Ways To Kickstart WWIII

Yes, I know this isn't exactly a difficult question, but I don't want to bullshit my way through this and end up looking like an idiot.

I am attempting to engineer a scenario in which a single man is responsible for starting total global nuclear war, but not through forceful methods. This man's aim is the total destruction of the human race, and he wants to see it done by their own hands. What I'm looking for is a reasonable plan of attack he could employ to shift the attitudes of the world's superpowers to ones of paranoia and suspicion, and ultimately accusation (i.e ones more conducive to MAD)

The only skills he has at hand are his silver tongue and his status as a Master of Disguise. Using these, by the story's beginning, he has already placed himself in a position of prominent political power, one that allows him direct interaction with other important international political figures (I was going to have him replace the president, but I'm still tinkering with the logistics of this, as well as how to not make it sound silly).

What can he do to encourage the major players to start a global nuclear war?

I think, if he's a master of disguise and convincing talker, getting political power is going about it wrong. What he should do is infiltrate a facility in which one country keeps its nuclear missiles, then launch a few at major population centers in other countries.

edited 3rd Jan '12 2:28:19 PM by INUH

I thought about that, but shelved it for two reasons. One, it's too anticlimactic and not in line with his motivations (although he would resort to it if he had to), and two, it's not guaranteed to kick off MAD. Maybe during or shortly following the Cold War, but not anymore. Not to say it's impossible for it to work, it's just not as likely as it used to be.

I was thinking that the best way to ensure everyone's full cooperation in such a conflict would be to make sure everyone else is primed and ready for a nuclear war, instead of the US being the only ones with their fingers on the big red button. Spread rumors and arouse suspicion in foreign nations that the US is preparing an attack, and everyone else will be more prepared for such a conflict, meaning more nukes get launched.

Like I said though, I'm not the expert here. I just wanted to see what you all thought about this.

edited 3rd Jan '12 2:36:34 PM by KSPAM

Firstly - because nuclear war for many people remains only an abstract concept:

Put men who have directly experienced nuclear attacks (or know close relatives who do) in position of power with nuclear policy. I think they will be more hysterical when it comes to it; it's either us who get blown up again, and you will watch your children and wives burn, or the other people who threaten to attack us.

Hostile tensions between nations are a must. Think back to the cold-war era; there is the USSR always trying to keep one step ahead of the USA when they both possess big giant cocks nuclear missiles in their Arse-nals. You can have a fictional political atmosphere for this, like the Modern Warfare series do.

Your character can engineer conflicts between nations - he has men disguising themselves as either forces making strong attacks on the other side. Incidents like the 9/11 tragedy happen on a wide scale, ingraining on public consciousness. (This is called a false flag operation; wearing someone else's colours.) There's nothing left in the aftermaths to suggest it could be a dupe. Communications get strained - it's difficult to get the point across as everyone is more likely to misread hostile intentions behind what is said.

You think of the rest from here.

edited 3rd Jan '12 3:32:05 PM by QQQQQ

Another thing to bear in mind: As was proven by World War One, killing the right person at the right time can topple a lot of dominoes if they're already lined up in a nice, neat little row.

Convince someone it's winnable in a meaningful fashion.

This will be very hard.

To expand upon this theme, the main reason conventional military conflicts are one-sided in the modern era is that we have passed the point where quantity in the sense of WW 2 or WW 1 has meaning. The Israelis made a career out of proving the point. Gulf One was mere punctuation. Even if a military relying on quantity over quality were to succeed, it would do so at such immense cost in blood and treasure as to make the fall of its government all but assured, and it would win very little, if anything. The real reason China doesn't invade Taiwan is because they'd have to flatten Taiwan to even get ashore, and if you do that there's no point in taking the place.

You may realize there's a corollary to the above: military conflicts are also short in the modern era because either you didn't meet the quality demands for entry, or if you did then you really, really can't sustain the losses and expenditure of munitions that slugging it out with an equivalent opponent will cost.

Finally, many of the combatants have serious failure points built into their system even below the nuclear threshold. Both China and Russia are dependent on massive hydroelectric dams for power, easy targets for stealth aircraft or cruise missiles, the loss of which will kill hundreds of thousands in the resulting floods, knock out electrical power for vast swathes of the country, and also annihilate agriculture so millions will starve. India has a similar problem. Many European and Middle Eastern countries just don't have the land area or the population to have much redundancy in their transport and power networks.

The stakes are so ridiculously high now that kicking off World War 3 more or less requires a form of dreadful miscommunication, a cultural or ideological inability to view the same reality as the rest of the world. That's not something you can easily manipulate into existence. You need a figure like Hitler or Stalin and at least a decade to get it working, probably a decade and a half.

Or you could poke an existing such, but the only country that might even have both the requisite influence and the pathological ideology problems is the PRC, and that's kind of iffy.

What kind of "poking" are we talking about here? And this may sound stupid, but what about supplying nuclear weapons to terrorist organizations?

In Scarecrow by Matt Reilly he postulated a secret government project to make ICB Ms whose flight characteristics mimicked those of other countries. Thus the Ancient Conspiracy comes along with plots to nuke a bunch of cities and blame it on those countries' traditional enemies, to ensure that there's always people buying military hardware.

Convince them to be aggressive to the point others react and let it spiral.

The prospect of nuclear terrorism isn't going to fly. It might have back when the Soviet Union backed terrorists a lot but those days are long gone, and in the end Iran's not worth World War III to anyone who's friendly with it.