[DesuMaiden]

Yes or no? Some people argue that there will be another world war over the remaining oil reserves. Is that a possibility? Let's just hope the next world war isn't fought with nuclear weapons, because the last thing we would want is a thermonuclear war. What other resources might the world be fighting over in the next world war? Let's just hope there isn't another world war because that might even be more devastating than the economic decline caused by oil depletion. If it is a thermonuclear war, then say "bye, bye" to humanity.

Either way, there might be another world war over the remaining oil reserves or whatever important resources are left in the world. The next world war is long overdue.

[Poordogabone]

Who knows? my hunch is that nukes will remain a deterrent weapon. people love their children too much to play that kind of game.

[DesuMaiden]

Who knows? my hunch is that nukes will remain a deterrent weapon. people love their children too much to play that kind of game.

Yeah you are right. It is unlikely that we will use nukes on each other.

[Shaved Monkey]

World War is old hat
You get them to fight each other and still sell you the oil.
Win win you sell both sides guns, they use their oil revenue fighting each other instead of fighting you or your allies.

[Tanada]

Who knows? my hunch is that nukes will remain a deterrent weapon. people love their children too much to play that kind of game.

I hope you are right, but there are people on this planet today willingly strapping explosives on young men and women and then sending them into crowds to explode. Every one of those are somebody's children.

[Shaved Monkey]

If their military could afford remote control drones they would use that instead,its not that they don't love their children, its just that they have fewer choices to kill people with to appear more caring and civilised.

[vtsnowedin]

I expect regional wars rather then a world wide conflict. Top prospect is China vs. India over the the food supply in the Mekong delta of South East Asia. Second is Europe invading Russia to seize the oil and gas from the Russian gangsters presently led by Putin.

[Poordogabone]

Who knows? my hunch is that nukes will remain a deterrent weapon. people love their children too much to play that kind of game.

I hope you are right, but there are people on this planet today willingly strapping explosives on young men and women and then sending them into crowds to explode. Every one of those are somebody's children.

I know, this is quite incomprehensible for people like us living relatively comfortably, engaging in intellectual conversations behind our computers with our refrigerators stuffed with goodies.
I am no psychology expert but I do not know that I would not take drastic measures myself if I was treated as a subhuman on a daily basis. I do know that primates have an evolved unequivocal sense of justice. So although highly unlikely you could make the case that a suicide bomber could detonate a nuke, but the chances of that is no greater than some christian nutter planting a nuke somewhere to bring about Armageddon. In any case I don't see how this would lead to a global nuclear conflict.

[Pops]

Nukes pretty well make world war passé.

Look for asymmetric "insurgencies" and Cyberwar vs NSA & drones - everywhere.

Read a pretty good novel on the subject of 24/7 drone surveillance: "Unmanned" - http://online.wsj.com/articles/book-rev ... 1409178481

[Lore]

There will be wars over resource depleation in general. I wouldn't be surprised if we don't see violent conflicts between states here in our own country in the next several decades.

[Kylon]

There will be, but not in the traditional sense of the word.


The kind of "World War" that occurs will be world proxy wars. Whenever a country with resources gets weakened, or is fighting an opponent and that opponent wants their resources or wants to destroy them, they will fund extremist/terrorist/civil war types in the opposing countries territory.

Russia has no real threat from the United States invading their country, due to the size of their army, and more importantly nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. However, the United States might find a would be dictator/warlord who wants to rule Russia, arm him, train him, and provide assistance in public relations, and everything else needed for a revolution, and then attack Russia from within with an insurgency. Every country has political winners and losers, the simple tactic would be to find some of those losers who are most aggressive, ruthless, least ethical, and most ambitious, and give them the backing they need to overthrow the legitimate government in that country. At the same time, in order to control the puppet government, they keep them relatively dependent on the country supporting the insurgency.

So what you will probably see is more and more "revolutions". Some of which will be genuinine, and exist out of frustration of a desperate population, and some will be manufactured.

But that's the kind of world war I envision, different "revolutionary/insurgency" groups, that are manufactured by foreign powers looking to overthrow the government that exist in order to replace it with a puppet government that will effectively pay tribute to the government/country/group that put them in power.

The reasons why I think that this will happen more frequently are-

1) Insurgency groups can hide whose their support base, which means countries like Russia might not know who to target with their nuclear weapons should the insurgency become a real danger to their control.
2) In times of economic desperation, it's easy to whip the population into a frenzy and fuel and power an insurgency. To put it simply, an insurgency becomes progressively more economical a way to fight a war, the more desperate, hungry, and ignorant the population is.

As a result of this tactic being used more frequently by all major powers, we can probably expect to see more and more police state like operations occurring, less civil liberties, fewer civil rights, greater control of weapons, and military related knowledge, and greater survelliance of the population.

This is both a function of corruption by all of the ruling elites in each society (as they attempt to hoard wealth both acquired ethically and unethically from the starving masses), and a means to protect against state supported terrorism by foreign powers (as most major adversary countries (for the U.S that might be China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela ect...) . But unfortunately that means that those of us who do not want to be political/military revolutionaries, and those of us who aren't politically connected will suffer as a result. We will all be viewed as potential terrorist because of the potential danger that a small part of the population pose.

[Keith_McClary]

The kind of "World War" that occurs will be world proxy wars. Whenever a country with resources gets weakened, or is fighting an opponent and that opponent wants their resources or wants to destroy them, they will fund extremist/terrorist/civil war types in the opposing countries territory.

Russia has no real threat from the United States invading their country, due to the size of their army, and more importantly nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. However, the United States might find a would be dictator/warlord who wants to rule Russia, arm him, train him, and provide assistance in public relations, and everything else needed for a revolution, and then attack Russia from within with an insurgency. Every country has political winners and losers, the simple tactic would be to find some of those losers who are most aggressive, ruthless, least ethical, and most ambitious, and give them the backing they need to overthrow the legitimate government in that country. At the same time, in order to control the puppet government, they keep them relatively dependent on the country supporting the insurgency.

Isn't that what they've been doing in various countries for decades?

[ralfy]

I was going to say the same thing, i.e., proxy wars. This allows financiers to profit and military forces to receive more funding. Civilians face collateral damage and war costs.

[Dybbuk]

Top prospect is China vs. India over the the food supply in the Mekong delta of South East Asia.

For those who believe in the book of Revelation (which does NOT include me, at present), how about China and India working together and invading the Middle East? There's a prophecy about an army of 200 million crossing the Euphrates River. About the only reasonable way to get an army of that size is to include both China and India.

It seems to hard to fathom, but here's one scenario where it could happen. Say the U.S. gets a president like Al Gore who takes climate change seriously, and identifies China and India as culprits in the attempt to scale back worldwide carbon emissions. He wields his power to restrict energy imports to those countries. This results in misery, upheaval and unrest in those countries. The leaders decide that military action is their only option to prevent starvation, revolution, etc. So they attempt to conquer Iraq and Saudi Arabia to restore the flow of oil.