Israeli/Iran bombs: Is World War 111 Imminent? By Emmanuel Onwubiko

“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones. – Albert Einstein”

“There’s not going to be a World War III, because there is no one to have World War III with. – Colin Powell “

“Yes, peace can and must be won, to save the world from the terrible destruction of World War III. – Paul Robeson”

The state of Israel has today carried out what international affairs analysts considered to be the biggest external aggression of a military kind in the history of Iran especially since the Islamic revolution about five decades ago.

The targeted bombing campaign by Israel against Iranian nuclear enrichment facilities, has come against the backdrops of global diplomatic interventions to avert these genre of military attacks of a such a nation with a big military architecture like Iran.

Israel on the other hand hinged the attack on the need for the state of Israel to safeguard the very survival of their entity given that the Iranian Islamic revolutionary hierarchy has never hidden their plot to eliminate the State of Israel from the face of the Earth because in the perception of Iranian Islamists, the State of Israel is an imposition on the very lands of Palestinians.

This is the reason Iran funds Hamaz militants(considered by international  community as a terrorist group), as a military force to try to destroy Iran.

Both Iran and Hamaz have similar ideological thinking that the destruction of the state of Israel is a necessity for the existence of the Palestinian people and the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Iran was also responsible for arming Hezbollah rebels in Lebanon to serve as a military buffer against Israel. Lebanon is a direct neighbour of Israel. Israel has already incapacitated Hezbollah in several months of consistent military attacks and the major leaders of Hezbollah have all but been eliminated by Israel.

The bombing attacks on the selected massive nuclear enrichment plants inside of Iran is one of the most significant reminders that the World is not yet done with witnessing catastrophic wars such as the first and second world wars.

Indeed, Iran had last year warned Israel never to contemplate bombing her Nuclear facilities unless the state of Israel wants to ignite what would be similar in dimension to the first and second world wars.

What then is the dimension of both world wars? We will come to the knowledge of this question by gettjng a comorehensive records of the catastrophic extent of the killings of humanity (casualties) and the destruction of nations that were occasioned by the first and the second world wars.

Number of military and civilian deaths per country in the First World War 1914-1918
Published by Aaron O’Neill
Aug 9, 2024:

The First World War saw the mobilization of more than 65 million soldiers, and the deaths of almost 15 million soldiers and civilians combined. Approximately 8.8 million of these deaths were of military personnel, while six million civilians died as a direct result of the war; mostly through hunger, disease and genocide. The German army suffered the highest number of military losses, totaling at more than two million men. Turkey had the highest civilian death count, largely due to the mass extermination of Armenians, as well as Greeks and Assyrians. Varying estimates suggest that Russia may have suffered the highest number of military and total fatalities in the First World War. However, this is complicated by the subsequent Russian Civil War and Russia’s total specific to the First World War remains unclear to this day.

Proportional deaths:
In 1914, Central and Eastern Europe was largely divided between the empires of Austria-Hungary, Germany and Russia, while the smaller Balkan states had only emerged in prior decades with the decline of the Ottoman Empire. For these reasons, the major powers in the east were able to mobilize millions of men from across their territories, as Britain and France did with their own overseas colonies, and were able to utilize their superior manpower to rotate and replace soldiers, whereas smaller nations did not have this luxury. For example, total military losses for Romania and Serbia are around 12 percent of Germany’s total military losses; however, as a share of their total mobilized forces these countries lost roughly 33 percent of their armies, compared to Germany’s 15 percent mortality rate. The average mortality rate of all deployed soldiers in the war was around 14 percent.
Unclarity in the totals:

Despite ending over a century ago, the total number of deaths resulting from the First World War remains unclear. The impact of the Influenza pandemic of 1918, as well as various classifications of when or why fatalities occurred, has resulted in varying totals with differences ranging in the millions. Parallel conflicts, particularly the Russian Civil War, have also made it extremely difficult to define which conflicts the fatalities should be attributed to. Since 2012, the totals given by Hirschfeld et al in Brill’s Encyclopedia of the First World War have been viewed by many in the historical community as the most reliable figures on the subject.
Source: statista

Now to the statistics of fatalities from the second World war which was for the ver first time fought with a nuclear bomb.

The story is that the World War II, the largest and deadliest conflict in human history, involved more than 50 nations and was fought on land, sea and air in nearly every part of the world. Also known as the Second World War, it was caused in part by the economic crisis of the Great Depression and by political tensions left unresolved following the end of World War I.

The war began when Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939 and raged across the globe until 1945, when Japan surrendered to the United States after atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By the end of World War II, an estimated 60 to 80 million people had died, including up to 55 million civilians, and numerous cities in Europe and Asia were reduced to rubble.
Among the people killed were 6 million Jews murdered in Nazi concentration camps as part of Hitler’s diabolical “Final Solution,” now known as the Holocaust. The legacy of the war included the creation of the United Nations as a peacekeeping force and geopolitical rivalries that resulted in the Cold War. Source: HISTORY.com.

The above factual and correctly entered historical records of the numbers of casualties, tells a story of two very bloody wars that humanity wouldn’t ever want to see a repeat.

However, from the ugly development in Iran versus Israeli tit -for- tat bombing campaign, it would seem that the threat of an imminent third world war isn’t totally fizzled out.

There is the possibility that we are even much closer to a global breakout of a much catastrophic world war than we ever expected.  Everyone is worried about what is going on in the middle Eastern nations of Iran and Israel.

The American President, Donald Trump, has identified with the Israeli bombing campaign and has bought into the reasons for the attacks which is why he has called on Iran to make a deal over its nuclear programme, strong on the heels of the attacks on Iranian core security assets by Israel.
The Israeli strikes, which began on Thursday and continued this Friday morning, targeted both the country’s nuclear experts, nuclear facilities and military brass, especially of the Iran Republican Guards (IRG).

And reacting to the strikes, Trump, on social media, said Iran must strike a deal before it was too late, and nothing was left of the “Iranian Empire.”
He confirmed that America was informed before the Israeli strikes ahead of time but was not directly involved.
Trump spoke as the United Nations Secretary General ,Antonio Gutierres, called for restraint. Gutierres said that the Middle East required stability and nothing should complicate the security of the region.
In its reaction, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said it was aware of the Israeli attacks on the Iranic nuclear site at Natanz. It made no further comments.
But the Vienna, Austria- based global agency had said that it did not trust that Iran was being transparent in its nuclear programme disclosures.
Consequently, it threatened to report Iran to the United Nations Security Council, UNSC, which has responsibility for imposing sanctions on offending nations under the canopy of the United Nations(UN).
Like America, Israel opposes Iran’s nuclear programme for the reason that a nuclear weapon, which they accuse Iran of trying to develop, could alter the balance of military power in the region away from Israel.
Of all of the countries in the Middle East and Asia Minor, Israel is the only nuclear weapon state, with an estimated 360 units of the dreaded weapon.
Iran responds:
World news has been reporting since this Friday morning that Iran has understandably launched drones at Israel as Israel attacks Iranian nuclear sites and top commanders, IDF says.

It was gathered from Tehran that the Iranians launched more than 100 drones at Israel on Friday morning, Israel’s military said, not long after Israel announced it had begun a major operation against Iran, with a wave of airstrikes targeting Iranian nuclear facilities, scientists and senior military commanders.
Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesman Brigadier General Effie Defrin said in televised remarks that Iran had launched the drones, and that Israel’s air defenses were already “working to intercept the threats.”

The news also said that later Friday, an Israeli military official told reporters that while the threat wasn’t over, Israel had managed to intercept many of Iran’s UAVs.
The U.S. was not involved in Israel’s strikes, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, adding a warning that “Iran should not target U.S. interests or personnel.”

President Trump said in a post Friday morning on his Truth Social media platform that he had given Iran “chance after chance” to make a deal with the U.S. on its nuclear program, but that despite his warnings to Tehran that the alternative would be “much worse” than anything seen before, “they just couldn’t get it done.”
“There has already been great death and destruction, but there is still time to make this slaughter, with the next already planned attacks being even more brutal, come to an end,” Mr. Trump said. “Iran must make a deal, before there is nothing left.”

In a later post on Friday, Mr. Trump said he “gave Iran a 60 day ultimatum to ‘make a deal.’ They should have done it! Today is day 61. I told them what to do, but they just couldn’t get there. Now they have, perhaps, a second chance!”
Israel has intercepted virtually every Iranian weapon launched in previous large-scale attacks by the Islamic republic. The retaliatory action by Iran was long anticipated and well planned for, Defrin said.

The news media quoted Iran’s President Mahsoud Pezeshkian on Friday on Iranian TV that the country would “strongly take action” against Israel in response to the attacks, promising “a severe, wise and strong answer.”
Israel says it destroyed Iran’s air defenses, killed top commanders
Earlier Friday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that the IDF had begun “Operation Rising Lion,” with a massive wave of airstrikes against dozens of Iranian nuclear sites, military commanders and research scientists, saying the goal was to “roll back the Iranian threat to Israel’s very survival.”
Like Netanyahu, Defrin, the IDF spokesman, called the attack on Iran preemptive in a video statement delivered Friday, saying Israeli intelligence had uncovered an Iranian “plan to destroy Israel that has taken shape in recent years.” He said that plan involved Iran “racing towards a nuclear bomb,” working to double or triple its ballistic missile stockpile, and continuing to “finance, arm, and operate its proxies throughout the Middle East against the State of Israel.”
“I can confirm that the senior security leadership of the Iranian regime has been eliminated in the strike: the Iranian Chief of Staff, [Mohammad] Bagheri; the Commander of the Revolutionary Guards, [Hossein] Salami; and the Head of the Emergency Command, [Gholamali] Rashid,” Defrin said, adding that other commanders had been killed and that Israeli would provide further updates. He said Israel had “targeted and struck the Iranian regime’s aerial defense arrays.”
he IDF said its operation would continue for days, but that the first wave consisted of 200 Israeli fighter jets dropping “over 330 different munitions,” to hit more than 100 targets in Iran. This is massive in dimension from any conceivable perspective.

NATO chief urges de-escalation, says nuclear clash “not close”
Iranian state media said the Israeli strikes had hit several cities, including in the capital of Tehran and the city of Natanz, a key center for Iran’s uranium enrichment program. The IDF said it struck Iran’s uranium enrichment site in the Natanz area.
“The underground area of the site was damaged,” the IDF said in a statement. “This area contains a multi-story enrichment hall with centrifuges, electrical rooms, and additional supporting infrastructure. In addition, critical infrastructure enabling the site’s continuous operation and the Iranian regime’s ongoing efforts to obtain nuclear weapons were targeted.”
The United Nations’ nuclear watchdog agency, the IAEA, said in a series of social media posts that its Director General Rafael Grossi had been in contact with Iranian authorities on Friday who told him the country’s highly-sensitive and highly-secured Fordo nuclear site “has not been impacted” by the Israeli strikes.

The IAEA also said Iran’s “Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant had not been targeted and that no increase in radiation levels has been observed at the Natanz site.”
Rescue teams work outside a heavily damaged building, targeted by an Israeli strike in the Iranian capital Tehran, June 13, 2025.AFP via Getty
On Friday, during a visit to Sweden, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte told reporters that “this was a unilateral action by Israel. So I think it is crucial for many allies, including the United States, to work as we speak to de-escalate.”
The U.S. and Iran were set to hold talks Sunday, multiple U.S. officials told CBS News. There was no immediate comment from any high-ranking Iranian officials that those plans would change after Israel’s attack, but some reports in Iranian media outlets indicated Iran would likely no longer participate in the negotiations.
“With Israel’s actions, the sixth round of negotiations with the USA may be imperiled.
A military analyst i watched his interview on BBC said the USA was told about the attacks by Israel before it struck. The analyst attributed the courage of Israel to attack Iran at this time to the closely knitted relationship Israeli government enjoys with the United States President Donald John Trump. It is estimated that President Donald John Trump supports the Israeli state one hundred percent and this is the single largest morale booster for the government of Benjamin Netanyahu. It is said that: “Onye nna ya dunyere ọgụ na-eji ụkwụ agba wa ụzọ”.  This Igbo adage means that a child whose father sent to fight would use leg to scatter the enemy’s door. So Irael got the by-in of USA before striking Iran.

Also I think the break down of relationship between the UN secretary General and Israeli government wouldn’t help to cool off the tensions. The European powers like France, UK and a few orher nations are also not in good diplomatic relationship with the Natanyahu government because of Israeli bombardment of Gaza and the needless bloodletting and killings of over 50,000 civilians of Palestine made up of children mostly.

The World is definitely rolling down the pricipis of an imminent global conflagration which only restraints on the parts of both Israel and Iran can stop. It is being hoped that humanity would be spared of another World war given the catastrophic outcomes of the last two World wars. We make haste to appeal to World leaders to work for peace and stop the wars.

*EMMANUEL ONWUBIKO IS THE FOUNDER OF THE HUMAN RIGHTS WRITERS ASSOCIATION OF NIGERIA AND WAS NATIONAL COMMISSIONER OF THE NATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION OF NIGERIA.