World war

The term "world war" is used by Karl Marx and his associate, Friedrich Engels,[2] in a series of articles published around 1850 called The Class Struggles in France.

In English, the term "First World War" had been used by Lieutenant Colonel Charles à Court Repington, as a title for his memoirs (published in 1920); he had noted his discussion on the matter with a Major Johnstone of Harvard University in his diary entry of September 10, 1918.

That caused a very minute conflict between two countries to have the potential to set off a domino effect of alliances, triggering a world war.

The fact that the powers involved had large overseas empires virtually guaranteed that such a war would be worldwide, as the colonies' resources would be a crucial strategic factor.

The same strategic considerations also ensured that the combatants would strike at each other's colonies, thus spreading the wars far more widely than those of pre-Columbian times.

The Second World War occurred from 1939 to 1945 and is the only conflict in which nuclear weapons have been used; both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in the Japanese Empire, were devastated by atomic bombs dropped by the United States.

[10] The United States, the Soviet Union, and Canada deported and interned minority groups within their own borders and, largely because of the conflict, many ethnic Germans were later expelled from Eastern Europe.

The old European empires collapsed or they were dismantled as a direct result of the crushing costs of the war and in some cases, their fall was caused by the defeat of imperial powers.

The United States became firmly established as the dominant global superpower, along with its close competitor and ideological foe, the Soviet Union.

[11] Institutions such as the United Nations were established to collectivize international affairs, with the explicit goal of preventing another outbreak of general war.

Technologies developed during wartime had a profound effect on peacetime life as well, such as through advances in jet aircraft, penicillin, nuclear energy, and electronic computers.

During the early 21st century, the ongoing armed conflicts that are taking place around the world, and their worldwide spillovers are sometimes described as proxy wars waged by the United States and Russia,[21][22][23][24] which led some commentators[who?]