World War III - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_III World War III (WWIII or WW3) and Third World War are names given to a hypothetical third worldwide military conflict subsequent to World War I and World War II. The term has been in use since the end of World War II. ..... Bill Downs wrote in 1951 that, "To my mind, the answer is: Yes, Korea is the beginning of World War III.

Strategic Defense Initiative Main article: Strategic Defense Initiative The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was proposed by US President Ronald Reagan on 23 March 1983.[20] In the later part of his Presidency, numerous factors (which included watching the 1983 movie The Day After and hearing through a Soviet defector that Able Archer 83 almost triggered a Russian first strike) had turned Ronald Reagan against the concept of winnable nuclear war, and he began to see nuclear weapons as more of a "wild card" than a strategic deterrent. Although he later believed in disarmament treaties slowly blunting the danger of nuclear weaponry by reducing their number and alert status, he also believed a technological solution might allow incoming ICBMs to be shot down, thus making the US invulnerable to a first strike. However the USSR saw the SDI concept as a major threat, since unilateral deployment of the system would allow the US to launch a massive first strike on the Soviet Union without any fear of retaliation. The SDI concept was to use ground-based and space-based systems to protect the United States from attack by strategic nuclear ballistic missiles. The initiative focused on strategic defense rather than the prior strategic offense doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). The Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO) was set up in 1984 within the United States Department of Defense to oversee the Strategic Defense Initiative. If activated, Operation Reforger would have largely consisted of convoys like this one from Operation Earnest Will in 1987, though much larger. While troops could easily fly across the Atlantic, the heavy equipment and armor reinforcements would have to come by sea. A Warsaw Pact invasion would have come via three main paths through Germany Seven Days to the River Rhine was a top secret military simulation exercise developed in 1979 by the Warsaw Pact. It started with the assumption that NATO would launch a nuclear attack on the Vistula river valley in a first-strike scenario, which would result in as many as two million Polish civilian casualties.[10] In response, a Soviet counter-strike would be carried out against West Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark, with Warsaw Pact forces invading West Germany and aiming to stop at the River Rhine by the seventh day. Other USSR plans stopped only upon reaching the French border on day nine. Individual Warsaw Pact states were only assigned their own subpart of the strategic picture; in this case, the Polish forces were only expected to go as far as Germany. The Seven Days to the Rhine plan envisioned that Poland and Germany would be largely destroyed by nuclear exchanges, and that large numbers of troops would die of radiation sickness. It was estimated that NATO would fire nuclear weapons behind the advancing Soviet lines to cut off their supply lines and thus blunt their advance. While this plan assumed that NATO would use nuclear weapons to push back any Warsaw Pact invasion, it did not include nuclear strikes on France or the United Kingdom. Newspapers speculated when this plan was declassified, that France and the UK were not to be hit in an effort to get them to withhold use of their own nuclear weapons. Exercise Able Archer Main article: Able Archer 83 President Ronald Reagan and Soviet double agent Oleg Gordievsky, who later told the west how close the Able Archer 83 exercise had brought the Soviets to ordering a First Strike.