When medics think of the word 'contagion', they think of diseases, spreading from one animal to another, from animals to humans, and so on. So when they see a book with a title like this one, they probably expect extensive chapters on, for instance, the Spanish 'Flu. But Vasquez doesn't even mention the 'Flu, and that's because he's not a medic. He's a scholar in international relations trying to answer the question 'Why do wars spread?'. For Vasquez, war itself is contagion, something evil that has the tendency to spread from one base (in his case, one country) to another. Perhaps The Contagiousness of War would have been a clearer title.
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