The Sexual Cycle of Human Warfare: Being a New Theory of the Cause of War and an Inquiry into the Possibility of War-Prediction

"“THIS BOOK IS DYNAMITE It cannot fail to startle, for it opens wide a new approach to war—that problem of headlong urgency in our Atomic Age. Sweeping aside conventional and outworn theories of the cause of international strife, the Author reveals to us that war is neither more nor less than a Titanic Sexual Act. War, he maintains, stands in the same biological relationship to the vast organic body of society as sexual activity to the body of the individual. Like the individual sexual urge, war, too, is cyclic, periodic. And like the individual urge, it is marked by a gathering mental tension that bursts into physical eruption. Were this revolutionary conception no more than a daring freak of thought, it would still command our attention for its stark originality of design. But it is more than that; it is a closely reasoned scientific argument that must either be refuted or accepted. One thing is certain in these dangerous times: it cannot be ignored. As we read these pages, we have a sense of rending veils, of shifting phantasmagoria, a presentiment that here at last we emerge upon a terrifying but epoch-making truth. The question remains: Can we adjust ourselves to this sweeping new conception—adjust ourselves in time? Or must the hydrogen bomb, and the insensate self-destruction of mankind, add their own dread postscript to the grim prophetic argument of this book?" "This implies a nonverbal chemistry of species-wide communication whose workings remain largely unknown. It implies that much of our collective behavior may be preplanned for us in the form of mechanisms that override consciousness. Remember that we're looking for patterns. The wild sexuality of combat troops has been remarked by observers throughout recorded history and has usually been passed off as a kind of boys-will-be-boys variation on the male mystique. Not until this century have we begun to question that item of consensus reality (read _The Sexual Cycle of Human Warfare_ by N.I.M. Walter). One of the themes of my own science fiction novel, _Dune_, is war as a collective orgasm. The idea is coming under discussion in erudite journals such as _the General Systems Yearbook_." --Frank Herbert, "Listening to the Left Hand" (http://z10.invisionfree.com/Dune_Forum/ar/t1065.htm), _Harper's_, December 1973 “_The Sexual Cycle of Human Warfare_ by Major Norman Walter, published in London at the Mitre Press in 1950. This book is shamefully neglected. Indeed, I doubt if more than a handful of people know it or know of it. And yet its thesis is original and highly suggestive. It is, briefly, that war is a psycho-biological phenomenon, not a political one, and that it can best be studied in terms of such genetic phenomena as hybridization, exogamy and the like. Nature explodes the human group with the aim of genetic recombination. Soldiers never know why they’re fighting (‘We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here’ was a song of the First World War) and politicians think they know. But the real motives for war lie at the biological level. War, like sex, is ineradicable from human society because is very close to sex.” --Anthony Burgess "After a lot of calling libraries in Los Angeles, none of whom had the book or ever had heard of it, I was able to get the publisher's address and write off for a copy, COD if that was required. Several weeks later the book arrived with a bill for so many pounds, forcing me to find out the exchange rate so I could send them a U.S. money order. I began reading it immediately and can truthfully say it was one of the few books I've ever read through almost continually from start to finish. It wasn't easy reading, which normally turns me off and due to my ignorance in certain subject areas there were parts I couldn't understand. But it was intriguing beyond compare, despite its academic, overly academic, format — references, footnotes, bibliography, all that stuff I never could stand when I was forced to read academic books for one reason or another. The book dealt with matters of sex and war. However, there was nothing clinical or sexually graphic and nothing about military strategy, tactics or weapons. On the sexual side it dealt broadly with matters in the realm of genetics, psychology, psychoanalytic theory, anthropology, sociology and everything else having to do with the behavior of human societies during peace; and how all these factors combined to periodically, averaging once a generation, propel a country into war. On the war side, it dealt mainly with how human societies behave during war and why wars, sooner or later, come to an end. ...When I had finished Walter's book, through the publisher I wrote a long letter to him, telling him how impressed I was and asking about his background — certain it was academic, that he was a professor of international relations, or philosophy, or anthropology at some prestigious British university. Some weeks later, I received a reply thanking me for my kind words and telling me I was literally the only one to write to him about his book. As for his background, no he wasn't a professor. He had graduated from Sandhurst (the British West Point) and after a very long career retired as a colonel. He had been a combat infantry officer, fighting mainly to protect the Empire — in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, wherever; and finally in World War I and II. Over all these years of fighting and seeing war in the raw and countries gripped in the throes of war, this sexual theme gradually dawned upon him. He vowed that when his career ended he would write a book about it. Which he did, but was unable to get a publisher, so he dipped into his meager pension and had 500 copies printed at his own expense, most of which never sold. He was scared to death, considering the implications of his thesis, about what might happen to the world now that nuclear weapons were around. Seeing no way of influencing anyone with his intellectual arguments on the cause and true nature of war, he joined the peace movement in Britain, a well meaning waste of time, as U.S. peace movements have been: they never work during peace, for the kinds of reasons Walter wrote about. We corresponded for a while, mainly in the way of him sending me pamphlets on peace and disarmament, which made no sense to me at the time and still don't. During our correspondence, he got around to asking me what I did for a living. I told him I was in the nuclear weapons business. In his next letter, he asked me if I ever had observed anything sexual in the behavior of nuclear particles. With that, I figured we had reached the end of the line. I didn't reply. I've never regretted cutting off our correspondence, but I've never gotten his book out of my mind. I have done a fair amount of reading on war and its causes over the years. Except for Colonel Walter's book, all of it left me feeling pretty cold. None of it, in my opinion, dealt with "why" but rather with "because", which is no explanation at all and ignores possibilities for dealing realistically with the problem. But at least Walter tried to get down to basics, rather than spouting broad generalities that few disagree with because they're so obvious, but also useless toward trying to avoid war, which most agree is a pretty stupid thing, except that we go on doing it and doing it." --Samuel Cohen, _Confessions of the Father of the Neutron Bomb, 2006 https://archive.org/stream/ConfessionsOfTheFatherOfTheNeutronBomb/Confessions_Sam_Cohen_2006_Third_Edition#page/n209