World War III

**World War III** or the **Third World War**, often abbreviated as **WWIII** or **WW3** was a global conflict that lasted from 11 April 2025 to 18 November 2027. The war was fought between the Allies, consisting of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and several Pacific and Middle Eastern countries, and the Pact, principally consisting of China and Russia and their allies. Involving the majority of the world's countries, including all great powers, nearly 100 million military personnel were raised in total. As was the case with both previous world wars, World War III was conducted as a "total war", with nations reserving their entire economic and industrial capabilities for the war effort. Over 300 million people were killed in what remains the most destructive conflict in human history; more civilians died in total than military personnel. The war ended with an armistice on 18 November, followed by the Treaty of Madrid, signed on 25 December 2027.

The root causes of the war laid in lingering tensions that had gone unresolved following the end of the Cold War (1946-1991). The most pressing of these was over the sovereignty of Taiwan; since the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949, the People's Republic of China (PRC) had maintained sovereign claims over the island of Taiwan, governed by the Republic of China (ROC), with tensions between the two Chinas becoming an acute source of friction between the PRC and the United States, a historic backer of Taiwanese sovereignty, in the late 2010s and early 2020s. Other flashpoints included boundary disputes in the South China Sea between China, Taiwan, Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam and the ongoing and unresolved Korean conflict between the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK, "North Korea") and the Republic of Korea (ROK, "South Korea"). Outside of East Asia, the 70-year conflict between India and Pakistan over the disputed Kashmir region and the invasion of Ukraine by Russia in 2022 and subsequent massive military aid for Ukraine provided by the West served to inflame otherwise regional affairs into additional theaters for the inevitable global war.

World War III began on 11 April 2025 following a series of air and missile attacks on the United States and its Pacific allies by China, including an attack on the U.S. air base on Okinawa Island and the sinking of the USS *Ronald Reagan* in the South China Sea. The same day, China invaded Taiwan in the largest landing campaign in the history of warfare, with over 1.3 million troops involved. At the same time, North Korea, with Chinese assistance, invaded South Korea, and Russia launched its own invasion of NATO's eastern members, namely the Baltic states, Poland, Finland, Romania, and Moldova, resumed their invasion of Ukraine, and launched air and missile attacks against Germany, the Czech Republic, Sweden, and several other countries. Within two weeks, China occupied the entirety of the island of Taiwan, though it incurred significant casualties in doing so. China also launched an island-hopping campaign in the South China Sea islands, successfully occupying the majority of the Paracel and Spratly Islands by the end of 2025, though also with heavy casualties. A similar offensive against the Japanese-controlled Ryukyu Islands was unsuccessful, and resulted in the destruction of most of China's surface fleet, including two of its three aircraft carriers. On the Korean Peninsula, despite the heavy employment of tactical nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons by North Korea, South Korean and U.S. forces were able to force North Korean troops to the border with China by the summer of 2026.

Though Russia had made early gains in their invasion of Europe, with Russian forces advancing as far west as the Polish capital of Warsaw, the course of the war effectively reversed with the arrival of large numbers of NATO reinforcements to the frontline in the autumn of 2025. This, as well as overwhelmingly low morale among Russian ground troops, technological inferiority in comparison to NATO, and logistical pitfalls resulted in the disintegration of the Russian war effort by the start of 2026, and the country was essentially removed from the war entirely by the autumn of that year with the death of Putin, the overthrow of the Russian government and the beginning of a Second Russian Civil War, and the signing of the Treaty of Stockholm with Russia’s new provisional government. With the fall of Russia, China invaded Russia’s eastern territories and formed the Far Eastern Republic as a client state, occupying Vladivostok and establishing a military presence throughout the Kamchatka Peninsula. Elsewhere in the Pacific, the United States and its allies launched a massive air campaign against Chinese forces in Taiwan and the South China Sea and economic and industrial targets in mainland China, while actual ground operations drew down to a stalemate. Operations in other theaters of the conflict drew down around this time as well. In the Americas, the United States invaded and occupied Cuba and Venezuela, both non-participants in the war but strongly aligned with the Pact. In South Asia, fighting between India and Pakistan, which had grown to encompass the length of the Indo-Pakistani border, remained static, with massive casualties on both sides and regular use of tactical nuclear and chemical weapons; China also conducted operations in the Himalaya Mountains, in Kashmir, and in Arunachal Pradesh against India, though these were similarly static. By contrast, the Middle Eastern front was especially dynamic, with the U.S. and its allies, including Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Israel successfully concluding invasions of Iran and Syria by the end of 2026, dismantling Khomeinist Iran and Ba'athist Syria respectively.