FROM OUR WW3 EDITOR, ADOLF PRINCIP

THAT ELUSIVE CREATURE, World War 3, has raised its head yet again, illuminated by the detonations of hundreds of rockets fired by Iran against Israel.

As Ukraine has yet to expand beyond its Eastern European battle space, and China just refuses to invade Taiwan, fans of World War 3 are looking to the Middle East to initiate the conflagration that will inevitably consume mankind.

“World War Three has become a bogeyman, a hellish threat to a western world that no longer believes in hell,” says Karly Jung, the Emeritus Professor of Real and Imagined Fears at the Online University of Copinghaven. ‘it began not long after WW2, in the shadow of the Cold War and its threat of nuclear Armageddon. When that didn’t happen, those who felt it should have, kept the threat alive, so much so that every war that breaks out involving America, even in the most peripheral role, is called as a potential Third World War. Perhaps. But one should bear in mind the reason the First and Second World Wars were world wars was the control that Europe and the US had across the globe in those days. Particularly Britain, and to a lesser degree, France and the Netherlands. Once you got into war with Britain, you got into a war with a quarter of the world; same with France and the Netherlands in their proportions. They all had large empires which quickly moved local European wars well offshore. The US could get involved in wars in both major oceans, so once Washington joined in, the whole globe was necessarily tied up in the same war. Today, China can barely reach beyond the first island chain, and Russia struggles to maintain its huge immediate land borders. Only full-scale nuclear exchanges would run the risk of escalation and most states try to avoid this – wars are far more limited today. More like the eighteenth century. No one wants to go for the nukes and the ideological confrontation that threatened during the Cold War is no longer present. Except in the Middle East, perhaps. And that’s a very specific and peculiar area. Eruption is its natural state. But it usually remains localized. If World War 3 does finally arrive, it will only be because we as a species have been terribly stupid. Now I’m a little scare