Read the following passage and answer the questions given after it.

Love of power is, perhaps, an even stronger motive than fear in enticing nations to pursue irrational policies. Although individual boastfulness is considered to be bad manners, national boastfulness is admired at any rate, by the compatriots of those who practise it. Throughout history, great nations have been led to disaster by unwillingness to admit that their power had limits. World conquest has been a will-o’-the-wisp by which one nation after another has been led to its downfall. Hitler’s Germany is the most recent example. Going backwards in time, we find many other examples, of which Napoleon, Genghis Khan, and Attila are the most noteworthy. When Khrushchev threatens to obliterate the West, I am reminded of past examples of a similar folly.

To spread ruin, misery and death throughout one’s own country as well as that of the enemy is the act of madmen. If East and West could cease their enmity, they could devote their scientific skill to their own welfare, to living without the burden of fear that only their own folly has caused. For it is in the hearts of men that the evil lies. The trouble lies in the minds often, and it is in enlightening the minds of men that the cure must be sought.

There are those who say: ‘War is part of human nature, and human nature cannot be changed. If war means the end of man, we must sigh and submit.’ This is always said by those whose sigh is hypocritical. It is undeniable that there are men and nations to whom violence is attractive, but it is not the case that anything in human nature makes it impossible to restrain such men and nations. Individuals who have a taste for homicide are restrained by the criminal law, and most of us do not find life intolerable because we are not allowed to commit murders. The same is true of nations. Sweden has never been at war since 1814.

None of the Swedes that I have known has shown any sign of suffering from thwarted instinct for lack of war. Political contests in a civilized country often raise just the kind of issues that would lead to war if they were between different nations. Not long ago, private disputes were often settled by duels, and those who upheld duelling maintained that its abolition would be contrary to human nature. They forgot, as present upholders of war forget, that what is called ‘human nature’ is, in the main, the result of custom and tradition and education, and, in civilized men, only a very tiny fraction is due to primitive instinct. If the world could live for a few Few generations without war, war would come to seem as absurd as duelling has come to seem to us.

According to the passage, war would seem absurd to us if:

we could live without fighting wars for a few years