Photo by Andhika Y. Wiguna on Unsplash
Will the rice fields stay green? Will the old forest still turn its leaves? These are strange questions to open with when the subject is nuclear weapons and the possibility of a third world war — and yet they may be exactly the right ones. War, in the end, is measured less in treaties and stockpiles than in whether a field gets the chance to turn green again, whether a child gets to grow up watching a stork glide over a paddy instead of a bomb crater.
Can stopping the production of nuclear weapons alone prevent a third world war? A former U.S. president once said that keeping Iran from building a bomb was meant to avert exactly that risk. But if Iran is stopped and the next nation demands the same right, then what — do we simply keep racing to stop the next one, and the one after that? Blocking weapons production treats the symptom. If that alone were the answer, the deeper habit that leads nations to build such weapons in the first place would never need to be examined at all.
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Every war, looked at closely, seems to share the same roots: misunderstanding, competing demands, and a hunger to be supreme. A culture built around ever more advanced weapons has taken deep root in the minds of politicians, who mistake more firepower for more strength. But there is just as much happiness available to a small, peaceful nation as to a large, armed one — sometimes more. A politician who feels compelled to keep proving supremacy is, underneath it, often someone starved for love, reaching for whatever glory is on hand, even a war, to fill that absence.
This reframes the whole problem in an unexpected way: nuclear weapons are not products of peace. They are products of greed, isolation, and a kind of loneliness large enough to threaten the whole world. And the response that actually addresses that loneliness isn’t a bigger stockpile on the other side — it’s understanding, and the willingness to forgive even someone who has caused enormous harm. It is said that love for humanity, more than any treaty, was part of what kept a warmongering figure like Hitler from ever building a nuclear weapon of his own. That is not an argument for excusing cruelty. It is an argument that compassion, extended even to people who are hard to feel compassion for, does something that further armament cannot: it removes one more reason for the cycle to continue.
There is an old teaching, sometimes called the Sutra on the Seven Qualities of a True Friend, that offers a practical guide for exactly this kind of moment. Understand cause: what actually drives people to fight and compete for supremacy is delusion, greed, envy, and resentment left unresolved. Understand effect: today’s conflicts are the fruit of seeds planted by yesterday’s unresolved conflicts, so peace has to be planted deliberately, the same way. Know moderation, so that pride in an idea or an ideology doesn’t calcify into something we’d rather go to war than release. Know how to use time — for practicing peace, not for plotting the next campaign. And know how to choose companions: draw close to those capable of building peace alongside you, and keep a respectful distance from those who are not, without turning that distance into hatred.
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Photo by Ahmed Nishaath on Unsplash
None of this is meant to live only in policy language. Even in the middle of ordinary work — deadlines, disagreements, the daily friction of living alongside other people — there is room to pause and send out something like a message of love. It doesn’t need to be eloquent. Patience is what lets water wear stone smooth over time, and it is patience, more than force, that eventually softens even a heart that has hardened around resentment. Gather enough single dewdrops and, eventually, there is a stream; gather enough streams and there is a river; enough rivers, and there is an ocean. A single person who has learned how to love already carries something oceanic. It doesn’t take a treaty to begin — it takes one person deciding not to add resentment to a world that already has more than enough of it.
This is, in its own way, close to a teaching found in the Gospel of Luke: “Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. Give, and it will be given to you… For with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you” (Luke 6:37–38). Whoever gives contempt is generally met with contempt in return; whoever gives love, sooner or later, tends to receive something of it back. Nations are not so different from people in this respect. Two countries that keep exchanging gifts of goodwill tend to grow closer. Two that keep exchanging harm tend to keep the exchange going indefinitely, each side certain the other started it.
None of this promises that a third world war is impossible. But it does suggest where the actual work is: not only in arms control agreements, as necessary as those are, but in the much slower, much less dramatic practice of letting go of the need to be supreme, understanding people we’d rather write off, and treating peace as something to be tended daily rather than assumed. Keep the rice fields green, and peace becomes present, right here, in this very moment — not because the danger has vanished, but because enough people, in enough ordinary moments, chose not to add to it.
A note on this article: “Preventing a Third World War” is inspired by and draws lessons from a chapter in A Peaceful Mind, A Peaceful World by author TG Minh Thạnh. Among the many reflections in that chapter, this one looks at what it would actually take — beyond treaties and weapons bans — to loosen humanity’s grip on the habits that lead to war.
