The Inter-Nation Tensiometer for the Prediction of War

摘要

This is the seventh paper in the Tensiometer series; all of these papers have been concerned with the prediction of war or, more accurately, with the development of a tension scale which has a critical value such that, if the value for a nation exceeds that critical value, it then is in a class more likely to go to war in the following five years than if its value is sub-critical. Nations are treated as monads and if they are supracritical we can not say with which other nation they are likely to become involved in a war; we can only say that they are 'nations at risk'. We are only concerned with wars in which two or more nations are involved; Raimo Vayrynen (1971) has suggested that countries with low Tension Ratios (TRs) were more likely to become involved in civil wars. The last time we looked into this question the number of civil wars was so small that our results were not conclusive but we did note that the civil wars seemed to be fairly evenly distributed between countries with high, medium and low TRs. (Author)