Broomstick wrote:Who says WWIII has to involve nukes?
The traditional and well established use of the phrase means such, and for good technical and political reasons. Are you honestly going to tell me that you don't think that's what the thread creator was concerned with? You want to argue you own definition of a well established term then the burden is on you to articulate that point. That much has come up in many threads many times before.
Meanwhile the conventional weapons just don't exist to wage a world war with conventional arms. Even the heavily militarized US only maintains 30 days of war stocks, and the World Wars both came after large scale arms races, ones noticed by commentator of the era, even in an era in which universal conscription was the norm. The modern Russian Army meanwhile has fewer troops then the Soviet Army kept in East Germany alone.
Also key in this is while some fairly large armies still exist, of them only India is seriously expanding its actual order of battle, and only then on a very modest scale. That's vital because as far as offensive warfare goes, numbers still count. Without numbers you cannot take and hold ground. Defensively you can replace numbers with technology, and that's the world wide trend. Smaller, more effective troops. But ones whom are better suited to carrying out specific missions at the same time, not conquering whole states.
Even China with its huge yearly increases in defense spending is still reducing the actual size of its army and air force, only its navy is growing, and honestly only then because in the past its Navy functionally didn't exist. It was only the coastal defense arm of the PLA.
. It would require many years of arms race to restore the needed force structures for a conventional WW3 and why would anyone bother? Let alone Trump who dislikes government spending and is more worried about immigration then RUSSIA. In the time it takes to design new jet fighter even a third rate power could developed and deploy nuclear weapons to prevent itself from being invaded.
Meanwhile all of the powers big enough to think about this on a global scale either have nuclear weapons or are closely allied with people whom do. That's why nuclear weapons are stabilizing, and the only way I see WW3 happening is if we were insane enough to get rid of them. Nuclear weapon are only destabilizing in the hands of countries in which ambition far exceeds their other means of power. So far none of the countries to get nukes are in that boat. Even North Korea just wants to protect its own regime as its conventional military power steadily weakens.
Seriously. Life changed n 1945 and endless books have been written to explain how and why. It can never be the same again barring some utter collapse of civilization. This has been good, and we should be thankful for it. Worry about the moron destroying the value of our currency, not killing millions.
WWI certainly didn't, and WWII only at the very end. The war in Europe ended without atomic weapons.
Yeah, cause we didn't finish them in time. But that's irrelevant to the post Hiroshima world. Meanwhile if Hitler had 100 tactical nuclear weapons, do you think the US and Russia would have blindly kept invading Germany if he threaten to use them, while offering peace terms on the basis of 1934 borders?
The World Wars could happen because the governments involved could honestly expect and promise incredible wealth and power out of victory. They could tell their people and keep them motivated that just that little extra effort would mean something big. Conquering fully developed industrial states and all the loot and pillage that implied. Taking other peoples colonies ect.
Nuclear weapons entirely negate this notion, and in a manner anyone can understand. You go too far and you get nuked, at the least on the tactical scale. And if you nuke back everything you wanted to profit from is radioactive vapor. So why try? All the more so when you already can fact check the actual cost of warfare like that? Nobody could do that in 1914, and WW2 was just a war of revenge over the mistakes of 1914.
That's why the normal use of the term WW3 is to refer to a large scale nuclear war. Because any attempt to do what was attempted in WW1 and WW2 would turn into a large scale nuclear war anyway, making the conventional fighting irrelevant. And that's why nobody in the world is remotely interested in fighting anything like that kind of conflict. Nobody is preparing for it, nobody is armed for it. Nobody has points of contention worth it. Indeed the points of contention seem to get more lame by the day. China is blustering over uninhabited reefs. Pakistan and India dispute....one of the least economically important parts of either country and last seriously fought a war to control it in
1965.
Russia and NATO...actually seem to have no direct point of contention, neither side being happy with Ukraine being a 'thing' in the first place ect. North Korea long ago abandon any pretext of invading the South... see the point?
The closest we come to the cold war level of contention over existence is radical Islam vs. The West, but no actual Muslim country supports said versions of Islam wholesale, and none of them rank as global military powers in the first place. So it's moot. Wars, maybe a major regional conflict which one might class Iraq-Syria right now, but that's it. And indeed said war has basically made the US and Iran allies if they want it or not, so that only points further to how implausible and divorced from the world wars the world situation now is.
I find it not surprising at all. The default of humans is to be good to each other. I don't need complex moral logic or what the shit to know that. I believe it because if it were not true I do not believe human civilization could exist at all. Given that I think the future will be bright, and while serious threats to peace and order will continue to exist for centuries they will be ever more sub national and driven by economic and climate change rather then wonton wars of conquest for profit.
And like it or not, Trump is on the good side of this trend, not the evil side. He might spread hate and fear as tactics, but his end goal is peaceful power, and he's interested in making money, not irrationally destroying ideological enemies.
I agree, it's unlikely, either via nukes or conventional means, but I would never say impossible. Given a sufficiently shitty, destabilized world things could get very, very ugly.
Sure, nothing is impossible except putting the genie back in the bottle. But how many decimal points of improbability does it take before we label it pointless and unhelpful fear mongering bullshit? Trump could also bring an era of global peace by various convoluted and unlikely means for all that's worth. He might find the secret to fusion power by falling down the stairs and spilling coffee onto someones notes.