I don't think this will really happen. It was just the first impression I got.

Reading on Yahoo today, I learned that "Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki issued an ultimatum Wednesday demanding that the militias surrender their weapons within 72 hours."

Further down the page: "Maliki stipulated in his ultimatum that the militants would be spared if they surrendered their weapons within 72 hours."

Of course, if you run a country (or try to), and a bunch of people go around shooting the place up, it doesn't make much sense to nuke them. You'd be nuking yourself.

But I just figured than any kind of ultimatum in a part of the world that is so problematic might end badly. Like maybe he says, "I'm going to count to three. One…"

The conflict doesn't stop.

"Two…"

Some of the fighting groups' bigger brothers (i.e. neighboring countries) say, "Hey, fight's on!"

"Three!" The enforcer tries to cut down the disobeying parties. Meanwhile, the big brothers say, "That's enough," and somehow escalate the conflict. Then they fight with each other. And it spreads and spreads, nation to nation, getting bigger and bigger, until someone says, "All right! I can finally use the nuke I got! Good thing I saved all the money I made on my paper route…"

FOOM!

Pure fiction? Or crazy like a fox? Stay tuned this weekend…

I remember just a few years ago I started wondering why we no longer seemed afraid of nuclear war. I had seen videos depicting the fear shared by members of my parent generation a few decades ago. I figured, "Well, the threat isn't that big a deal anymore." But then I wondered, if we still have the technology, there's still a threat. Sure, foreign countries aren't really in the news all that much (this was a few years ago, mind you) as being threatening in a nuclear sense, but that could change. Every time I heard another country became a nuclear power, I felt like one of the geeky kids cheated his way into the popular clique. "India has The Bomb? What in the world happened?"

The media wasn't really mentioning nuclear war as a major issue. Movies depicted end times scenarios, but that was about it. We focused on "lesser" battles, non-nuclear confrontations. And slowly, steadily, various nations began acquiring nuclear technology without any mainstream naysayer. Now, it seems, we may have reached a crystallization point. Enough countries have gone nuclear that there is an even greater threat to the world in general than when everybody lived in fear.

World War III is sometimes thought of as a dragged-out nuclear conflict. On the contrary. Nuclear weapons will greatly speed things up. If we ever do reach the point of a full-scale nuclear war with our neighbors, it will probably last less than 48 hours.