In this comprehensive study, international relations scholar John Weltman explores the many roles of war in world politics. With topics ranging from the development of strategic thought to the effects on war of political and technological change, from the uses of force--and threats of force--to the uses of arms control, from the prominence of war in history to its likely fate in the post-Cold War world, Weltman's analysis offers a detailed, thoroughgoing, and rigorous overview of the subject.

Throughout, Weltman questions a number of widely held assumptions. To the conventional...