I'm of the belief that WW3 actually began around the time of the Twin Tower attacks. Of course, crackpots have been declaring a biblical 'end of times' apocalypse for 10's of centuries, ... and smaller scale wars in areas of Africa & Asia are often overlooked by our mainstream Western media.
Before my brother passed about 5 years ago, I told him I hoped to move to a relatively scenic rural mountaintop in the Rockies to watch the 'chaos' of our times play out. Along with another industrial arms race between many nations, we essentially attacked the wrong country in going after Iraq, helping to create ISIS, and got bogged down in a lengthy war in the middle-east, more recently Moscow has upped the ante taking Crimea from Ukraine, China then declaring the So. China Sea their own, nuclear armed India & Pakistan attacking one another regularly over Kashmir, Saudi Arabia & Iran bankrolling every (terrorist) organization on speed dial willing to attack the others interests, the hope of an 'Arab Spring' bringing down the despot dictator Assad in Syria backfiring, the collapse of Libya & Sudan, North Korea's bold rhetoric for bringing down the U.S., tensions on the Chinese/Indian border, Japan's re-arming, Russia's threatening behavior towards Europe & NATO. ISIS attacking Mindanao in the Philippines, Turkey moving from a secular state to a more dictatorial conservative Islamic State and their hate of Kurds, Iranian troops fresh from the fight with ISIS in Iraq now trying to link up with Hezbollah in Syria & Lebanon ... I fear it's only the beginning stages of the slow burn which will ignite into something more catastrophic when someone really steps over another's line which is drawn in the sand. Mass migration due to war is only at a beginning stage, once regional draught catches up to the warming planet, migration will be 100 fold of anything we could have imagined from Syria & Libya. Clean water, already at a premium in many areas, is drying up as the largest mountain ranges lose snow pack. Antarctic & Greenland ice melt, Siberian permafrost melting and allowing even more methane into the atmosphere, tripling down on how climate will be impacted several years from now. The U.S. backing out on the Paris climate accord, ... one might ask where global 'leadership' is taking us ?
Terrorism like we've seen in Britain today, France weeks back, where does it end ? Or is this a new era where terrorism will actually be granted an acceptable level in life's routine ?
While i'll likely not live to see the brutal future so many others face, being 64 now, it's hard to dismiss the trajectory we seem to be on. I no longer wonder if or why, I tend to wonder ... when ? In this age of wonder, where technology drives us to new frontiers daily, it's amazing we haven't found a way to just get along. The divide between rich & poor in the U.S. is greater now than at any time since the Great Depression. "In 1982, the highest-earning 1% of families received 10.8% of all pretax income, while the bottom 90% received 64.7%, according to research by UC-Berkeley professor
Emmanuel Saez. Three decades later, according to Saez’ preliminary estimates for 2012, the top 1% received 22.5% of pretax income, while the bottom 90%’s share had fallen to 49.6%." The worldwide monetary divide is even more acute.
Besides income disparity, gender and race issues are as problematic today as they have been in decades, religious animosity is growing, not slowing, politics are as divisive as ever. Everyone is blaming anyone & everything else for their problems. The next 'Great War' won't start with a bang as many anticipated, although it could easily conclude in such a manner.
Whoever are the survivors of WW3 ? Should there be a few, the only winners will be the bad guys. The re-cycling of the biggest, baddest, strongest most dangerous & cunning will begin again, everyone remaining will fight for whatever scraps of water, food & natural resources are still left available. Feral rules are the only rules. Women & children are likely to suffer the most, plumbing, electricity & hot showers will be something of the past which stories will circulate around campfires while cooking your glowing radioactive squirrel stew. Eventually, someone will find a partially charred copy of the 'Lord of the Rings', ... and Samwise or Frodo or Gandolf or Aragorn or Elrond or Saruman will be declared a god, maybe all of them, then they will argue and fight over them, each group declaring the 'only' one and true god, then we'll do it all over again.