One of Andy Burnham’s first tasks as prime minister will have been to write so-called “letters of last resort” that provide instructions on what to do in the event the UK is hit by a nuclear attack and the government is incapacitated.
Written by hand and addressed to each of the four commanders of the Vanguard submarines that carry the country’s nuclear deterrent, the letters contain orders about how the UK should retaliate. Precisely what is contained in these letters is never made public, with orders from previous PMs destroyed as soon as new ones reach the subs.
The choices are “broadly known”, said The Economist. They are “retaliate; join forces with an allied state (typically America, but these days possibly France); do nothing; or let the commander decide”.
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It is “the moment when new prime ministers feel the gravity of the job, and the inevitable attention they must pay to the perils of the world”, and “rarely has the threat to Europe seemed so dangerous”, given ongoing tensions in Europe, the Middle East and Asia that risk escalating into a global conflict between great powers.
When would we know the Third World War had begun?
Multiple “system-changing conflicts with multivector loads of countries involved” are a sign that the next world war has indeed already started, UK security analyst Fiona Hill told The Guardian last year – if only we would recognise it.
The reality is that most people won’t know they are in a world war until fighting is well under way – or so history teaches us. The Second World War was “simply ‘the War’ until the late 1940s” in Britain, according to History.com, although US president Franklin D. Roosevelt “publicly declared it” as such when America entered the conflict in 1941.
Although the conflict in the Middle East, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and rising Chinese threats against Taiwan have intensified fears, the truth is that another world war will “only come into existence when people subjectively agree that it has”, said Gavriel Rosenfeld in The Washington Post.
In the end, we may not really know the Third World War has happened until it enters “the history books as a real event in retrospect”.
Are there signs that the Third World War is on the way?
“The question of how a third world war might erupt haunts us today more than at any time since the end of the last world war,” said author Richard Overy in The Telegraph.
The world is perhaps in as tense a position as it has been in nearly a century and countries are more readily equipped with stockpiles of highly destructive weapons than they were before the previous wars.
The “major powers” holding nuclear weapons make the “situation far more perilous”, Dr David Wearing, lecturer in international relations at the University of Sussex, told Sky News. This is not because one side is more likely to make a “premeditated decision to spark the apocalypse” but that, if one side “misinterprets” the action of the other, a “nuclear exchange begins, despite the fact that no one was looking for one”.
Earlier this year, World Health Organization officials began preparing for nuclear catastrophe if the US-Israeli war with Iran escalated further. “The worst-case scenario is a nuclear incident, and that’s something that worries us the most,” Hanan Balkhy, WHO’s regional director for the eastern Mediterranean, told Politico. “As much as we prepare, there’s nothing that can prevent the harm that will come.”
“That’s an understatement”, said US news site Salon’s national affairs editor, Troy Farah. “A single nuclear device detonated in a city, whether it’s Tel Aviv, Tehran or Washington, would immediately qualify as one of the worst events of this century.”
But for all the talk of a new world war, “it’s unclear what ‘war’ even means in the 21st century”. It looks “barely recognisable, compared to historical footage or war movies of the past” and is “happening everywhere, all the time, and involves the whole globe in some way”.
How would the Third World War be fought?
Even with their potential to escalate, the wars we are seeing today in Ukraine and Iran are “quite different to what happened in the 1940s with its thousand bomber raids and millions fighting on the eastern front”, said Mark Urban in The Sunday Times. “Critically, no country in the world – with the possible exception of China – could sustain the huge expenditure of precision weapons that we are now seeing for any substantial period of time.”
Whether it’s Nato vs. Russia over Ukraine or the US vs. China over Taiwan, “great powers rarely settle military conflicts with other great powers in a neat, tidy fashion”,said Brian Kerg at the New Atlanticist.
Wars between world superpowers are usually “long, gruelling slogs of attrition”, which then “tend to expand horizontally, ensnaring other regions in their wake”. That is possibly the clearest sign that the Third World War is under way.
Many defence experts believe “the first shots of the next world war will almost certainly be fired in space (with simultaneous volleys being exchanged in cyberspace, which increasingly overlaps with the space domain)”, said Andreas Kluth on Bloomberg. “The controversy is about what form an attack would take.”
This could presage the use of nuclear arms, which present the risk of conflicts being over in a rapid flash of mass destruction. The “tearing up” of treaties that capped the spread of nuclear arms means more countries than ever are now in a position to build a nuclear arsenal: a sign that the “old nuclear order is dead”, said Richard Spencer in The Times, and the “only thing preventing catastrophe is, once again, mutually assured destruction”.
That could mean nuclear arms are more likely to be used as “tactical weapons”, rather than the all-out bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Smaller nuclear weapons could be “fired from artillery or tanks, or attached to short-range missiles”.
The scenario of Putin using tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine, Iran building a nuclear bomb and using it on Israel, or China deploying them against Taiwan are all “possible” if still not “probable”, said Overy.
“Predicting – more accurately, imagining – the wars of the future can produce dangerous fantasies that promote anxiety over future security. It is likely that even the most plausible prognosis will be wrong.”
Looking further ahead, Albert Einstein once said that although he didn’t know “which weapons World War Three will be fought” with, “World War Four will be fought with sticks and stones”, said Forbes.
