Considering it's been an unprecedented time where we've gone about seventy years without a major war, it's hard not to think that it's about due.

In some ways it reminds me of the period after the Napoleonic wars. That war had changed the nature of warfare do a degree that the generations that followed did everything in their power to prevent another world war.

In the 1890s, the idea of another massive European war was dismissed. Nations that were significant trading partners would never engage in the kind of total war seen sixty years before. It would be suicide. The systems of alliances made it so no nation could move against another, and a general peace had been found. There were still conflicts, similar to what we see today, but an all consuming war? Madness.

Then the first world war happened, and it was more devastating, more terrible and more bloody than anyone could have anticipated. Even in 1908 it wasn't a possibility on anyones radar. If there had been Reddit back then, we would have been too busy having arguments over the suffrage movement, the dangers of unchecked immigration of radicals into America, and looking at pictures of exposed ankles to see the looming storm.

How is it going to take place? Obviously impossible to guess, but the idea of automated killing machines targeting civilians without regards to borders seems the most obvious. the targeting o leadership and government officials would be first, with centers o communication being the next target. I doubt we'll see large scale use of strategic weapons, such as ICBMs since nobody wants to open that can of worms....but given advances in bioweapons, we may wish that it was just a nuclear exchange.

In the end we will be left with a shell shocked generation who will do everything in their power to prevent such a thing from happening again...until the next time it happens.