Conclusion

Although best known for his contributions to mathematical psychology, Anatol Rapoport became an outspoken military abolitionist during the Vietnam War era. In the foreword to Understanding War he writes: [T]he identification of national security with military potential, the belief in the effectiveness of ‘deterrence’, the belief that dismantling military institutions must lead to economic slump and unemployment, the belief that military establishments perform a useful social function by ‘defending’ the societies on which they feed, and so on. All these beliefs qualify as superstitions by the usual definition of a superstition as a stubbornly held belief for which no evidence exists....