As the United States, Russia and China test each other's patience and strategic focus, speculation about the possibility of a global war has reached a new high.
But many of the people who took part seriously in this important debate often miscalculate.
When it comes to estimating military capability, the Western media is primarily concerned with the weapons capabilities of weak states;
They seldom pay the slightest attention to the enormous capacity of the United States, which is still responsible for most of the world's defense expenditures.
Any reasonable discussion of what a hypothetical World War III might look like must begin with the size and power of US military hardware.
Although China and Russia seek to arm themselves in various measures, US military leaders have the ability to control escalating crises and resist opposing forces before they are used.
Take a look at the missile arsenal alone: The US Navy already has 4,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles, while the Navy and Air Force are currently receiving 5,000 AGM-158 conventional cruise missiles (JASSM) with a range of 200 to 600 miles, barely visible to radar. They are designed to destroy "hardened" targets such as nuclear missile depots.
By contrast, Russia and China have neither the quantity nor the quality that can be used to threaten the American mainland.
The same applies to the Navy;
Despite what has been raised about the Russian frigates* and smaller ships stationed off the Syrian coast, France alone has 20 warships and aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean, and the American forces operating (permanent) in the region include six destroyers equipped with dozens of cruise missiles and anti-missile systems.
At the other end of Europe, the Russian army threatens the small Baltic states, but the Russian Baltic Fleet is seldom seen as the same size as Denmark's and half the size of Germany's.
Meanwhile, China's expansionist behavior in the South China Sea has been reported in conjunction with the stories of China's first aircraft carrier and its long-range ballistic missiles.
According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, although the Chinese navy is large and growing, it is still only as many fleets as Japan and Taiwan combined, while the United States has 19 aircraft carriers worldwide if its naval attack ships are included.
Above all this equipment, of course, is the nuclear factor.
falling from the sky
The United States, Russia and China are all nuclear-armed.
Vladimir Putin recently unveiled a new fleet of nuclear-capable missiles, describing it as "invincible in the face of all current and future regimes", and some suggested that China might shift away from a policy of no-use first (referring to a pledge or policy by a nuclear power not to The use of nuclear weapons as a means of warfare, unless the adversary attacks them first with nuclear weapons.
All of the foregoing is undeniably disturbing;
While it has long been assumed that the threat of nuclear weapons acts as a deterrent to any war between great powers, it is also possible that the world may simply have been lucky.
But again, US non-nuclear capabilities are often overlooked.
US leaders may in fact believe that they can eliminate Russia's nuclear deterrent with a crushing conventional attack backed by missile defenses.
This capability was cultivated under the Prompt Global Strike** program that began before the events of September 11, 2001 and continued through the Obama years.
Organized by the US Air Force's Mass Bombardment Command, this force is the use of conventional weapons to attack anywhere on the ground in less than 60 minutes.
This does not mean that the task will be simple;
In order to destroy Russian nuclear missiles before they can be launched, the US military will first need to block the radar and the Russian command and its communications to the incoming attack, most likely using physical and electronic attacks.
About 200 stationary and 200 mobile land-based missiles and dozens of Russian missile submarines and bombers would then have to be destroyed.
You will then need to shoot down any remaining Russian missiles that can be launched.
Russia is not in a position to survive such an attack;
Their early warning radars - both terrestrial and satellite - are degrading and difficult to replace.
At the same time, the United States has developed and is still developing a set of technologies for carrying out anti-satellite and radar missions (anti-satellite weapon), and they have been in use for years.
Back in 1985, a satellite was downed by an F-15 fighter jet.
However, the West relies heavily on satellites as well, and Russia and China continue to develop their own anti-satellite systems.
air war
Russian bombers date from the Soviet era, and despite the alarm they raise when they press into Western nations' airspace, they don't pose a significant threat in and of themselves.
If Russian and American planes faced each other, the Russians would find themselves under attack from planes they couldn't see or planes far from their range.
US and British submarine crews claim a record-breaking record of constantly tracking Soviet submarines as they left bases during the Cold War.
Since then, Russian forces have retreated and American anti-submarine weapons have been activated, raising the possibility that Russian submarines will be wiped out before they can even fire their missiles.
The core of Russia's nuclear weapon consists of land-based missiles, some stationary in silos and others mobile on rail and road.
The missiles in the silos can now be targeted by several types of missiles carried by American planes, which are almost invisible to radar.
All are designed to destroy targets protected by underground bunkers made of concrete and steel.
But the problem for US war planners is that it can take very long hours for missile carriers to reach these targets, and then need to act within minutes.
One obvious and seemingly simple solution to attacking targets very quickly is to hybridize fast nuclear ballistic missiles with non-nuclear warheads.
In 2010, Robert Gates, who served as Secretary of Defense under Barack Obama, stated that the United States had this capability.
ICBMs take just 30 minutes to travel between the US Midwest and Siberia.
Fired from well-positioned submarines, the Navy's Trident missiles can be faster, with a target launch time of less than ten minutes.
Since 2001, the US Navy has hybridized its Trident missiles with either solid, inert warheads—accurate to within ten metres—or wide-spread fragmentation weapons.
Critics have argued that this would leave the potential enemy unable to tell whether it was under nuclear or conventional attack, meaning they would have to endure the worst.
According to researchers from the US Congress, the development work is close to completion, but it is clear that it stopped in 2013.
Despite this, the United States continued to develop other technologies through its armed services to attack targets around the world in less than an hour;
At the forefront are hypersonic missiles that may return to Earth at up to ten times the speed of sound, while Russia and China are trying to keep up.
enviable missiles
The remainder of Russia's nuclear power consists of missiles transported on rail.
An article published by the Kremlin-sponsored news agency Sputnik described how it would be extremely difficult to find railcars transporting missiles where an immediate global strike would not be as effective as the United States would like.
But taking into account the face value, the article notes that the rest of the Russian nuclear arsenal is actually relatively weak.
Beginning with the "Chasing of Scuds" in the first Gulf War, the US military spent years improving its efficiency at targeting mobile land-based missiles.
These skills are now using remote sensing to attack small ground targets at short notice in the myriad counterinsurgency operations it has pursued since 2001.
If the "sword" of an immediate global strike does not stop the firing of all Russian missiles, then the United States can use the "shield" of its own missile defenses.
It was published by the United States after it withdrew from a treaty with Russia that banned such weapons in 2002.
While some post-2002 missile defense systems have been described as ineffective, the US Navy has a more effective system called Aegis, which a former head of the Pentagon's missile defense program claims can shoot down ICBMs.
About 300 Aegis anti-ballistic missiles now supply 40 US warships.
In 2008, one destroyed a satellite after it fell out of orbit.
war mentality
Early in the Iraq war, many governments and onlookers warned the US and UK of the potential for unforeseen consequences, but both governments were driven by a mentality deflecting criticism and skepticism.
For all the lessons that can be learned from the Iraq disaster, there is a great risk today that a tough stance will be taken as it did before.
Foreign strikes usually have little effect on domestic politics in the United States.
Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians who died under the first sanctions and then the war, their deaths did not negatively affect Presidents Clinton or George W. Bush.
Nor can similar casualties be expected in Iran, North Korea, or other countries, especially if "humanitarian" precision weapons are used.
But most importantly, a poll by Scott Sagan of Stanford University showed that the American public would not oppose the preventive use of even nuclear weapons, provided the United States itself was not affected by it.
And nuclear Trident weapons provide that response.
Control of major conventional weapons as well as weapons of mass destruction needs urgent attention from international civil society, media and political parties.
There is still time to rally behind the Nobel Prize-winning international campaign to abolish nuclear weapons and the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, and to revive and globalize the OSCE's disintegrating arms control agenda, which played a vital role in ending the Cold War largely peacefully.
Like the German Kaiser*** in 1914, perhaps Trump or one of his successors would express his displeasure when faced with the reality unleashed by major American attacks.
But unlike the Kaiser, who saw his empire first defeated and then dismembered it, perhaps the American president might get away with it in the twenty-first century.
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margins
The frigate: (Frigate) is a name given to a type of fast warship that is smaller than destroyers and larger than a frigate or corvette.
Compared to destroyers, frigates have lower nautical speed and range.
** The immediate global strike is the efforts of the US military to develop a system that can strike anywhere in the world in less than one hour, regardless of its location on the globe.
This system shares the principle of intercontinental ballistic missiles, both of which aim to hit distant targets around the world.
*** The Caesar of Germany is Wilhelm II or Wilhelm II, and he is called in Arabic sources as Galeum II as well, he was a Caesar of the German Second Reich, besides being the king of Prussia.
He was forced to abdicate in 1918 after Germany's defeat in World War I and was exiled to the Netherlands.
And with it fell the German Second Reich, as the Weimar Republic was established in Germany after its fall.
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Translation (Alaa Abu Rumaila)
This report is translated from: The Conversation and does not necessarily reflect the site of Medan