It's what everyone is thinking about

According to Florence Gaub, head of research at the NATO Defense College, the world risks slipping into a global conflict “without anyone wanting it”.

She told Spanish newspaper El País that “it’s not that someone one day presses the button for war; rather, you can slide into a conflict of this kind without anyone wanting it: an accident, a misreading, a verbal escalation, decisions taken under pressure.”

“Very often, a line gets crossed that nobody wanted to cross. That is why investing in defence is as important as investing in diplomacy”, she added.

As she addressed specifically the war in the Middle East sparked by the joint US-Israeli attack on Iran, Gaub said that it has been in the making since the early 2000s, when Iran's nuclear programme was uncovered.

She added that “when the source of a conflict is not resolved and material capability coincides with the will to act, war is always just a matter of time”.

Since Saturday’s attacks by the US and Israel, Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed, along with senior figures in the Islamic Revolution Guard Corps (IRGC).

Iran has since launched retaliatory missile and drone attacks across the Middle East, as it targets Isreal and countries which host US military assets.

This isn't the first time that NATO has warned about the possibility of a Third World War, as late last year, the secretary general warned Europe to be prepared for “the scale of war our grandparents and great-grandparents endured”.

While this week, a nuclear expert named four places in the UK where Iran could attack, amid the current Middle East tensions.