re: What Would It Take To Start WW3?

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You're trying to tell me that the world is just as interconnected and interdependent today as it was two years after the Titanic sank. C'mon.

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The economies of Great Britain, Germany, and France were very much intertwined prior to WWI ( Read this and learn). In fact Britian and Germany were each other's top trade partners. You had Brits heavily invested in German companies and vice versa. Just because they did not have the internet and Twitter does not mean the world of 1914 was some primal place where people lived in caves and commerce ended just outside the village gates.

Here's some more reading for you....

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We may sneer at the opulent costumes or despair at the poor excuse for democracy that marked the early 20th century. But today's society has more in common with that of pre-World War I than we may think.

Our own millennials are often viewed as the first generation of a globalised world, but the progress made in the 50 years prior to WWI, in many ways, acted as a harbinger to our own digitally enhanced age.

German steel giants investing heavily in French iron ore production sites in Normandy; 3.4 million migrant workers labouring in Germany's agricultural sectors and the coalfields of the Ruhr Valley; rail networks expanding across Europe and further east ? all helped the great "annihilation of distance".

It brought the world and its people closer together, eliminating tariffs and other barriers to trade along the way. Exports reaching record levels year-on-year, with trade accounting for a higher level of GDP than ever before.

It all has a familiar ring to it, but the outbreak of WWI was like somebody pressing the reset button on the rapidly internationalising world of trade.

The historian Niall Ferguson wrote that "the sinking of the Lusitania also symbolised the end of the first age of globalisation". And while not everyone agrees on the exact date, most acknowledge that WWI radically changed the course of global trade for decades to come.

Some of the changes were temporary, others permanent. Some are still being felt today.

Many can be directly traced back to the Great War – such as the Russian Revolution of 1917 which almost certainly wouldn't have occurred independently (at least not so early), others, such as the decline of imperial France and Britain, were already underway, but were expedited by the events of 1914.

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LINK

And if we're talking about people being intertwined, I think the fact that the heads of state of Germany, Great Britain, and Russia were all 1st cousins in 1914 bears remembering.


(And yes, in case you'er wondering that is the German Kaiser dressed as a Russian Field Marshal while he stands next to the Russian Czar in the uniform of a German Field Marshall. The reason for this each was given the rank in the other's army. In fact the Kaiser was also an Admiral in the British Navy while King George V held the same rank in the German Navy.)