The World Is Closer To World War III Than Many Realize. Playing With Fire.

How close is World War III? It may be a lot closer than you realize.

I’ve studied nuclear warfighting since the 1960s, including major scholarly works such as On Thermonuclear War (1960) by Herman Kahn. There’s a lot of learning on the topic, but all of the studies boil down to the same warning: Don’t go there.

What this means is that nuclear war is not a place where anyone begins an attack and it’s not a place where anyone wants to end up. But it can happen anyway.

The process by which nuclear war happens is called escalation.

Two nuclear powers start out with a grievance of some kind. The grievance may be played out using proxy powers such as Vietnam in the 1960s and Afghanistan in the 2000s. One side escalates the conflict by doing something unexpected or extreme. The other side does not stand still; they take an extreme retaliatory action.

The first actor then retaliates to the retaliation and so on. Now we have a dynamic where two sides are climbing the escalation ladder.

Again, it’s important to emphasize that neither side really wants a nuclear war, but once they start climbing the ladder, it’s hard to stop. Eventually, one side pushes the other so far that the only response is to use nuclear weapons.

At that point, you’re no longer just escalating; you’re at the brink of a nuclear launch. To make matters worse, the other side sensing that their opponent may go nuclear will be under pressure to go nuclear first in order to avoid being hit themselves. This then goes into another branch of theory involving first-strike, second-strike, counterforce and counter-value strategies, etc.

I don’t have to do a deep dive on these theories in order to make the point that nuclear war doesn’t begin with a nuclear attack. It begins with small steps that spin out of control.

This article is an example of one of those small steps. To make the point about escalation, just two days after NATO activated its response force as described in the article, Putin activated the Russian nuclear forces by putting them on full alert.

We haven’t seen the Western military response yet, but it would come as no surprise if the U.S. put their nuclear forces on high alert also.

The escalatory dynamic has begun. We’ll see where it ends up. Smart citizens should prepare for the worst. Let’s pray it doesn’t happen.

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