51°µÍø

Depending on your individual mettle, it is either an uneasy moment to be reading a book about war or a timely one. Given the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, Russian drones being shot down in Polish airspace and Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza, a third world war has felt imminent in recent weeks.

Warhead, an ambitious new book by neuroscientist Nicholas Wright, sheds light on what might be going on in the minds of those responsible for navigating conflicts – and how their very human decision-making might lead to escalation or resolution.

Wright’s research looks into neuroscientific, behavioural and technological insights that are useful for understanding and navigating international confrontations. He has also advised the US Pentagon Joint Staff for over a decade. Wright speaks with authority about what goes down in war rooms and in the minds of world leaders; in Warhead, he attempts to take the civilian reader there.

Early on, Wright argues that our experience of conflict was at least as influential on the evolution of our species as the discovery of fire. From there, he leads the reader on a systematic tour of the brain’s different parts and their relevance to conflict.

The cerebellum and brainstem, for instance, are home to “elementary drives” that support and inform our fight to stay alive, both as individuals and as a collective. Wright suggests that it was memories of the first world war’s devastating loss of life that made the UK and France so cautious in dealing with Adolf Hitler in the run-up to the second world war.

He points to this as an example of a particular “model of the world”: an internal sense of reality, which our brains construct from past experience and expectations, that influences our actions. Drawing on other battles and pivotal moments throughout history, Wright illustrates the ways in which the brain’s primal responses and processing may have played a part in conflicts. For instance, France’s decision to open Paris to the Nazis – against the urging of Winston Churchill – spared the city the airborne destruction wrought on Warsaw in 1939, but worsened the UK’s prospects in the war.

This is an example of our brains making a prediction error, Wright argues, and failing to consider all the outcomes or options that are unpalatable in the short term. These many piecemeal – but consequential – choices, which may ultimately determine victory or defeat, all tax the brain and reflect our individual and collective thresholds for risk, self-control or delayed gratification, he writes.

To help the casual reader understand the “dauntingly complicated” design of the brain, Wright supplements his examples of battles and wars with more familiar references, such as aspects of animal behaviour and popular culture. Some of these are laboured or digressive, but they are mostly helpful for grounding abstract or technical ideas.

One key question, however, remains peripheral: why do we have wars at all? Wright argues that they are inevitable, a product of our wiring and the reality of competition. As such, he is impatient with pacifists who fail to engage “beyond the truth that war is bad”, as well as with a blanket strategy of either aggression or appeasement, both of which he shows can sometimes escalate emergent threats.

Understanding our brains, impulses and potential blind spots will only become more crucial as wars are increasingly fought at a distance through military technology and artificial intelligence, argues Wright. But the qualities that he espouses as being essential for battle – wisdom, self-knowledge, emotional regulation – seem conspicuously lacking in our current crop of world leaders, and he isn’t forthcoming with suggestions for how to foster them.

For people who seek out books about war and military strategy, Warhead presents an original angle with some illuminating insights. But if you struggle to accept large-scale conflicts as inevitable and are worried about a third world war, don’t expect to feel reassured.

Elle Hunt is a writer based in Norwich, UK