[carapace]

Fair enough. It also adds to your point that the earlier wars tended to be a lot longer than the later ones, meaning the intensity of the killing has been increasing, eh?

FWIW I'm usually on the doom-and-gloom side of the argument (benefit vs. hazard of tech).

[greedo]

I think it's the opposite. Though the casualties in earlier large conflicts are numerically smaller than compared to WW1/WW2 etc, as a percentage of the population involved, they're higher, no?