Commodore Sarah Hunt is a veteran Navy officer towards the end of her career and she is in command of three ships on a freedom navigation control through the South China Sea, which is a vast-body water, half the size of the company to the United States that

currently China claims to be territorial waters, but international law shows are in fact international waters. She's on one of these freedom of navigation patrols asserting the right of international ships to traverse these waters when she spies what appears to be a fishing trawler in duress, you know, thick black columns of snow coming up from its bridge and when she investigates she quickly sees that this is anything but a run of the mill fishing trawler.

So now we cut to the other side of the world and marine major Chris Wedge Mitchell is piloting his state-of-the-art F-35 joint strike fighter above the Straits of Four Moose with basically his starboard wing just right up against Iranian airspace and Wedge is a fourth generation fighter pilot.

And while Wedge is piloting this state-of-the-art F-35, he's sort of lamenting the fact that he really doesn't feel like a pilot at all, certainly not a pilot like his forebearers were because this aircraft kind of flies itself and so technologically advanced.

And as he's lamenting this, his aircraft literally does begin to fly itself. The controls become non-responsive and it begins to divert into our Iranian airspace and collide path toward Bander Abbas airfield.

So we now cut to the White House, modernizing these two twin crises, the telephones rings, and on the other end the lines Admiral Lynn Baal, the Chinese military attaché to the United States.

And he has a message which is that these two events, both the fishing trawler and syneth is going on in the South China Sea and what's occurring over the Straits of Four Moose with this F-35, they're in fact interrelated.

The Chinese government will no longer tolerate US warships navigating the South China Sea and at which point the US is hit with a massive cyber attack and which basically the entire East Coast is effectively blinked.

The lights go off, power goes off, that all comes back on. But when it comes back on again, things aren't really quite as they were.

In the world of 2034, as we see nations around the globe entering into a massive war.

The fact is the United States is not a specific battle. There is, you know, we're not coming out of this kind of clash.

This is Arthur Snell, welcome to Doomsday Watch. And don't worry, if a massive war had just broken out, you'd probably not hear about it on a pod call.

That was Elliot Ackerman talking us through the plot of his book, 2034, a novel of the next World War. It's a work of speculative fiction. But, Elliot is a US Marine Corps veteran of wars in the Middle East.

And his co-author, James Stavredis, was a US admiral and supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe. These guys know their subject. They've created a plausible scenario born out of a clear eyed militant war.

It's an Afghanistan. And his co-author, James Stavredis, was a US admiral and supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe. These guys know their subject. They've created a plausible scenario born out of a clear eyed military appraisal of real world tensions between, on the one hand, Xi Jinping's China, the rising world force, and on the other, America, whose divisions in decline we detailed in episode one of this series.

What about the path to war between America and China?

The novel screen would say that one of the things that we can do that I'm most interested in is to really deeply imagine what this would look like.

I imagine we're probably about the same age. I was a child of the very tail into the Cold War. I can remember growing up watching movies like Red Dawn or books on the beach.

There was this very rich body of Cold War literature, including film in that too. And although there are very few things that we in the Soviets could agree upon in those years, the one thing we all agree upon was that that war would be horrific and was to be avoided at all costs.

But where is this very easy to imagine a mushroom cloud? And in fact, at the outset of the Cold War, we'd seen a mushroom cloud at the end of the Second World War.

That same deep level of imagining hasn't really taken place. I think we've all just sort of woken up in the last few years to realize, wow, we're at least in the foothills of a Cold War like China, if not in a full-on Cold War with them.

You know, we're at a moment where we could all go over the edge and we need to walk ourselves back from that edge.

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