwandan genocide. Women in both
conflicts took over their husbands jobs due to the effects of the war, and received more economic
equality as a result.

On society
"International humanitarian law (IHL), also known as the laws of war and the law of armed
conflict, is the legal framework applicable to situations of armed conflict and occupation. As a
set of rules and principles it aims, for humanitarian reasons, to limit the effects of armed
conflict". International humanitarian law works to limit the effects of war and will protect the
people who do not participate in such hostilities. Most wars have resulted in a significant loss of
life. Conflict characterizes a major obstacle for the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs),
particularly for the universal completion of primary education and gender equality in
education. "The Millennium Development goals are the world's time-bound and quantified
targets for addressing extreme poverty in its many dimensions-income poverty, hunger, disease,
lack of adequate shelter, and exclusion-while promoting gender equality, education, and
environmental sustainability. They are also basic human rights-the rights of each person on the
planet to health, education, shelter, and security". There can be no doubt that armed conflict
directly kills, injures, and harms more men than women in that combatants are predominantly
male. Armed conflict has many indirect consequences such as on health and survival. "Armed
conflict both generates conditions for increased morbidity and mortality". 7
Why?, from The Disasters of War (Los desastres de la guerra), by Francisco Goya, 18 - . A
collection of depictions of the brutalities of the Napoleonic-Peninsular War.
During Napoleon's retreat from Moscow, more French soldiers died of typhus than were killed
by the Russians. Felix Markham thinks that 450,000 crossed the Neman on 25 June 18 , of
whom less than 40,000 recrossed in anything like a recognizable military formation. More
soldiers were killed from 00–19 by typhus than from all military action during that time
combined. In addition, if it were not for the modern medical advances there would be thousands
more dead from disease and infection.
Displacement
Displacement or forced migration results most often during a time of war and can adversely
affect both the community and an individual. When a war breaks out, many people flee their
homes in fear of losing their lives and their families, and as a result, they become misplaced
either internally or externally. Those who are internally displaced face a direct threat because
they do not receive the rights that a refugee may receive and are not eligible for protection under
an international system. Victims of internal displacements are symptoms of war that are often
motivated by communal hatred based on ethnic background, race, or religious views. External
displacement are individuals who are forced out of the borders of their country into another as
seen with the Syrian Refugees. The following may have a severe economic impact on a country.
In 20 , 53 percent of refugees worldwide originated from Somalia, Afghanistan, and Syria. In a
Global Trends Report by the UNHRC, approximately 65 million people around the world have
been forced from their home. Out of this number, 21.3 million are refugees, over half of the
demographic under the age of 18. Some of the top countries absorbing these displaced peoples
are Pakistan (1.6 million), Lebanon (1.1 million), and Turkey (2.5 million). In times of violence,
people are displaced from their homes and seek places where they are welcome, periodically
meeting places they are not welcome.
In response to an influx of refugees and asylum seekers from countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq,
and Sri Lanka, Australia initiated a controversial plan in 2001 titled the Pacific Solution which
called for all asylum seekers arriving by boat to be sent to the small and barren island Nauru. 27
Asylum seekers were housed in crowded tents and lived under a constant threat of running out
of resources, especially water. Individuals were kept in the detention center until their refugee
status was granted or denied. Chris Evans, former immigration minister stated the Pacific
Solution as being “a cynical, costly and ultimately unsuccessful exercise,” and was ended under
a newly elected Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in 2007. In February 2008, after the Pacific Solution
was ended, the final members of a group of 82 refugees detained on Nauru were granted
residency rights and resettled in Australia according to a humanitarian resettlement program.
In the case of the Sri Lankan Civil War, displacement had a high chance to impoverish those
affected, but women and children were found to be the most vulnerable to the burden of
displacement. A Sri Lankan female head of household earns less than a household that has a male
head. After men and women became displaced, however, females lost 76% of their income and
males lost 80%. While the lost income is within a relatively close percentage, females were more
likely, on average to fall below the official poverty line. Male household by comparison were
able to stay above the line even after becoming displaced. In a post-displacement setting, male
headed households had more earned income than female headed households. Males benefit from
manual labor, carpentry, masonry, and government services while females had earned their
income from informal work. Informal work for females is more difficult in a post-displacement
setting where they do not have access to the same tools as they did pre-displacement.
The Palestinian people have suffered from displacement as a result of armed conflict and the
military occupation. The largest displacement caused due to war occurred in 1947, after the
United Nations agreed to have Palestine divided into two states. It later became the Israeli
decision that Palestinian refugees no longer were permitted to return to their lands unless it was
to reunify a family. "Nearly one-third of the registered Palestine refugees, more than 1.5 million
individuals, live in 58 recognized Palestine refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, the Syrian Arab
Republic, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem".
Education
Oftentimes when a country is in an economic crisis there is an increase in poverty which results
in the decline of education. Over half of the world’s children that are out of school are assessed
to live in conflict-affected fragile states. According to the UNESCO report “The groups most
negatively affected by conflict were those that suffered from multiple exclusion, for example
based on gender, area of residence, household wealth, language, and ethnicity”. One
predominantly damaging, effect of conflict on education is the proliferation of attacks on schools
with children, teachers and school buildings become the targets of violence. During times of war
teachers and students often suffer from death or displacement. This prevents the opening of
schools and increases teachers absenteeism. In the case of Iraq, boys were pulled out of school to
work for their families, and therefore the education gap for men and women shrank.
Gender
Conflict negatively impacts women and men, which often results in gender-specific difficulties
that are not recognized or addressed by mainstream communities across the globe (Baden and
Goetz, 1997). War impacts women differently as they are more likely to die from indirect causes
as opposed to direct causes. "Women and girls suffered disproportionately during and after war,
as existing inequalities were magnified, and social networks broke down, making them more
vulnerable to sexual violence and exploitation, the Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping
Operations". Men during war are more likely to die from direct causes such as direct violence.
The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, made women and armed conflict one of most
critical areas of concern. It stated that peace is directly linked to equality between men and
women and to development post conflict (Beijing Platform for Action). Plumper found that most
women live longer when they are in peacetime, when compared to a state that is in armed
conflict the gender gap of life expectancy drastically decreases in the male to female ratio. The
indirect effects of militarized conflicts' affect access to food, hygiene, health services, and clean
water. Women suffer more harshly from the damage to the health as well as overall well being,
other infrastructure damages, and the wider economic damage as well as from dislocation during
and post-conflict. During a time of war women are often separated from their husbands or lose
them as a cost of war. Because of this there is a dramatic economic cost effect on women causing
many to bear the entire economic responsibility for their household.
Three of the most common things done by Israeli military occupation includes the apartheid
wall, displacement of people, and house demolitions caused by bombings especially in Gaza.
This has severe consequences on men and women. As the number of marital disputes rises after a
house demolition, women are forced to look for work in order to support the livelihood of their
families. Also, there is a large rise in domestic violence that leaves women more
vulnerable. Palestinians, particularly women, are unable to access basic services because of the
closeness to or route of the apartheid wall, resulting in everyday abuse and suffering as they pass
through Israeli checkpoints in order to have such access and admittance.
Long term effects
During the Thirty Years' War in Europe, for example, the population of the German states was
reduced by about 30%. The Swedish armies alone may have destroyed up to 2,000 castles,
18,000 villages and 1,500 towns in Germany, one-third of all German towns.
Estimates for the total casualties of World War II vary, but most suggest that some 60 million
people died in the war, including about 20 million soldiers and 40 million civilians. The Soviet
Union lost around 27 million people during the war, about half of all World War II casualties.
The largest number of civilian deaths in a single city was 1.2 million citizens dead during the
872-day Siege of Leningrad. Based on 1860 census figures, 8% of all white American males
aged to 50 died in the American Civil War. Of the 60 million European soldiers who were
mobilized in World War I, 8 million were killed, 7 million were permanently disabled, and
million were seriously injured.

Politically
When war strikes it ends up affecting government structures along with the people in power of
the government. Many times, one regime is removed and new forms of government are put into
place. This can be seen in the Second Liberian Civil War where rebels had removed the current
leader, Charles Taylor, and with the help of the United Nations deployed a new democratic form
of government that stands for equal rights and even has a women president in Ellen Johnson
Sirleaf. This change in government was also apparent in Rwanda in 1993 when the genocide
finally stopped. The country had shifted from dictatorship to pure democracy and gave both men
and women the right to vote. The country also installed a quota system where a certain number
of government seats must belong to women. The country's quota was 30% of seats, however
women now hold 55% of seats from their own merit. These changes in government also changes
the way the country behaves economically.
Some scholars, however, have argued that war can have a positive effect on political
development.
On state formation
Political scientist Jeffrey Herbst argues that interstate war is a requisite factor in the formation of
strong states. Using Europe's history of state formation as his model, Herbst identifies interstate
war as the factor that enabled states to effectively collect revenue and to generate a spirit of
nationalism, two results that Herbst considers "crucial developments" in the formation of strong
states. War increases both a leader's incentive to establish an efficient system of taxation and the
population's willingness to assent to higher taxes. The existence of an external threat is also a
powerful impetus for the development of a cooperative or unified state. Because the system of
revenue collection, increased rate of taxation, and spirit of nationalism generally persist after war
ends, war can have long-term consequences on a state's formation. This is particularly true of
states in regions or periods of consistent warfare because states generally either adapted or were
conquered. Herbst postulates that the stability of borders and lack of credible external threats
between African states could result in "a new brand of states", those that will "remain
permanently weak".
Charles Tilly, an American sociologist, political scientist, and historian, claims that within the
context of European history, "war makes states." While the purposes of war were to expand
territory and to check or overcome neighboring states, the process of war inadvertently
engendered European-style state-building. War making resulted in state making in four ways:

1. War making that culminated in the elimination of local rivals gave rise to one centralized,
coercive strong state power that had a large-scale monopoly on violence.
2. Eventually, this large-scale monopoly on violence held by the state was extended to serve
the state's clients or supporters. This encouraged pacification, led to the formation of
police forces, and provided protection as a state service.
3. War making and military expansion would not be possible without extracting resources
from the population and accumulating capital. Historically, this led to the establishment
of fiscal and accounting institutions to collect taxes from the population to fuel war.
4. Finally, courts of law, guarantees of rights, and representative institutions were demanded
for by the state's populations whose resistance to war making and state making led to
concessions being made by the state. This enabled the population to protect their
individual property without allowing them to use force, which would compromise the
state's monopoly on violence.
War making and the extraction, protection, and state making that followed were interdependent.
Tilly ultimately argues that the interactions between these four processes influenced the classic
European state making experience.

Case studies
Israel/Palestine
The effects of conflict and its aftermath in Palestine reveals distinct types of disadvantages that
worsen gender relations in both men and women. Increased militarization of the conflict and a
rise in gender-based violence focused towards Palestinian as well as Israeli women are major
ongoing issues happening in the conflict zone. The longstanding effects of Israeli occupation and
policies of siege, confinement and confiscation of land have resulted in social as well as
economic crisis for Palestinians. Consequently, the Israeli occupation remains a major problem
for Palestinian women with regard to their advancement in labor, and participation in executive
governmental bodies. In the light of an increasingly failing security and living conditions most
efforts should be directed at everyday survival and creating a more stable environment for the
Palestinian peoples. The pushing of gender issues should be at the peak of the political agenda.
World War II
One stark illustration of the effect of war upon economies is the Second World War. The Great
Depression of the 1930s ended as nations increased their production of war materials to serve
the war effort. The financial cost of World War II is estimated at about a $1.944 trillion U.S.
dollars worldwide, making it the most costly war in capital as well as lives.
Property damage in the Soviet Union inflicted after the Axis invasion was estimated to a value of
679 billion rubles. The combined damage consisted of complete or partial destruction of 1,7
cities and towns, 70,000 villages/hamlets, 2,508 church buildings, 31,850 industrial
establishments, 40,000 miles of railroad, 4 0 railroad stations, 40,000 hospitals, 84,000 schools,
and 43,000 public libraries.
 The Pentagon’s Radioactive Bullet

It is about two feet long, cylindrical and far denser than steel. When fired from a U.S. Army M1
Abrams tank, it is capable of drilling a hole through the strongest of tank armors. The makers of this
tank-killing ammunition say it is the best in the world. But there is one problem with the Pentagon’s
super bullet: It is made of radioactive waste.

The first time the Army used this “depleted uranium” (D.U.) ammunition on a battlefield was during
the Gulf War, in 1991. Yet despite Pentagon assurances that only a small number of U.S. troops were
exposed to dangerous levels of D.U., a two-month investigation by The Nation has discovered that
hundreds and perhaps thousands of U.S. veterans were unknowingly exposed to potentially
hazardous levels of depleted uranium, or uranium-238, in the Persian Gulf. Some soldiers inhaled it
when they pulled wounded comrades from tanks hit by D.U. “friendly fire” or when they clambered
into destroyed Iraqi vehicles. Others picked up expended rounds as war trophies. Thousands of other
Americans were near accidental explosions of D.U. munitions.

The Army never told combat engineer Dwayne Mowrer or his fellow soldiers in the First Infantry
Division much about D.U. But the G.I.s learned how effective the radioactive rounds were as the
“Big Red One” made its way up the carnage-ridden four-lane Kuwaiti road known as the “highway
of death.” Mowrer and his company saw the unique signature of a D.U. hit on nearly half the
disabled Iraqi vehicles encountered. “It leaves a nice round hole, almost like someone had welded it
out,” Mowrer recalled.

What Mowrer and others didn’t know was that D.U. is highly toxic and, according to
the Encyclopedia of Occupational Health and Safety, can cause lung cancer, bone cancer and kidney
disease. All they heard were rumors.

“Once in a while you’d hear some guy say ‘Hey, I heard those things were radioactive,'” Mowrer
said. “Of course, everybody else says, ‘Yeah, right!’ We really thought we were in the new
enlightened Army. We thought all that Agent Orange stuff and human radiation experiments were a
thing of the past.”

So Mowrer and his comrades didn’t worry when a forty-ton HEMTT transport vehicle packed with
D.U. rounds accidentally exploded near their camp. “We heard this tremendous boom and saw this
black cloud blowing our way,” he said. “The cloud went right over us, blew right over our camp.”

Before they left the gulf, Mowrer and other soldiers in the 651st Combat Support Attachment began
experiencing strange flulike symptoms. He figured the symptoms would fade once he was back in the
United States. They didn’t. Mowrer’s personal doctor and physicians at the local Veterans
Administration could find nothing wrong with him. Meanwhile, his health worsened: fatigue,
memory loss, bloody noses and diarrhea. Then the single parent of two began experiencing problems
with motor skills, bloody stools, bleeding gums, rashes and strange bumps on his eyelids, nose and
tongue. Mowrer thinks his problems can be traced to his exposure to D.U.

The Pentagon says problems like Mowrer’s could not have been caused by D.U., a weapon that many
Americans have heard mentioned, if at all, only in the movie Courage Under Fire, which was based
on a real-life D.U. friendly-fire incident. The Defense Department insists that D.U. radiation is
relatively harmless–only about 60 percent as radioactive as regular uranium. When properly encased,
D.U. gives off so little radiation, the Pentagon says, that a soldier would have to sit surrounded by it
for twenty hours to get the equivalent radiation of one chest X-ray. (According to scientists, a D.U.
antitank round outside its metal casing can emit as much radiation in one hour as fifty chest X-rays.)
Plus, the military brass argues that D.U. rounds so effectively destroyed Iraqi tanks that the weapons
saved many more U.S. lives than radiation from them could possibly endanger.

But the Pentagon has a credibility gap. For years, it has denied that U.S. soldiers in the Persian Gulf
were exposed to chemical weapons. In September Pentagon officials admitted that troops were
exposed when they destroyed Iraqi stores of chemical weapons, as Congress held hearings on “Gulf
War Syndrome.” The Pentagon also argued, in its own defense, that exposure to chemical weapons
could not fully explain the diverse range of illnesses that have plagued thousands of soldiers who
served in the Persian Gulf. Exposure to D.U.–our own weaponry, in other words–could well be
among the missing links.

Scientists point out that D.U. becomes much more dangerous when it burns. When fired, it combusts
on impact. As much as 70 percent of the material is released as a radioactive and highly toxic dust
that can be inhaled or ingested and then trapped in the lungs or kidneys. “This is when it becomes
most dangerous,” says Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental
Research. “It becomes a powder in the air that can irradiate you.” Some scientists speculate that
veterans’ health problems stem from exposure to chemical agents combined with D.U., burning oil-
field vapors and a new nerve-gas vaccine given to U.S. troops. “We know that depleted uranium is
toxic and can cause diseases,” said Dr. Howard Urnovitz, a microbiologist who has testified before
the Presidential Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans’ Illnesses. “We also know these soldiers
were exposed to large amounts of nerve-gas agents. What we don’t know is how the combination of
these toxic and radioactive materials affect the immune system.”

Exactly how many U.S. soldiers were exposed to dangerous levels of D.U. during the Gulf War
remains in dispute. Friendly-fire incidents left at least twenty-two veterans with D.U. shrapnel
embedded in their bodies. The Veterans Administration is also monitoring the health of eleven more
soldiers who were in tanks hit by D.U. but who were not hit by shrapnel, and twenty-five soldiers
who helped prepare D.U.-contaminated tanks for shipment back to the United States without being
told of the risk. The tanks were later buried in a radioactive waste disposal site run by the Energy
Department.

No Protection
The Nation investigation has also discovered that the average infantry soldier is still receiving no
training on how to protect against exposure to D.U., although such training was called for by an
Army report on depleted uranium completed in June 1995. On the training lapses, the Pentagon does
acknowledge past mistakes. Today the Army is providing new training in D.U. safety procedures for
more soldiers, particularly members of armor, ordnance or medical teams that handle D.U. on a
routine basis. “I feel confident that if an individual soldier has a need to know, they will be provided
that training from the basic level on,” Army Col. H.E. Wolfe told The Nation. But Wolfe confirmed
that even now, not all infantry will get D.U. training.

Although the full hazards of these weapons are still not known, the law allows the President to waive
restrictions on the sale of D.U. to foreign armies. Documents obtained under the Freedom of
Information Act show that the Pentagon has already sold the radioactive ammunition to Thailand,
Taiwan, Bahrain, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Greece, Korea, Turkey, Kuwait and other countries which the
Pentagon will not disclose for national security reasons. The proliferation of D.U. ammunition
around the world boosts the chances that U.S. soldiers will eventually be on the receiving end of the
devastating weapon.

A broad coalition of veterans organizations, environmental groups and scientists hope that won’t
happen. On September 12, they met in NewYork to kick off a campaign calling for an international
ban on D.U. weapons. Even the conservative-minded Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American
Legion recently passed resolutions calling on the Defense Department to reconsider its use of the
controversial weapon.

“Clearly the Department of Defense hasn’t thought through the use of D.U. on the battlefield and
what kind of exposures they are subjecting our troops to,” charged Matt Puglisi, the assistant director
of veterans affairs and rehabilitation for the American Legion. “It is a very effective weapon, which
is why the D.O.D. really doesn’t want to see it re-examined. We only spent a couple of days [in
winning the Gulf War]. But what if we had a fight that took years and years? We could have tens of
thousands of vets with D.U. shrapnel in them.”

The Gulf War Test

The U.S. Army began introducing D.U. ammo into its stockpiles in 1978, when the United States and
the Soviet Union were engaged in intense competition over which side would develop the most
effective tank. Washington feared that the Soviets with their T-72 had jumped ahead in the
development of armor that was nearly impenetrable by traditional weapons. It was thought that D.U.
rounds could counter the improved Soviet armor. But not until Iraq’s Soviet-supplied army invaded
oil-rich Kuwait and President Bush sent an expeditionary force of 500,000 to dislodge it was there a
chance to battle-test the D.U. rounds.

American M1 Abrams tanks and Bradley armored personnel carriers fired D.U. rounds; the A-10
Warthog aircraft, which provided close support for combat troops, fired twin 30-millimeter guns with
small-caliber D.U. bullets. All told, in the 100 hours of the February ground war, U.S. tanks fired at
least 14,000 large-caliber D.U. rounds, and U.S. planes some 940,000 smaller-caliber rounds. D.U.
rounds left about 1,400 Iraqi tanks smoldering in the desert. Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf recalled one
commander saying his unit “went through a whole field of burning Iraqi tanks.”

The D.U. weapons succeeded beyond the Pentagon’s wildest dreams. But they received little public
attention compared with the fanfare over other high-tech weapons: smart bombs, stealth fighters and
Patriot missiles (which looked good, even if they didn’t, as it turned out, work). D.U., perhaps the
most effective new weapon of them all, was mentioned only in passing. “People have a fear of
radioactivity and radioactive materials,” explained Dan Fahey, a former Navy officer who served in
the gulf. “The Army seems to think that if they are going to keep using D.U., the less they tell people
about it the better.”

As the U.S.-led coalition forces swept to victory, many celebrating G.I.s scrambled onto–or into–
disabled Iraqi vehicles. “When you get a lot of soldiers out on a battlefield, they are going to be
curious,” observed Chris Kornkven, a staff sergeant with the 304th Combat Support Company. “The
Gulf War was the first time we saw Soviet tanks. Many of us started climbing around these destroyed
vehicles.” Indeed, a study by the Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm Association found that out of
10,051 Gulf War veterans who have reported mysterious illnesses, 82 percent had entered captured
enemy vehicles.
Other soldiers might have been exposed to harmful levels of D.U. as they rescued comrades from
vehicles hit by friendly fire. A Gulf War photo book, Triumph in the Desert, contains one dramatic
picture of soldiers pulling wounded Americans from the burning hull of an Abrams tank that had
been hit by a D.U. round. Black smoke from the depleted-uranium explosion billows around the
rescuers. Still other G.I.s picked up fragments of large-caliber D.U. rounds or unexploded small
rounds and wore them as jewelry, hung around the soldiers’ necks. “We didn’t know any better,” said
Kornkven. “We didn’t find out until long after we were home that there even was such a thing as
D.U.”

But the Americans facing perhaps the greatest risk from D.U. were those who had been hit by D.U.
shrapnel, especially those still carrying radioactive fragments in their bodies. Robert Sanders, who
drove a tank, was one apparent casualty. On the third day of the ground war, his tank was hit by a
D.U. round fired from another U.S. tank. “I had stinging pain in my shoulder and a stinging pain in
my face from shrapnel,” Sanders said.

Military doctors removed the shrapnel. Several years later, however, Sanders heard that D.U. was
radioactive and toxic, so he obtained his medical records. He found an interdepartmental fax saying
doctors had removed bits of an “unknown metal” from his shoulder and that it was “probably D.U.”
Four years after he was wounded, Sanders took a urine test for depleted uranium, which revealed
high levels of it in his system. The Pentagon had never made an effort to tell him of his likely
exposure.

Even the end of the ground war on February 28, 1991, did not end the threat of exposure to U.S.
soldiers. Government documents reveal that in one accident alone, at a camp at Doha, about twelve
miles from Kuwait City, as many as 660 rounds weighing 7,062 pounds burned, releasing dark
clouds of D.U. particles. Many of the 3,000 U.S. troops stationed at the base participated in cleanup
operations without protective gear and without knowledge of the potential dangers.

The Aftermath
At war’s end, U.S. forces left behind about 300 tons of expended D.U. ammunition in Kuwait and
Iraq, a veritable radioactive waste dump that could haunt inhabitants of the region for years. In
August 1995, Iraq presented a study to the United Nations demonstrating sharp increases in leukemia
and other cancers as well as other unexplained diseases around the Basra region in the country’s
south. Iraqi scientists attributed some of the cancers to depleted uranium.

Some U.S. officials and scientists have questioned the Iraqi claims. But former Attorney General
Ramsey Clark, who has made two recent trips to Iraq, observes that “the health ministry and doctors
particularly in Basra and the south are terribly concerned about a range of problems that were not
experienced before: fetuses with tumors, high rates of leukemia.” And a secret British Atomic
Energy Authority report leaked to the London Independent in November 1991 warned that there was
enough depleted uranium left behind in the Persian Gulf to account for “500,000 potential deaths”
through increased cancer rates, although it noted that such a figure was an unlikely, worst-case
scenario. That figure was based on an estimate that only forty tons of D.U. was left behind.

Another study, by Siegwart Gunther, president of the Austrian chapter of Yellow Cross International,
reported that D.U. projectiles “were gathered by children and used as toys.” The study noted that a
little girl who collected twelve of the projectiles died of leukemia. Gunther collected some D.U.
rounds in southern Iraq and took them to Germany for analysis. However, when Gunther entered
Germany, the D.U. rounds were seized. The authorities claimed that just one projectile emitted more
radiation in five hours than is allowed per year under German regulations.

Cleaning up the radioactive mess in the Persian Gulf would cost “billions,” even if it were feasible,
said Leonard Dietz, an atomic scientist who wrote a report on depleted uranium for the Energy
Department. But the Pentagon maintained in a report that “no international law, treaty, regulation, or
custom requires the U.S. to remediate Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm battlefields.”

Those who suggest otherwise have found that they must fight the military industry as well as the
Pentagon. In January 1993 Eric Hoskins, a public health specialist who surveyed Iraq as a member of
a Harvard team, wrote an Op-Ed in The New York Times warning that D.U. may be causing health
problems in Iraqi children. A few weeks later a harsh letter to the editor accused Hoskins of “making
readers of limited scientific literacy the lawful prey of his hyperbole,” which reaches the “bizarre
conclusion that the environmental aftermath of the Persian Gulf war is not Iraq’s fault, but ours!” The
author, Russell Seitz, was identified as an associate with the “Olin Institute for Strategic Studies,
Harvard University.”

Though the letter appeared to be the work of a neutral scientist, the Olin Institute at Harvard was
established by the John M. Olin Foundation, which grew out of the manufacturing fortune created by
the Olin Corporation, currently the nation’s only maker of D.U. antitank rounds. Seitz did not answer
a request from The Nation seeking comment.

Despite the Pentagon’s love affair with D.U., there is an alternative–tank ammunition made from
tungsten. Matt Kagan, a former munitions analyst for Jane’s Defence Weekly, said the latest
developments in tungsten technology have made it “almost as effective as D.U.” That assessment is
shared by Bill Arkin, a columnist for The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientistswho has consulted on D.U.
for Greenpeace and Human Rights Watch. “It comes down to this,” Arkin said. “Is there a logical
alternative that provides the same military capability and doesn’t leave us with this legacy? The
answer is yes, tungsten.”

But tungsten is more expensive and must be imported, while the United States has more than 500,000
tons of depleted uranium, waste left behind by the production of nuclear weapons and by nuclear
generators. Scientists have long looked for a way to re-use what otherwise must be stored at great
expense in remote sites.
Summary points
 Terms such as “traumatisation” or “brutalisation” may be simplistic and stigmatising
 Tension exists between medicotherapeutic viewpoints and sociomoral viewpoints
 “Recovery” from war is not a discrete psychological process or event
 Recovery centres around the person practically re-engaging with everyday life
 Life on the battlefield and on the home front was extremely harsh.
 Many soldiers died from disease and exposure.
 Family members were often pitted against one another, as were friends against friends.
References:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1 4587/
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-28263683
http://www.wikipedia.org
https://www.thenation.com/article/pentagons-radioactive-bullet/