ABSTRACT
The fifteenth of November 1988 should have been celebrated as a major milestone for humanity. On that day forty-three years and three months had passed since the last hostilities between major powers, the fighting between Japan and the United States, which stopped on 15 August 1945. This tied the longest previous period of non-fighting between major powers: the forty-three years and three months between the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 and the outbreak of the First World War on 1 August 1914 (a period of non-war, however, that was marred by the war between Russia and Japan in 1905 – but Japan was not then considered a major power). And the 1945–88 period of non-war greatly exceeded the celebrated thirty-nine years of major-power peace between Waterloo in 1815 and the Crimean War that pitted England and France against Russia in 1854.
