Senate Is a WW3 upon us?

It would seem that right now the world is in a state of confusion, the US government has shut down, North Korea seems to be a threat, and Syria and its civil war are causing major powers to take sides.
Do you think a World War 3 could break out, or is the world safe? Are we stupid enough to go to war again...?

I want to find out your opinions.

(This may need to be moved, I wasn't sure if it had qualified for this forum)

 

Somehow I doubt it, because nobody, including the US, can afford it.

In a more general sense, the moment the nuclear weapon was invented, war from that point forward was going to become asymmetrical. Nukes changed the game entirely. They've kept us from a global, worldwide conventional war for a period of sixty-odd years, simply because von Neumann was right: nuclear weapons make fullscale war a zero sum game.

The biggest threat to the world now is atomic terrorism.

 

An understandable comment, but war is just as profitable as it is costly, it is easy to develop funds in war, wouldn't you say? The US being one of the largest places for arms around. I think it is plausible that a world war 3 could cause economic growth in some countries quite easily.

 

I don't see us being any closer to WW3 than we ever have been in the past - IMO this perception is mostly perpetuated by the media. News channels focus on the most dramatic stories because that is what sells and they sensationalize them to make matters even worse.

For example, if you watch television in the US, you might think homicides here are rampant and the highest they've ever been right now when actually the rate has been cut in about half since the early 90's

 

Let's analyze each piece:

What does that mean "in a state of confusion?" It's a very vague sentence here.

Firstly, the US government is back open again. Secondly, the US government has shut down in the past. I don't see what makes this particular shut down special.

Does it? Sure, NK does a lot of saber rattling. but not even South Korea takes it that seriously and it never really amounts to anything.

These sides have been taken quite a long time ago. In addition, I'd argue that the diplomatic removal of Syria's chemical weapons is evidence that the major powers can negotiate in regards to their involvement in Syria.

There's really nothing in your post that would even suggest a world war in the works.

 

Disregarding the economics of it, there isn't a massive visible threat currently, which is kind of required for a World War to begin.

Sure, terrorism is a thing, but attacks haven't killed a large amount of people in the west since 9/11, and even then it was 3,000 casualties. I'm not saying it wasn't horrific, and I'm not trivializing their deaths, but that's not a World War-causing amount of casualties.

Given that the concept of mutually assured destruction is very much still intact, I don't even know if a World War could happen now. Or if it did, it would be very short.

 

I don't seem to think anything. My stance on this is completely neutral, my comments above were just to spark debate, the purpose of this forum.

 

Actually, the rules of the Senate forum state: First and foremost, we want to hear what it is YOU think and WHY.

So yes, tell us your stance.

 

Frankly, I don't think there would be major enough tensions between the power nations to drive them to warmongering on the grounds of "taking over the world" or of a pre-emptive strike to retain regional hegemony (which were what the other two were mainly built upon). Now, resource wars could occur later on, but those are likely not driven on by party politics as much as necessity.

As said above, nuclear technology kinda changes everything.

 

I'm just not seeing it. People have already mentioned the nuclear weapon aspect; I'd also point out that the last World War was mostly possible due to a badly designed, horribly vindictive "peace" treaty that an egomaniacal lunatic was able to exploit to move his chosen country back into an appetite for war. If Versailles had gone differently, WW2 might not have happened at all; and given that even a war most see as inevitable required a pretty specific set of circumstances (isolationist Russia and USA, power-hungry and ideologically motivated regional powers, and war-weary regional powers desperate to avoid conflict at all cost) to happen...I just don't see those factors happening again.

Edit: High-technology wars don't last long enough to be economically beneficial in and of themselves. The Arab-Israeli wars, and the Persian Gulf War, are solid examples of this. The absolute longest-the Gulf War-lasted a year, and that was with a massive overmatch to one side; a war fought between peer competitors would last weeks at best. The longest Arab-Israeli War, the Yom Kippur War, lasted under a month, and the shortest, the Six-Day War, was only a week.

 

All due respect, but I don't think you quite contemplate the scale and sheer destructiveness of the war you're dreaming about here. Einstein famously said he had no idea what weapons WW3 would be fought with, but he knew WW4 would be fought with sticks and stones. He would not be far wrong. Go back and watch "The Day After", which posited a hypothetical WW3 and its after effects. It was a seriously sobering film, so sobering it is said that Reagan himself, after watching it, moved to detente on nuclear issues because it scared the living hell out of him. And the film assumed a WW3 just fought with nukes the size of those used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not the subsequent nukes designed which were capable of delivering hundreds of times that blast. Even with detente, the US and Russia since hold enough nuclear weapons to raze the planet of life many times over. Nuclear winter also would bring its joys to the entire planet.

Nobody except the most irrational Cawadoody fan thinks WW3 would amount to anything less than the end of all human life on Earth as we know it. Economic growth in WW3 would basically amount to how many cockroaches you can sell to your buddy up the road for food. Even Tom Clancy's wet dream about a conventional war in Europe, Red Storm Rising, immediately assumed there would be no nuclear exchange at all, because he knew as well as everyone else on the planet that nukes just make the concept of symmetrical conventional war laughable. As I said, we have not seen a major conventional war for those reasons alone. Nothing frightens me more than naive young people who are so removed from reality and history as to think WW3 should be contemplated with anything other than gut wrenching fear, because that fear has kept us from that very war.

 

All I'd add to Boba's points re: WW2 is that the Great Depression played a critical role in it too, as without that Stresemann's reforms may have succeeded in enabling the Weimar Republic to work which would have screwed over the Nazis' appeal.

As to WW3 - no, what is more likely are various ongoing regional /local conflicts, likely involving asymmetric warfare.

 

Ben is right. I wonder what the reason was for posting this topic. Was there any specific news item that worried you, The Star Wars Archivist? Are you afraid? You should be. But not for the reason you think.

A regional war is as terrible as a world war for that region. There have been 51 military conflicts since WWII, in which an estimated 51 million people were killed. As others have stated, a world war is impractical for the survival of the species, so it's not something that could benefit anyone, as previous world wars have. Regional wars are the real danger.

 

To be honest, I was surprised when I looked at a poll, with 77% of people suggesting that there would be a WW3 and 23% saying there wouldn't. So I was curious just to see what you guys would think.

In my opinion, extremely unlikely. Because a war of that scale will destroy everything these countries have, which they don't want to lose. The prosperity civilisation has had in peace is too much to lose, in my opinion.

 

It only takes one casualty to cause a World War.

 

I'd say its been on us for some time now if one were to set aside the idea that it has to be nuclear in actuality. There are nukes abound , nations are rather farcical illusions to begin with but they are all involved ( albeit not in the way the ordinary person thinks ), and the television and internet has put our humanity - personal and collective ideologies, personal and collective faiths, beliefs, the lack of those things for better and worse, our dreams and our nightmares - into the universal seamlessness and timelessness that is consciousness to be viewed at any given time in contrast with anyone's else's on the planet . Into the spinner if you will. We're at war with each other and ourselves as to what the self actualization of human kind actually is, both individually and collectively. The last war, and really its just a continuation of WWII, sans the overwhelming proletariat involvement or support or whatever lol. And if that's not the case I'd say its hard to debate that we're moving out from one age and into another.

 

If we're going to expand this thread to a general discussion of global wars, then why hasn't anyone brought up the war that has shaped the present every bit as much as the World Wars? I speak, of course, of the Cold War! You know, the one that ended 22 years ago?

 

You need to add a bunch of idiot leaders and an interlocking alliance system.

 

The world is a mess right now, but the danger is more asymmetrical war, not another world war.

 

It always makes me uneasy when people describe the world or some region as messy, unpredictable or unmanageable. It makes me think that one of these days some megalomaniac with OCD is gonna concoct some genius false pretences scheme that's gonna tidy everything up to a nice and organized manageable fashion. Perhaps alphabetical.

 

just to defend the dead a little-the Soviet military coup at the end of Storm was because the Politburo was edging closer and closer to a nuclear exchange.

 

You're referring to Princip's lucky shot at Archduke Franz Ferdinand?

 

In response to the OP, I can't forsee there being a world war. Most of the structures which facilitated the first world war - the so-called "concert of Europe" - affected the second world war. In that you had a very different world view back then, and with only 50-something nation-states (compared to 190-something now) you had a lot less competing self interest.

(International relations theory names several paradigms for world view, but in my direct experience the only one in practise is Morgenthau's Realism)

There's simply not the appetite for such a costly misadventure.