'The Third World War' was a book by
General Sir John Hackett, first published in
1978 and reprinted several times over the next couple of years. It was an imaginary 'future history' of a third world war in August
1985; the book took the form of a retrospective written in
1987.
It was extremely popular in the UK, and rode the early waves of what would become a tidal wave of 80s nuclear angst. It started to depart from reality almost as quickly as it was released (both the Islamic revolution in Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan happened in 1979, something which Hackett did not predict, although that hardly made a third world war less likely). The book had been forgotten by 1985, although it didn't really become irrelevant until 1989.
The book's strength is its prescient political motive for the war (Hackett essentially predicted the Soviet Union's eventual collapse, although he saw it happening much earlier, and resulting in war, not peace), and its meticulously-detailed outline of a likely NATO response. The war it depicts is generally fought with conventional forces, with a final, brief nuclear exchange, something which seems more plausible than the contemporary view that a third world war would inevitably be one of mutual nuclear armageddon.
Against it, the writing is extremely dry and undramatic, but this pales besides a much greater problem, one that doomed the book as surely as the eventual end of the cold war. In 1978 Hackett had just retired from a distinguished military career - he was wounded as a Brigadier at Arnhem (although he plays a relatively major role in the book of 'A Bridge Too Far' he isn't in the film), and eventually ended up as Commander-in-Chief of the British Army in Germany. Consequently, the effectiveness of NATO forces seems implausibly overstated - despite overwhelming weight of numbers, the Russians do not advance past Germany in the book, and one gets the impression that Hackett was constrained by having to work out a third world war which involved no defeats on the part of NATO.
Because of his status as a military man, Hackett bangs the drum for increased military spending, and predicts a new wave of patriotism in the west to replace the dangerously apathetic left-wing political climate that dominated when he was writing the book; one suspects that the men behind Ronald Reagan had read the book.
As an interesting aside, Harold Coyle's 1987 novel 'Team Yankee' takes place in the same 'universe' as 'The Third World War', although from the perspective of a tank commander. There are subtle differences, however; the technology in General Hackett's book is an interesting cross-section of late-1970s hardware, with the XM1 prototype of the M1 Abrams, the Shillelagh missile-firing M60A2, and sundry Warsaw Pact Fagots and Fitters.
'The Third World War' is no longer in print, and it is unlikely to be so in the future. The third world war itself has not yet come to pass, at least not in a form that we recognise today.