How close are we to World War Three?

Vladimir Putin has issued a new threat against the West after revealing the successful test of a game-changing, radioactive-exhaust-emitting nuclear missile.

During a visit to a frontline military command post, the Russian president said he now has the “highest level” nuclear forces in the world “in a chilling World War Three warning”, reported The Mirror.

If a new global conflict were to start, Nato’s border with Russia is one of five likely theatres where it could erupt, according to Harry Kazianis, editor-in-chief of National Security Journal. Other candidates are the Taiwan Strait, the Israel-Iran theatre, the Korean Peninsula, and the Himalayan frontier between India and China.

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While “each flashpoint has its own fuse – unfinished wars, shifting deterrence, or alliance commitments that could drag in great powers quickly” the “common thread is miscalculation under pressure”.

Russia

Putin has until now been happy to stall on peace talks as Kremlin forces make slow but steady gains in Ukraine. A second meeting between the Russian president and Donald Trump, due to take place in Budapest, has been delayed indefinitely. Meanwhile, Moscow continues to launch drone strikes on Kyiv and, over the past month, has even begun to test Nato defences and resolve with a series of airspace incursions into Estonia, Romania and Poland.

This prompted the Polish PM to warn that his country was at its “closest to open conflict since the Second World War”, while a statement from Nato said the violations were “part of a wider pattern of increasingly irresponsible Russian behaviour”, with actions that are “escalatory, risk miscalculation and endanger lives”.

In a sign of the growing fear that an attack could be imminent, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, as well as Poland and Finland, have announced they are withdrawing from a landmark landmine treaty as they seek to shore up their border defences with Russia. There have also been renewed efforts to revive a Baltic “bog belt” along Nato’s eastern flank to protect Europe from Russia.

While the Baltic states are the most likely target for a Russian invasion, Moscow has also begun ramping up production of hypersonic missiles. The intermediate-range weapons “are capable of striking targets up to 3,415 miles away, which puts locations across Europe and even the western US within their potential reach”, said The Economic Times.

The successful test of the Burevestnik nuclear-powered cruise missile – nicknamed the “Flying Chernobyl” because it emits radioactive exhaust from its unshielded reactor – is yet another escalation. The test on 21 October saw the missile fly for 15 hours non-stop and cover a distance of 14,000 km (8,700 miles) but its true range could be “unlimited”, Putin said.

If Russia takes military action against any Nato member state, it would force the military alliance into an all-out conflict. In that scenario, Russia could call on its allies to join in a global war. “Serious analysts express concern that Russia may escalate and the world, as it has done so many times in the era of mass warfare, may sleepwalk its way into an engulfing conflict,” said The New Statesman.

In reality, the likely threat from Russia is not a “full-scale invasion” but a “test: something ambiguous and tricky that will divide Nato, and thus discredit it”, said Edward Lucas in The Times. Some believe the recent drone and jet incursions are designed to do just that but, with Russia’s new supersonic missiles able to stretch from Moscow to any point in Europe, we are all on “the eastern flank now”.

Middle East

Trump may have declared a “historic dawn of a new Middle East” but, just weeks after the Gaza ceasefire came into effect, both Israel and Hamas appear ready to start fighting again.

There is frantic behind-the-scenes work being done to try and salvage the US-brokered peace deal and, were it to collapse, it would represent a significant setback to Trump’s desire to remake the Middle East.

The US president has vowed to use all his power to ensure that Israel recognises it has achieved “all that it can by force of arms” and begin an age of cooperation that may ultimately extend as far as reconciliation with Iran.

It is a head-spinning change of tone from this summer, when, for a few days, it looked as though the war between Israel and Iran would explode into an all-out regional conflict, dragging in the US and Western allies on one side, and potentially Russia and China on the other.

While both sides backed down following a frantic 24 hours in which the US launched air strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities, the threat from Tehran’s nascent nuclear programme remains “heightened”, said Paul Ingram, research affiliate for the Centre of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, told the The i Paper.

Claims by Trump to have eliminated the regime’s nuclear capabilities for the foreseeable future were quickly debunked by the Pentagon. And with Iran still holding 440kg of highly enriched uranium, “it all adds up to quite a dangerous situation where their capacity has been marginally degraded, but the incentives for Iran to go nuclear have gone through the roof”.

The weakening of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the fall of the Assad regime in Syria and now the potential decommissioning of Hamas mean Iran has lost much of its proxy influence across the region. Combined with the short-lived Israel-Iran war “calls within Tehran to develop nuclear deterrence will have massively increased”, said Ingram.

China

It has long been assumed that the greatest threat to geopolitical stability is rising tension between China and the US, which could force other countries to align with either superpower. This risks pushing the globe to “the brink of a third world war”, The Straits Times reported.

Trump is set to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping in South Korea later this week for their first face-to-face meeting in six years. His “top priority” will be to “avoid a full-blown trade war”, said the BBC’s North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher.

But while attention is currently fixed on trade, most analysts expect a future military confrontation to centre on Taiwan. Beijing sees the island nation as an integral part of a unified Chinese territory. It has, in recent years, adopted an increasingly aggressive stance towards the island. It has denounced Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party, which won an unprecedented third term last year, as dangerous separatists. At the same time, the US has ramped up its support – financially, militarily and rhetorically – for Taiwan’s continued independence.

Earlier this year, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) conducted live-fire military exercises in the Taiwan Strait, drills seen as a “dress rehearsal for a possible real blockade in an attempt to overthrow the government in Taipei in the future”, said the BBC.

This year, China has “held live-fire drills on the doorsteps of Australia, Taiwan and Vietnam”, tested new landing barges on ships that “could facilitate an amphibious assault on Taiwan”, and unveiled deep-sea cable cutters “with the ability to switch off another country’s internet access – a tool no other nation admits to having”, said The Guardian.

Many observers anticipate that China will look to invade Taiwan by 2027, which is seen as a “magical” year because it marks the centenary of what was to become the PLA, said Robert Fox in London’s The Standard. The idea that this anniversary could coincide with a serious military operation by Beijing has become a “fixation” in Washington, said Defense News.

If there’s one ally almost every Republican in Washington wants to defend, it’s Taiwan against China, said Time. Beijing knows a full-scale invasion of Taiwan would “risk direct war with the US”.

To this end, China will be looking to expand its estimated 600 fielded nuclear warheads to compete with Russia and the US, Dr Sidharth Kaushal, from the Royal United Services Institute think tank, told The i Paper.

“This will make things even more complex for the US, because it will face the prospect theoretically of a China-Russian alliance that has more nuclear weapons than it does.”

Politicians, military chiefs and industry leaders “can no longer afford to ignore the prospect of a full-scale invasion”, said the Daily Mail. In such a scenario, the US – Taiwan’s most powerful protector – may be forced to respond in its defence. It would “shake the foundations of the world as we know it and could well trigger a third world war”.

North Korea

Since 2019, Kim Jong Un has “focused on modernising his nuclear and missile arsenals”, said Sky News. At the start of last year, he announced that the hermit kingdom had eliminated “the idea of a peaceful unification” with South Korea, said The Associated Press. South Korea has since scrapped a 2018 non-hostility pact aimed at lowering military tensions.

“Kim’s government has repeatedly dismissed calls by Seoul and Washington to restart long-stalled negotiations aimed at winding down his nuclear weapons and missiles programmes, as he continues to prioritise Russia as part of a foreign policy aimed at expanding ties with nations confronting the US,” said The Independent.

North Korea has sent thousands of troops and weapons to fight in Ukraine, a move that “has raised concerns Moscow could provide technology that strengthens Kim’s nuclear-armed military”.

In April, North Korea conducted the first test-firing of the weapons system of its new 5,000 tonne “Choe Hyon-class” destroyer, according to state media KCNA. The new warship can apparently launch nuclear-capable ballistic missiles, and that, security and defence analyst Michael Clarke told Sky News, “shows the level of their ambition”.

Around the same time, South Korea said its soldiers had fired warning shots at North Korean troops who had crossed the demarcation line between the two nations – some of whom were armed.

Dr Sean Kenji Starrs, lecturer in international development at King’s College London, told the Daily Mail that “the more likely scenario” than North Korea invading South Korea would be China “encouraging or pressuring” it to do so “in order to expel US troops”. That would “open a new front against the US so that China could more easily take Taiwan”.