Brent Scowcroft Center Nonresident Senior Fellow August Cole cowrites for TIME on how his new novel, Ghost Fleet, portrays a hypothetical World War where an array of science-fiction-like technologies would likely make their debut:
US and Chinese warships battle at sea, firing everything from cannons to cruise missiles to lasers. Stealthy Russian and American fighter jets dogfight in the air, with robotic drones flying as their wingmen. Hackers in Shanghai and Silicon Valley duel in digital playgrounds. And fights in outer space decide who wins below on Earth. Are theses scenes from a novel or what could actually take place in the real world the day after tomorrow? The answer is both.
Great power conflicts defined the 20th century: Two world wars claimed tens of millions of lives, and the Cold War that followed shaped everything from geopolitics to sports. But at the start of the 21st century, the ever-present fear of World War III seemed to be in our historic rearview mirror.