World War III

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World War III (WWIII or Third World War) denotes a hypothetical successor to World War II (1939–1945) that would be on a global scale, with common speculation that it would be likely nuclear and devastating in nature.

In the wake of World War I, World War II, the commencement of the Cold War and the development, testing and use of nuclear weapons, there was early widespread speculation as to the next global war. This war was anticipated and planned for by military and civil authorities, and explored in fiction in many countries. Concepts ranged from limited use of atomic weapons, to destruction of the planet.

Difficulty in determining a "World War"

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The English term "World War" has only seen widespread use during one conflict — World War I. A German biologist and philosopher Ernst Haeckel wrote this shortly after the start of the war:

This is the first known instance of the term First World War, which previously had been dated to 1931 for the earliest usage. The term was used again near the end of the war. English journalist Charles A. Repington (1858–1925) wrote:

This ignored such examples as the Seven Years' War, although this was also a war fought by a collection of coalition over the whole world.

Other historic conflicts as World War III

Norman Podhoretz in his World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism has suggested that the Cold War can be identified as World War III because it was fought, although by proxy, on a global scale, with the main combatants, the United States and later NATO, and the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries providing political, military and economic support while not engaging in direct combat. Eliot Cohen, the director of strategic studies at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, declared in the Wall Street Journal, a little more than a month after the attacks on the twin towers and the Pentagon, that the struggle against terrorism was more than a law-enforcement operation, and would require military conflict beyond the invasion of Afghanistan. Cohen, like Marenches, considered World War III to be history. "A less palatable but more accurate name is World War IV," he wrote. "The Cold War was World War III, which reminds us that not all global conflicts entail the movement of multi-million-man armies, or conventional front lines on a map." ^[2] In a 2006 interview, US President George W. Bush labeled the ongoing War on Terror as "World War III" also.^[3]

On the July 10, 2011 edition of Fox News' The Big Story, host John Gibson interviewed Michael Ledeen, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and said "some are calling the global war on terror something else, something more like World War III." But Ledeen responded that "it's more like World War IV because there was a Cold War, which was certainly a world war." Ledeen added that "probably the start of it [World War IV] was the Iranian revolution of 1979." Similarly, on the May 24, 2011 edition of CNBC's Kudlow and Company, host Lawrence Kudlow, discussing a book by former deputy Under-secretary of Defense Jed Babbin, said "World War IV is the terror war, and war with China would be World War V."^[4]

Historical close calls

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Before the end of the Second World War, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was concerned that, with the enormous size of Soviet forces deployed in Europe at the end of the war and the perception that the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was unreliable, there was a serious threat to Western Europe. In April–May 1945, British Armed Forces developed the Operation Unthinkable, the Third World War plan; its primary goal was "to impose upon Russia the will of the United States and the British Empire."^[5] The plan was rejected by the British Chiefs of Staff Committee as militarily unfeasible.

With the development of the arms race, before the collapse of the Soviet Union and end of the Cold War, an apocalyptic war between the United States and the Soviet Union was considered possible. Among the historical events considered potential triggers for such an conflict are:

• 1948: During the Berlin Blockade, Soviet military forces attempt to reunify the city of Berlin by blockading West Berlin. In response, Western allies organize massive airlifts to keep West Berlin supplied.
• 1950–1953: Before and after the entry of Chinese reinforcements into the Korean War, with the pushback of South Korean and UN forces, orders and scenarios were developed for the development of nuclear weapons. Supreme Commander MacArthur went so far as to declare he would invade and bomb China to eliminate the threat of communism in East Asia, for which he was removed from command by President Harry S Truman.
• July 26, 1956–March, 1957: In the Suez Crisis, the USSR threatened to intervene on behalf of Egypt in its confrontation between France, the United Kingdom, and Israel over its proposed nationalization of the Suez Canal. Pressure was applied on the United Kingdom and France by Canadian UN ambassador Lester B. Pearson (for which he would receive a Nobel Peace Prize) and the Eisenhower administration (which including a threat to create a currency crisis by dumping US holdings of British debt).
• June 4–November 9, 1961: Berlin Crisis of 1961 where the Soviets demanded a withdrawal of western troops from Berlin. It culminated in the construction of the Berlin Wall.
• October 15–October 28, 1962: The Cuban Missile Crisis, a confrontation on the stationing of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba, is often considered as having been the closest to a nuclear exchange. The crisis peaked on October 27, when a U-2 was shot down over Cuba and another almost intercepted over Siberia, after Curtis LeMay (U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff) had neglected to enforce Presidential orders to suspend all overflights, and a Soviet submarine nearly launched a nuclear-tipped torpedo in response to depth charges (with the launch being prevented by an officer named Vasiliy Arkhipov).
• 1969: According to historian Liu Chenshan, at the height of the Sino–Soviet border conflict, Soviet officials drew up plans for a nuclear attack against China.^[6] The United States, however, refused to remain neutral in such a conflict, threatening to launch a full-attack against the Soviet Union in such an event.
• October 24, 1973: As the Yom Kippur War wound down, a Soviet threat to intervene on Egypt's behalf caused the United States to go to DEFCON 3.
• November 9, 1979: The United States made emergency retaliation preparations after NORAD saw on-screen indications that a full-scale Soviet attack had been launched.^[7] No attempt was made to use the "red telephone" hotline to clarify the situation with the USSR and it was not until early-warning radar systems confirmed no such launch had taken place that NORAD realized that a computer system test had caused the display errors. A senator inside the NORAD facility at the time described an atmosphere of absolute panic. A GAO investigation led to the construction of an off-site test facility to prevent similar mistakes.
• September 26, 1983: A false alarm occurred on the Soviet nuclear early warning system, showing the launch of American Minuteman ICBMs from bases in the United States. An erroneous retaliatory nuclear attack on the United States and its Western allies was prevented by Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov, an officer of the Soviet Air Defence Forces, who intuited the scale and recent system upgrades meant the system had simply had a malfunction (which would be borne out by later investigations).^[8][9]
• November 2-11, 1983: Amid deteriorating relations between the Soviet Union and the United States and the lack of a functioning General Secretary in the Soviet Politburo (due to Yuri Andropov's failing health), the Able Archer 83 military drill for NATO's nuclear-release procedures was treated by some Politburo members as a ruse of war. Nuclear weapons and air forces were placed on alert in East Germany and Poland before the exercise ended.

In popular culture

World War III is also a common theme in popular culture. Who might start World War III and how it might start are perennial topics of discussion in press. A vast apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic science fiction literature exists describing the postulated execution and aftermath of World War III, several notable movies have been made based on World War III, and it is the topic of various comics, video games, songs, magazines, radio programs, newspapers and billboards.

See also

Wikinews has related news: Bush and Putin suggest potential for World War III

• List of nuclear holocaust fiction
• Nuclear war
• World War
• World War III in popular culture

References

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