World War III
World War III was already a magazine headline on the 3rd of November 1941, weeks before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Time magazine ran the story under the title "World War III?" It concerned Hermann Rauschning, a Nazi refugee who had just arrived in the United States. He believed the fighting would pause before Hitler tried to invade Great Britain.
On the 22nd of March 1943, Time reused the same title over remarks by US Vice President Henry A. Wallace. "We shall decide sometime in 1943 or 1944... whether to plant the seeds of World War III," he said. He meant a possible war between the United States and the Soviet Union. The magazine kept using the phrase for years, and in 2015 it ran a book review titled "This Is What World War III Will Look Like."
The name has been in circulation for generations, yet the war itself has never come. World War III is a hypothetical global conflict that would follow World War I and World War II. Most predictions say it would draw in every great power and involve nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction. How did governments plan for it, and what did those plans assume? Which moments came closest to setting it off, and what stopped them? And why do some prominent voices insist that it has already begun?
In April and May 1945, British planners drafted Operation Unthinkable, thought to be the first scenario for a third world war. Its stated goal was "to impose upon Russia the will of the United States and the British Empire." Prime Minister Winston Churchill worried about the enormous Soviet Red Army in Central and Eastern Europe. He also doubted that Joseph Stalin could be trusted. The British Chiefs of Staff Committee rejected the plan as militarily unfeasible.
In 1949, the United States produced Operation Dropshot, a contingency plan for nuclear and conventional war with the Soviet Union. It called for 300 nuclear bombs and 29,000 high-explosive bombs, falling on 200 targets in 100 cities and towns. The aim was to destroy 85% of Soviet industrial potential in a single stroke. Between 75 and 100 of the nuclear weapons were meant for Soviet combat aircraft sitting on the ground.
The American arsenal of that era was small, based mostly in the United States, and dependent on bombers. Weapons were too inaccurate to hit a naval base without destroying the neighboring city, so industry became the target. Dropshot predated intercontinental ballistic missiles. It also predated the change under President John F. Kennedy and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who moved the war plan from "city killing" toward a "counterforce" plan aimed at military forces.
In 1979, the Warsaw Pact developed a top-secret simulation called Seven Days to the River Rhine. It assumed that NATO would open with a nuclear first strike on the Vistula river valley, killing as many as two million Polish civilians. A Soviet counter-strike would then hit West Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark. Warsaw Pact forces would drive into West Germany and halt at the Rhine by the seventh day. Other Soviet plans stopped only at the French border, on day nine.
Each Warsaw Pact state saw only its own slice of the picture, and Polish forces were expected to advance no further than Germany. The plan expected Poland and Germany to be largely destroyed and many troops to die of radiation sickness. When it was declassified, newspapers speculated that France and the United Kingdom were spared nuclear strikes so that they would hold back their own weapons.
Ireland began planning for nuclear war in the late 1940s. Under Operation Sandstone, a top-secret British-Irish operation, the armed forces of both states surveyed the coasts of Britain and Ireland from 1948 to 1955. The United States had asked for the survey, to find landing grounds in case of a successful Soviet invasion. By 1953, the two countries had also agreed to share wartime weather data and to evacuate civilian refugees from Britain to Ireland. Ireland's part in Operation Sandstone ended in 1966.
Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey still host American nuclear weapons under NATO's nuclear sharing policy. Canada hosted them until 1984 and Greece until 2001. The United Kingdom, despite having its own arsenal, received American tactical weapons such as nuclear artillery and Lance missiles until 1992. Of roughly 480 US nuclear weapons believed to be in Europe, 180 tactical B61 bombs fall under the sharing arrangement. They are stored in vaults inside hardened aircraft shelters. In war they would be mounted on the host nations' F-16 Fighting Falcons and Panavia Tornados. In peacetime, American airmen guard them, and the codes needed to detonate them stay under American control.
Three separate incidents struck on the 27th of October 1962, the peak day of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The standoff ran from the 15th to the 29th of October. It began over Soviet nuclear missiles stationed in Cuba, a response to the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.
The most critical incident involved a Soviet submarine that American naval depth charges had targeted in international waters. The crew nearly launched a nuclear-tipped torpedo in response. Vasily Arkhipov, the Soviet Navy executive officer, prevented it.
Elsewhere that day, a Lockheed U-2 spy plane flown by Rudolf Anderson was shot down after violating Cuban airspace. Another U-2 strayed into Soviet airspace over Siberia. That raised the danger that the Soviets would read it as the vanguard of an American aerial bombardment.
The Doomsday Clock, run by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, stayed at a fairly steady seven minutes to midnight throughout the standoff. The explanation offered is that the clock tracks long-term factors, such as leadership, wars, political upheaval and how societies react to them. The crisis was simply too brief to register.
The first lasting product of the crisis was a hotline between Washington and Moscow. It grew out of the communication trouble between the White House and the Kremlin. Leaders of the two largest nuclear powers could now speak in real time, which mattered when seconds might prevent a nuclear exchange.
Worldwide alarm over how close the two powers had come also built public support for non-proliferation, and the 1963 test ban treaty followed. It ended nuclear testing in the atmosphere, leaving only underground and underwater tests, which reduced fallout. To date, 126 nations have signed it, with France and China the notable exceptions. Both were early in their nuclear programs and wanted capabilities independent of their allies. By then, over 1000 nuclear bombs had been detonated. The Doomsday Clock shifted by five minutes, to twelve minutes before midnight.
The Soviet Union developed nuclear weapons in 1949, and several other countries followed, which set off the nuclear arms race. The world had already seen the weapons used in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. Since then, fear of a nuclear apocalypse has run through speculation and fiction about a third world war. That fear includes the collapse of modern civilization and even human extinction.
Military and civil personnel around the world planned for such a war, with scenarios ranging from conventional fighting to limited or total nuclear warfare. They argued at length over how certain escalation from one stage to the next would be. The Eisenhower administration adopted a policy of massive retaliation, promising a nuclear response even to a minor conventional attack.
In the wake of 1962, the doctrine of mutually assured destruction became widely accepted. It held that a full-scale nuclear war would annihilate all parties. At the 1985 Geneva summit, American and Soviet leaders first stated jointly that "a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought."
The Vietnam War (1955-1975) and the Soviet-Afghan War (1979-1989) showed the other side of the standoff. Such proxy wars were significant, but they never grew into a full-scale global conflict. The United States and the Soviet Union never fought each other directly.
Advocates of deterrence theory argue that nuclear weapons are exactly what prevents a great power conflict of the World War III kind. Advocates of nuclear disarmament hold that the risks of keeping the weapons far outweigh that benefit.
During the Yom Kippur War of October 1973, American and Soviet naval forces in the Mediterranean Sea came close to firing on each other. A coalition of Arab states, aided by the Soviet Union, had launched a surprise invasion of Israeli-occupied territories. Israel counterattacked with American aid. Admiral Daniel J. Murphy of the US Sixth Fleet put the chances of a Soviet first strike against his fleet at 40 percent. The Pentagon moved Defcon status from 4 to 3, and a ceasefire under UNSC 339 eased the tension.
On the 9th of November 1979, NORAD systems indicated that a full-scale Soviet attack had been launched. The United States made emergency retaliation preparations. Nobody tried to use the Moscow-Washington hotline to check with the USSR. Early-warning radar finally confirmed that no launch had occurred, and NORAD realized that a computer system test had caused the display errors. A senator inside the facility described an atmosphere of absolute panic. A GAO investigation led to an off-site test facility to prevent similar mistakes.
On the 26th of September 1983, the Soviet nuclear early warning system showed American Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles launching from bases in the United States. Stanislav Petrov, a Soviet Air Defence Forces officer, realised that the system had simply malfunctioned. His judgment prevented a retaliatory attack, and later investigations bore him out.
Exercise Able Archer 83 began on the 7th of November 1983. It spanned Western Europe and centered on the SHAPE headquarters in Casteau, north of the city of Mons. The annual exercise practiced the shift from conventional operations to chemical and nuclear ones, ending in a simulated DEFCON 1 nuclear strike. Its realism, worsening relations between the superpowers, and the coming arrival of Pershing II missiles in Europe convinced some in the Soviet Politburo and military that it was a ruse of war hiding a real first strike.
The Soviets readied their nuclear forces and put air units in East Germany and Poland on alert. The threat ended when the exercise concluded on the 11th of November. Many historians consider this "1983 war scare" the closest the world has come to nuclear war since 1962.
On the 25th of January 1995, the Olenegorsk early warning station in Russia mistook a Black Brant XII research rocket for a Trident missile launch. Norwegian and American scientists were launching the rocket from the Andøya Rocket Range. President Boris Yeltsin was summoned, and the Cheget nuclear briefcase was activated for the first and only time. The high command soon saw that the rocket was not entering Russian airspace and called off its preparations. The scientists had notified thirty states, including Russia, but the warning never reached the radar technicians.
On the 12th of June 1999, the day after the Kosovo War ended, some 250 Russian peacekeepers occupied Pristina International Airport ahead of NATO troops. General Wesley Clark, NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Europe, ordered force against the Russians. British general Mike Jackson refused to carry out the order, famously telling Clark, "I'm not going to start the Third World War for you." Captain James Blunt, leading the NATO column at the stand-off, received the "Destroy!" order by radio. He followed Jackson's instruction to encircle the airfield instead, and said later that he would have refused Clark's order regardless.
On the 24th of November 2015, the Turkish Air Force shot down a Russian Sukhoi attack aircraft at the border between Turkey and Syria. Turkey said the plane had violated its airspace, and Russia denied it. The Russian jet was in the region as part of Russia's intervention in the Syrian civil war, where Turkey backed opposing forces. It was the first destruction of a Russian or Soviet warplane by a NATO member since the attack on the Sui-ho Dam during the Korean War in 1953.
A Gallup poll in December 1950 found that more than half of Americans considered World War III to have already started. The Korean War, fought from the 25th of June 1950 to the 27th of July 1953, fed that belief. CBS News war correspondent Bill Downs wrote in 1951, "Yes, Korea is the beginning of World War III." Secretary of State Dean Acheson later acknowledged that the Truman administration feared escalation. General Douglas MacArthur had warned him that a US-led intervention risked a Soviet response.
In 2004, commentator Norman Podhoretz proposed that the Cold War, from the surrender of the Axis powers to the fall of the Berlin Wall, might rightly be called World War III. He added that the global campaign against "Islamofascism" would then be World War IV. Most historians disagree. They hold that such a war must be one in which large forces from many countries fought and involving most of the principal nations. Bill Yenne, in his book Secret Weapons of the Cold War, concluded that the standoff from the 1940s to 1991 was not World War III.
The "war on terror" that followed the September 11 attacks has also been called World War III, or World War IV. Others have disparaged such claims as "distorting American history." A few historians have suggested that a "World War" might no longer require worldwide aggression and carnage. That lower threshold has not won wide support.
On the 1st of February 2015, Iraqi Foreign Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari declared the war against the Islamic State to be effectively "World War III." He cited its aim of a worldwide caliphate and its spread into several countries outside the Levant. After the November 2015 Paris attacks, King Abdullah II of Jordan said, "We are facing a Third World War against humanity."
President Barack Obama pushed back in his State of the Union Address on the 12th of January 2016. "Over-the-top claims that this is World War III just play into their hands," he said. He added that fighters on pickup trucks and plotters in apartments endanger civilians but "do not threaten our national existence." Some have also linked a hypothetical World War III to the prophesied "Great War" of scripture, namely Armageddon in Christianity and Malhama al Kubra in Islam.
Pope Francis, in several recorded interviews, said, "The world is at war because it has lost the peace." He added, "perhaps one can speak of a third war, one fought piecemeal." His successor, Pope Leo XIV, repeated the description during a visit to Turkey in 2025. Fiona Hill has argued that the combination of major conflicts, including in Ukraine and the Middle East, already amounts to a third world war. Polling by Politico found that a majority of American, Canadian, French and British respondents thought World War 3 more likely than not within five years.
The People's Republic of China claims Taiwan as part of its territory, a dispute that dates to the end of the Chinese Civil War. The Republic of China government retreated to Taiwan, while the communist People's Republic claimed the mainland. In the 2020s, Beijing has built up forces and held provocative exercises around the island, including a simulated siege. US officials have warned that the PRC could be ready for military action against Taiwan by 2027.
On the 24th of February 2022, Russian president Vladimir Putin ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It escalated the Russo-Ukrainian war, which began in 2014, and started the largest war in Europe since World War II. At least fifty countries have sent military aid to Ukraine, including every NATO member. Russia calls this a "proxy war" by NATO. Putin, foreign minister Sergey Lavrov and Dmitry Medvedev have made statements widely seen as nuclear blackmail, implying that Russia might use nuclear weapons if certain "red lines" are crossed.
Then-US President Joe Biden and then-NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg stressed the need to prevent escalation into a third world war, while affirming that NATO members would defend each other. Fearing escalation, NATO countries held back advanced weapons and forbade Ukraine to fire NATO weapons into Russia. Since July 2024, they have allowed strikes on military targets in Russia, but only near the border in self-defense. Russia has not used nuclear weapons, despite most of its red lines being crossed.
Iran and North Korea have supplied weapons and ammunition to Russia, including ballistic missiles. In 2024, Russia and North Korea signed a defense pact, and about 10,000 North Korean troops were deployed to Russia's border to fight a Ukrainian incursion. In November 2024, Putin said the war "has acquired elements of a global character."
In February 2025, a controversial meeting between US president Donald Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy erupted into an argument. Trump accused Zelenskyy of "gambling with World War III." French president Emmanuel Macron answered, "If anyone is gambling with World War III, his name is Vladimir Putin."
On the 9th of September 2025, about twenty Russian military drones entered Polish airspace. Some were shot down by NATO fighter jets and others crashed. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said that a large military conflict was closer than at any time since World War II. On the 23rd of February 2026, ahead of the invasion's fourth anniversary, Zelenskyy said he believed Putin had "already started" World War III.
On the 28th of February 2026, the United States and Israel jointly struck Iran with the stated goal of regime change. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was among the Iranian officials killed. Iran retaliated against Israel, US military bases and US allies in the region. An Iranian missile heading toward NATO member Turkey was shot down, with debris landing in Dörtyol, which raised concern that the alliance would be drawn in.
Military analysts told The Wall Street Journal that Iran aimed at "internationalizing the conflict." Political strategists Julie Roginsky and Michael DuHaime wrote that the war was the beginning of World War III. In March 2026, Robert Reich called it "the precipice of World War III." Former British Army officer Richard Shirreff called it "the final catalyst for a third world war." On the 29th of March, Iranian parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf described the conflict as "a major world war."
In 1949, physicist Albert Einstein told journalist Alfred Werner, "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." He suggested that a third world war would be so catastrophic that it would send humanity back to the Stone Age.
Other thinkers disagreed. Leslie A. White replied that human extinction might be possible, but that "extravagant expressions of horror will not alter the course of events." Crane Brinton doubted that telling a generation there must be no war would prevent one. He expected another general war that humanity would survive. James Burnham of the Office of Strategic Services held that the principles of military strategy remained unchanged. An atomic war, he argued, would be decided by the same mix of resources, morale and strategy.
A peer-reviewed study in the journal Nature Food in August 2022 put numbers on the stakes. A full-scale nuclear war between the United States and Russia, releasing over 150 Tg of stratospheric soot, could indirectly kill more than five billion people by starvation during a nuclear winter. A smaller war between India and Pakistan, releasing 5-47 Tg, could cause more than two billion deaths from starvation. In a Russia-United States war, 99% of the population of the belligerent countries, Europe and China would die.
A 1998 New England Journal of Medicine overview found considerable evidence that the nuclear threat had not disappeared with the Cold War. The 1994 United States-Russia detargeting agreement was largely symbolic, because it did not change the time needed to launch an attack. The most likely accidental-attack scenario was a retaliatory launch triggered by a false warning, like the one in 1983.
In his book Destined for War, Graham Allison views the rivalry between the United States and rising China as a Thucydides Trap. He states that "12 of 16 past cases where a rising power has confronted a ruling power" led to fighting. Hypothesized flashpoints for the 2010s and 2020s also include Estonia-Russia tensions, known as the Narva scenario, the Sino-Indian border dispute and Indo-Pakistani border conflicts. Another risk is a rogue commander in any nuclear power launching an unauthorized strike.
In the 1980s, the Strategic Defense Initiative aimed to nullify the Soviet nuclear arsenal, and some analysts judged it destabilizing. In 2020 and 2023, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists advanced its Doomsday Clock, citing among other factors the destabilizing effect expected from hypersonic weapons. A 2018 RAND Corporation report argued that artificial intelligence would have a large effect on nuclear security within a quarter century. It warned that AI could track "second-launch" launchers, or that a third party could exploit an AI's algorithms to trigger a launch recommendation.
Cyberwarfare adds another path. Nearly 40 discrete Russian attacks permanently destroyed files in hundreds of systems across dozens of organizations in Ukraine, with 40% aimed at critical infrastructure. The world's leading militaries are developing ways to alter an enemy's command and control, early warning, logistics and transportation systems. Such trends suggest the potential of a cyber World War III. World War III is also a common theme in science fiction and popular culture.
CIA founder Miles Copeland, in his memoir The Game Player, described a scenario in which a wider war emerged through crises in the developing world. The United States and Soviet-aligned forces would act largely through regional actors in the Third World, rather than in a direct superpower confrontation.
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Common questions
What is World War III?
World War III is a hypothetical future global conflict that would follow World War I (1914-1918) and World War II (1939-1945). It is widely predicted to involve all of the great powers and the use of nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction.
When did the term World War III first appear in print?
Time magazine used the headline "World War III?" in its issue of the 3rd of November 1941, before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The story concerned Nazi refugee Hermann Rauschning and his belief that fighting would pause before Hitler tried to invade Great Britain.
What was Operation Dropshot in the context of World War III planning?
Operation Dropshot was the 1949 United States contingency plan for a possible nuclear and conventional war with the Soviet Union. It envisioned 300 nuclear bombs and 29,000 high-explosive bombs striking 200 targets in 100 cities and towns.
How close did the Cuban Missile Crisis come to starting World War III?
The Cuban Missile Crisis, from the 15th to the 29th of October 1962, is considered the closest the world has come to a nuclear exchange. On the 27th of October, Vasily Arkhipov prevented a Soviet submarine from launching a nuclear-tipped torpedo.
Who prevented a nuclear response during the 1983 Soviet radar false alarm?
Stanislav Petrov, a Soviet Air Defence Forces officer, prevented a retaliatory attack on the 26th of September 1983. He realised that the early warning system, which showed American Minuteman missiles launching, had simply malfunctioned.
What did Albert Einstein say about World War III?
In 1949, Albert Einstein said, "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." He suggested that the outcome would be catastrophic enough to return humanity to the Stone Age.
Why do some people say World War III has already started?
Some commentators, politicians and religious leaders argue that a series of linked conflicts already amounts to World War III. Pope Francis spoke of a third war "fought piecemeal," and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on the 23rd of February 2026 that Putin had "already started" it.
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