The abundance of nuclear weapons, among other things, makes it virtually impossible to carry out a tactful analysis of how modern militaries might fare in a global conflict, and it hardly needs stipulating that war is about context, and that's very much more than facts and figures. Now before we square off on the biggest military-geek debate on the internet, we'd like to reiterate: While based on factual information, the situations described here are entirely hypothetical and the conclusions drawn have been reduced to analyses of the set of criteria stipulated above combined with the findings of research on predicted future trends. Trends in military spending (both the amount in U.S. Air force size (number of combat planes and attack helicopters) total real weight of military sea vessels) Naval size (by displaced tonnage of water, i.e. Military personnel count (total active, reserve and paramilitary troops) But in an attempt to try and make our own predictions about this hypothetical global conflict a little more realistic and diplomatic, we combined several points of data on the biggest military powers today with trends in their economic growth and defense spending. This is barely scratching the surface of the uncertainty of the question: Who would win WWIII? Some of us might be tempted to place victory in the nuke-count, plain and simple. Are the nukes just in-waiting for that next “World War”? Perhaps the fact that industrialized countries continue bloating their military budgets for all sorts of less-frightening armaments, like F-35 fighter jets with 24 million lines of software code and bunker-busting cruise missiles, means it’s unlikely a global war would take off running with a decisive nuclear parade.īut then again, the most recent evidence of major military powers facing off comes with a nuclear explosion. It’s a frightening thought, but thankfully military conflict is more complicated than that America’s choice to unleash just two instances of that destruction on Japan remains by far the most morally, politically and historically problematic military decision ever made. With estimates of some 22,000 total nukes in modern military arsenals, it’s not hard to believe countries really do have the means for multiple mass-extinctions, as some have sensationally warned.īut is that what a Third World War would look like? Certainly, the days of a war centred around battles fought in trenches are long behind us. Would warheads now simply pepper the planet and wipe nations out in one fell swoop? Would it be over within days? Weeks? A handful of months or years maybe from nuclear ecocide? If global war were to erupt today, it would be the first time in history where virtually all major combatants had this sort of destructive capability. Today, a single thermonuclear weapon weighing just over 1,000 kg has the explosive equivalent of about 1.2 million tons of TNT.

So ended the Second World War in Asia, when Japan surrendered to the allies just months after Hitler's suicide in a German bunker.

Three days later, a second bomb on Nagasaki killed 40,000 just as quickly, and tens of thousands more died from injury and radiation by the end of the year. Monday, August 6, 1945, the American atomic bomb “Little Boy” dropped on Hiroshima effectively killing 80,000 people and destroying 69% of the city’s buildings in an instant.

Will world war 3 happened