I tend to agree that the definition of "World War" is pretty much a non sequitur these days. By default, any war involving any two of the first-world countries or the two third-world countries with nuclear weapons will have effects far beyond the borders of those countries and, willy-nilly, those other countries will either be directly affected by or drawn into the conflict.

I believe that WWI and WWII were called "world wars" because the protagonists were not single countries but world-wide empires ...

In some sense, the original quotation was probably spot on. The major contributions that modern science had on both wars were definitely gas in WWI and the atomic bomb in WWII. Both changed the face of actual warfare forever. Now, of course, we also have biological warfare, so we can wrap it all up in a nice, tidy three-letter acronumb, BNC.

It seems unlikely to me that there will be a WWIII as such. Everyone has too much to lose to start a general conflict and no one can afford to sustain one anyway. And with the demise of the Warsaw Pact the conditions for one to begin seem to have disappeared. However, that's not to say that there won't be a conflict between two countries which will exhibit some of the characteristics of a global conflict if BNC is part of the arsenal used.

Does this make sense?


The idiot also known as Capfka ...