“September 1, 1939, was the first day of a war that would claim an average 27,600 lives every day, or 1,150 an hour, or 19 a minute, or one death every 3 seconds.” ― An Army at Dawn, The War in North Africa, 1942-1943, Copyright © 2002 by Rick Atkinson, Henry Holt and Company, LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY, Page 5.
And this occurred in a world whose population included a total of 2.27 billion people, not the 7.21 billion people resident today. Adjusting for that population difference, such a conflict today could easily treble those frightful numbers, and as I type this, things aren’t looking so good…