World War III

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A nuclear holocaust is often associated with World War III.
A nuclear holocaust is often associated with World War III.
For other uses, see World War III (disambiguation).

World War III (abbreviated WWIII), or the Third World War, is a hypothetical term used to describe a global war waged on or above the scale of World War I or World War II.

Contents

[edit] Cold War

Some analysts[1] and historians[2] have 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 of America and later NATO, and the USSR and Warsaw Pact countries providing political, military and economic support while not engaging in direct combat.[3]

[edit] Historical close calls

 This section may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.
Please improve this article if you can (August 2007).

Before the collapse of the Soviet Union and end of the Cold War, an apocalyptic war between the United States and the USSR was considered plausible. The Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 is generally thought to be the historical point at which the risk of World War III was closest. Other potential starts have included the following (see External links below for further examples):

  • 1948 - Berlin Blockade. Soviet military forces stopped all commerce into West Berlin which caused a humanitarian and political crisis. War was avoided, as the west sent in air lifts to supply West Berlin.
  • 1950–1953 – Korean War. General MacArthur planned to invade and bomb China to eliminate the threat of communism in eastern Asia.
  • July 26, 1956 – March, 1957 – Suez Crisis: The conflict pitted Egypt against an alliance between France, the United Kingdom and Israel. When the USSR threatened to intervene on behalf of Egypt, the Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Lester B. Pearson feared a larger war and urged the British and French to withdraw. The Eisenhower administration, also fearing a wider war, applied pressure to the United Kingdom to withdraw, including a threat to create a currency crisis by dumping US holdings of British debt. Lester B. Pearson later received a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts toward peace.
  • October 27, 1962 – Cuban Missile Crisis: The conflict pitted the United States against an alliance between the USSR and Cuba. The USSR was attempting to place several launch sites in Cuba in response to the United States installation of missiles in Turkey. The United States response included dispersal of Strategic Air Command bombers to civilian airfields around the United States and war games in which the United States Marine Corps landed against a dictator named "ORTSAC" (Castro spelt backwards). For a brief while, the U.S. military went to DEFCON 3, while SAC went to DEFCON 2. The crisis peaked on October 27, when a U-2 (piloted by Rudolph Anderson) was shot down over Cuba and another U-2 over the USSR was almost intercepted when it strayed over Siberia, after Curtis LeMay (U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff) had neglected to enforce Presidential orders to suspend all overflights. See also: Vasiliy Arkhipov.
  • October 24, 1973 – Yom Kippur War: As the Yom Kippur War was winding down, a Soviet threat to intervene on Egypt's behalf caused the United States to go to DEFCON 3.
  • November 9, 1979 – False "Soviet First Strike" Alarm: The US made emergency retaliation preparations after NORAD saw on-screen indications that a full-scale Soviet attack had been launched. [4] 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 in the future.
  • October 27, 1981 - The U 137 incident: A Soviet submarine is stranded close to a Swedish naval base, about 10 kilometres outside Karlskrona. The incident caused much attention worldwide, but it was eventually resolved peacefully.
  • September 26, 1983 – False "US First Strike" Alarm: Soviet early warning systems showed that a US ICBM attack had been launched. Colonel Stanislav Petrov, in command of the monitoring facility, correctly interpreted the warnings as a computer error and did not notify his superiors, even though this was against standing orders and ultimately resulted in serious career consequences for Petrov.
  • November 1983 – Exercise Able Archer: The USSR mistook a test of NATO's nuclear-release procedures as a fake cover for a NATO attack and subsequently raised its nuclear alert level. It was not until afterwards that the US realized how close it had come to nuclear war. At the time of the exercise the Soviet Politburo was without a healthy functioning head due to the failing health of then leader Yuri Andropov, which is thought to have been one of the contributing factors to the Soviet concern over the exercise.[citation needed]
  • January 25, 1995 – Norwegian Rocket Incident: A Norwegian missile launch for scientific research was detected from Andøya Rocket Range and thought to be an attack on Russia, launched from a submarine five minutes away from Moscow. Norway had notified the world that it would be making the launch, but the Russian Defense Ministry had neglected to notify those monitoring Russia's nuclear defense systems.[citation needed]

[edit] Difficulty in determining a "World War"

 This article needs additional citations for verification.
Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (April 2008)
This section may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.
Please improve this article if you can (April 2008).
Please help improve this article or section by expanding it.
Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion. (April 2008)

The English term "World War" has only seen widespread use during one conflict — World War II. What is now known as World War I was generally known as the "the European War" while it was in progress,[citation needed] although German troops referred to it as a Weltkrieg, or "World War", throughout,[citation needed] and it was the Germans who show first recorded use of the "first world war". A German biologist and philosopher Ernst Haeckel wrote this shortly after the start of the war:

“ There is no doubt that the course and character of the feared "European War"...will become the first world war the full sense of the word.

Indianapolis Star September 20, 1914[5]

 ”

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:

“ [Diary entry, September 10, 1918]: We discussed the right name of the war. I said the we called it now The War, but that this could not last. The Napoleonic War was The Great War. To call it The German War was too much flattery for the Boche. I suggested The World War as a shade better title, and finally we mutually agreed to call it The First World War in order to prevent the millennium folk from forgetting that the history of the world was the history of war.

"The First World War, 1914–1918" (1920)[6]

 ”

Known as The Great War in the 1920s, it ignored the Napoleonic wars as having the dubious honour of being the first to be called the "Great War" although it, like the Cold War, was a collection of coalition conflicts, and not a single continuous conflict as was the Second World War.

It may take years before another major conflict could be arguably recognized as a World War III. It should also be noted that serious wars before and after the first two world wars, even those closely associated with them, are not now treated as part of the larger conflict. These include the Balkan Wars from 1912 to 1913 and the Polish-Soviet War from 1919 to 1921, the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and later China, the Spanish Civil War, the Italian invasions of Ethiopia and Albania, the 1938 German annexation of Austria (Anschluss), and the subsequent occupation of Czechoslovakia. Therefore, the specific event where a future World War III begins may only be determined retrospectively.

[edit] Popular culture

Main article: World War III 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 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.

"I know not what weapons World War III shall be fought with, but I do know that World War IV shall be fought with sticks and stones"[7]

– Albert Einstein

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ Norman Podhoretz in his World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism
  2. ^ On the July 10 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 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."[1]
  3. ^ 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]
  4. ^ [3]
  5. ^ "The Yale Book of Quotations" (2006) Yale University Press, edited by Fred R. Shapiro
  6. ^ "The Yale Book of Quotations" (2006) Yale University Press, edited by Fred R. Shapiro
  7. ^ Calaprice, Alice (2005), The new quotable Einstein, Princeton University Press, p. 173, ISBN 0-691-12075-7  Other versions of the quote exist, substituting "sticks and stones" for rocks.

[edit] Sources

  • Podhoretz, Norman, World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism, Doubleday, New York, 2007