Contrary to popular belief, war is not declining, according to a new analysis of the last 200 years of international conflict.

In fact, the belief that war is disappearing has lulled us into a false sense of security, said Bear Braumoeller, professor of political science at The Ohio State University.

“We really don’t get how big a threat war is – not by a longshot,” Braumoeller said.

“The process of escalation that led to two world wars in the last century are still there. Nothing has changed. And that scares the hell out of me.”

Any apparent declines in war initiation or severity can be attributed to random luck – and our luck could run out at any time, Braumoeller said.

Braumoeller is the author of the new book Only the Dead: The Persistence of War in the Modern Age. In the book, Braumoeller challenges the argument of recent scholars who claim war is in decline, most notably Steven Pinker in his 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.

“I take a comprehensive look at all the different ways you can think about what it means for war to be in decline. And I find no evidence for a long-term decline in any of them,” he said.

Maybe most alarmingly, though, Braumoeller finds that the probability that a small war will become a very big one hasn’t changed, either.

One grim example: If humans continue to fight 50 wars per century, the probability of seeing a war with battle deaths that exceed 1 percent of the world’s population in the next 100 years is about 13 percent, Braumoeller found. That would amount to at least 70 million people killed.

“That’s nothing short of horrifying. The escalatory propensity of war is the scariest thing I found in this research,” he said.

So what’s wrong with the claims that war is declining?

By simply looking at trend lines since World War II, it appears that worldwide conflict has declined. But there have been other periods of history where relative peace has reigned, Braumoeller said.

What you can’t tell just by looking at trends is whether they are the result of the normal variation in the amount of conflict, or if something really has changed, he said.

“One of the biggest contributions of the book is that it brings statistical rigor to the question of the decline of war in a way that anyone can understand,” said Braumoeller, who is a Faculty in Residence at Ohio State’s Translational Data Analytics Institute.

“The data demanded sophisticated tests that I either had to brush up on, discover or create.”

Braumoeller used the Correlates of War data set, which scholars from around the world study to measure uses of force up to and including war.

What he found with the statistical analyses was that any decline in the deadliness of war that we think we see in the data is within the normal range of variation – in other words, our period of relative peace right now could easily be occurring simply by chance.

“We do see a decrease in the rate of conflict initiation at the end of the Cold War, but that’s about the only good news. Other than that, for the last 200 years at least, I can find no downward trend in the incidence or deadliness of warfare. If anything, the opposite is true,” he said.

The role of chance becomes particularly alarming when you consider the probability that any particular conflict will become a huge, catastrophic war, Braumoeller said.