World war

• 1. Introduction

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  World war is a term whose first known appearance in the English language came not from a general or a president, but from a Scottish newspaper called The People's Journal, in 1848: "A war among the great powers is now necessarily a world-war." That single sentence captured something that would define the next century. How does a local dispute spiral into a conflict touching every inhabited continent? What combination of alliances, empires, and technologies turns a regional crisis into a catastrophe measured in tens of millions of dead? And why do historians keep arguing about which conflicts deserve the label at all? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. A Name for the Unthinkable

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  Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels used the phrase "world war" in a series of articles published around 1850, well before the concept attached itself to any actual conflict. Rasmus B. Anderson reached even further back in 1889, applying the term to an episode in Teutonic mythology, grounding it in a line from the Old Norse epic Völuspá. A German writer then brought the term into popular fiction in 1904, titling his anti-British novel Der Weltkrieg: Deutsche Träume, published in English as The Coming Conquest of England.

  The outbreak of actual fighting sharpened the language fast. German biologist and philosopher Ernst Haeckel declared in September 1914 that the feared European conflict would become "the first world war in the full sense of the word." His remark was cited in the Indianapolis Star on the 20th of September 1914. In English, Lieutenant Colonel Charles à Court Repington used "First World War" as the title of his memoirs in 1920; he had already noted a conversation with a Major Johnstone of Harvard University on the matter in his diary entry of the 10th of September 1918.

  The companion term "World War I" did not appear until considerably later. Time magazine coined it on page 28 of its issue dated the 12th of June 1939. On page 32 of that same article, the editors used "World War II" speculatively, describing a conflict that had not yet begun. One week before Time's the 11th of September 1939, issue confirmed the term for the actual war, the Danish newspaper Kristeligt Dagblad had already run it on its front page on the 4th of September, the day after France and the United Kingdom declared war on Germany.

• 3. Why Alliances Made War Global

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  The scale of World War I, which ran from 1914 to 1918, was made possible by the technological advances of the Second Industrial Revolution. Mass production of military hardware and the ability to project power across oceans transformed what might otherwise have been a regional fight. Observers at the time understood that the opposing alliance system, the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires ranged against the British, Italian, Russian, and French Empires, created a hair-trigger. A very small conflict between two countries carried the potential to set off a domino effect across the entire system.

  The overseas empires held by these powers made global spread almost inevitable. The colonies offered crucial strategic resources, and each side had both the motive and the ability to strike at the other's colonial holdings. That dynamic pushed the fighting far beyond Europe, reaching territories that had no quarrel with either bloc. Chemical weapons were used during the conflict despite the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 having explicitly banned them. The Ottoman Empire used the war as cover for the Armenian genocide, among other documented war crimes.

• 4. The Second War's Particular Horrors

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  World War II, from 1939 to 1945, is the only conflict in which nuclear weapons have been used in combat. The United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, both cities in the Empire of Japan. The main Axis powers were Nazi Germany, the Empire of Japan, and the Kingdom of Italy; the "Big Four" Allied powers were the United Kingdom, the United States, the Soviet Union, and China.

  Nazi Germany, led by Adolf Hitler, carried out genocides, most notably the Holocaust. The Holocaust murdered approximately six million Jews and about five million others, including Slavs, Roma, homosexuals, and people with physical and mental disabilities, all of whom the Nazis categorized as Untermensch. Japan's record included the Nanjing Massacre, in which 250,000 civilians were killed by Japanese troops, as well as the use of Asians as forced laborers and the killing of Allied prisoners of war. The United States, the Soviet Union, and Canada also deported and interned minority groups within their own borders during the conflict.

  Noncombatants suffered at least as badly as combatants throughout both wars, partly because the belligerents pursued total war strategies that deliberately blurred the line between soldier and civilian. The old European empires collapsed or were dismantled after 1945. The United States emerged as the dominant global superpower alongside its ideological rival, the Soviet Union. Institutions created in the aftermath of the war, including the United Nations, were explicitly designed to prevent another outbreak of general conflict. Technologies developed during wartime, including jet aircraft, penicillin, nuclear energy, and electronic computers, reshaped daily life in the decades that followed.

• 5. The Fear of a Third

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  Since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a prolonged fear of a potential third world war between nuclear-armed states has persisted. Albert Einstein is often quoted as having said in 1947: "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." Military and civil authorities have anticipated and planned for such a conflict, and it has been explored extensively in fiction.

  Former government officials and military leaders, including James Woolsey, Alexandre de Marenches, Eliot Cohen, and Subcomandante Marcos, have attempted to apply the labels of Third World War and Fourth World War to various conflicts since 1945, including the Cold War and the war on terror. During the early 21st century, ongoing armed conflicts and their worldwide spillovers have been described by some commentators as proxy wars waged by the United States and Russia, leading them to characterize the situation as a "proto-world war" with many countries caught in overlapping conflicts.

• 6. Which Conflicts Count

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  Historians have never fully agreed on where to draw the line. The Seven Years' War, fought from 1756 to 1763 across North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America, involved most of the great powers of the era, notably the British and French Empires. Some historians call it "World War 0" as a result.

  Richard F. Hamilton and Holger H. Herwig assembled a list of eight world wars that extends the two commonly accepted conflicts back to include the Nine Years' War of 1689-1697, the War of the Spanish Succession of 1701-1714, the War of the Austrian Succession of 1740-1748, the French Revolutionary Wars of 1792-1802, and the Napoleonic Wars of 1803-1815. British historian John Robert Seeley grouped the wars between France and Great Britain fought between 1689 and 1815, including the American Revolutionary War of 1775-1783, under the label the Second Hundred Years' War, echoing the earlier Hundred Years' War between France and England that ran from 1337 to 1453.

  Others push even further. Russian ethnologist L. N. Gumilyov labeled the Byzantine-Sasanian War of 602-628 "the World War of the 7th century" because it drew in an alliance of the Chinese Empire, the Western Turkic Khaganate, the Khazars, and the Byzantine Empire against a coalition of the Sasanian Empire, the Avars, and the Eastern Turkic Khaganate, with proxy conflicts extending across the Old World. The Second Congo War of 1998-2003, though confined to one continent, drew in nine nations and has been called "Africa's World War." Some historians prefer to classify all such conflicts as "Hegemonic Wars" or "General Wars" rather than world wars, a distinction that keeps the debate alive to this day. The Napoleonic Wars alone carry casualty estimates ranging from 1,800,000 to 7,000,000, a spread that reflects how contested even the basic accounting of these conflicts remains.