World War Three

     The Third World War.*  It's a buzzphrase, especially popular just now with the farther fringes of the Right and Left, but -- let's face it -- becoming ever more mainstream.

     We've certainly got the classic ingredients for the early stage: an expansionist power moving to take territory by force of arms, a coalition united in opposition but hesitant to engage directly, while at least one small nation is being hacked to bits.  The West may yet be drawn into active conflict.

     This is far from the first time such a prospect has loomed.  It's not even the first time an emboldened Russia has looked westward; but Stalin had other problems, and we ended up with a Cold War instead of a hot one.

     But in 1951, the ambitious editors of Collier's magazine wondered what it would look like if the world again fell into war [PDF] and imagined a situation in which the Soviet Union might try to launch a short, victorious war against a smaller and uncooperating nation.  They chose Tito's Yugoslavia as the flash point, and posited an unsuccessful assassination attempt followed by land invasion.

     Tito, surviving, calls on the UN for help and the NATO responds; after a string of initial successes, the invasion by the USSR (and satellites) grinds to a halt.

     To that point, it sounds familiar, doesn't it?  In Collier's projection -- told as if looking backwards from 1960, five years after the war had drawn to a close, leaving national capitols in ruins -- the UN gives the USSR an ultimatum, which is ignored; the Soviet invasion into Europe falters under a campaign of conventional and fission bombing that escalates after the USSR hits London, then cities and war-production sites in the continental U.S.  The near-destruction of Washington D. C. is followed by a daring raid on Moscow, as the tide of the war turns--

     The magazine's collection of writers, everyone from reporters and columnists to politicians, fiction writers and labor leaders, were envisioning global war at a time before fusion bombs and intercontinental ballistic missiles, before "one missile, one city," before Nuclear Winter.  Their WW III included only a limited nuclear exchange, horrific though it is.  Bombs grew more quickly than they imagined.

     The issue was praised as a solemn warning and condemned as little more than nihilistic disaster-porn.  It's worth taking a look at, to see how much -- and how little -- has changed.

     Ambitious autocrats have always been a threat to peace, to the ordinary lives of ordinary people.  And it is the ordinary people who bear the cost of bringing aggressive powers to heel.  History is too often the story of "great men," larger-than life heroes and villains, but the real story is the ruin the worst of men bring about and the effort it takes to stop them, by everyone from the noblest philosopher and most clever strategist to the simplest foot soldier and Home Front worker.

     Like it or not, and I don't, we're in it again.  Maybe everything will work out, Russia will grind to a halt in the snow and mud, and the war will end at the negotiating table sooner rather than later.  A look at history -- or a back issue of Collier's -- suggests otherwise.
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* Some historians dispute the count, pointing out the global scope of the Seven Year's War in the 18th Century and the Napoleonic Wars of the 19th, along with others.  The numbers of fallen in those wars are not changed by the designation, nor any borders changed, and about the only conclusion is that as a species, our wars are as wide-ranging as our means of travel allow.