Air Conflicts: Secret Wars

Lore & Background

The game follows a female pilot named Dorothy Derbec, nicknamed DeeDee, who seeks to solve the death of her father, Guillaume Derbec. She is joined by friends Tommy Carter and Clive as the story progresses through locations from Tobruk to Russia, the Balkans, and finally Berlin. Both Tommy and Clive die while progressing. In the Berlin campaign, DeeDee discovers that one friend killed her father in World War I because her father could not stand watching bombers drop chemical gas on a village. As the player progresses, they unlock airplanes ranging from classics such as the Spitfire to experimental planes like the Horten Ho 229.

Reader's Guide

Air Conflicts: Secret Wars is notable as a sequel to the 2006 title Air Conflicts, continuing the series' arcade-style approach to flight combat. Its release across multiple platforms in 2011 brought the game to a wide audience, and its later inclusion in a Nintendo Switch collection in March 2019 extended its lifespan. The game's story-driven campaign, centered on a female protagonist and a personal mystery set against the backdrop of both World Wars, distinguishes it from more purely historical simulators. Reception, as aggregated by Metacritic, was mixed or average across the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Windows versions, indicating a divisive response from critics. The inclusion of experimental aircraft like the Horten Ho 229 alongside classic warbirds reflects the game's blend of historical and speculative elements.

Did You Know?

• The game is a sequel to the original Air Conflicts (2006).
• The player character is a female pilot named Dorothy Derbec, nicknamed DeeDee.
• The game includes experimental planes such as the Horten Ho 229.
• It was ported to the Nintendo Switch in March 2019 as part of a collection with Air Conflicts: Pacific Carriers.

The Shape of a Hypothetical Catastrophe

World War III remains, by definition, a war that has never been fought. It is the imagined successor to the two global conflicts of the twentieth century, and speculation about it has always carried the assumption that every major power would be drawn in, just as in 1914 and 1939. What sets the hypothetical apart from its predecessors is the expected scale of destruction: the involvement of nuclear weapons or other instruments of mass annihilation would push casualties and devastation beyond anything previously witnessed. For much of the Cold War era, the phrase was essentially shorthand for a direct clash between the American-led Western Bloc and the Soviet-led Eastern Bloc, even though those two superpowers never fired a shot at each other. After 1991, the conversation broadened. Terrorism, cyberwarfare, and a renewed great-power rivalry—sometimes labeled a Second Cold War among the United States, China, and Russia—have reshaped the threat landscape. In recent years, observers have pointed to the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war, the escalating Middle Eastern crisis, and rising tensions around Taiwan as potential flashpoints that could, in the worst-case scenario, ignite a truly global conflagration.

The Nuclear Shadow and the Logic of Deterrence

The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 permanently altered the character of any imagined future world war. From that moment forward, the specter of nuclear annihilation—widespread destruction, the collapse of modern civilization, even human extinction—became the central fear embedded in every discussion of a third global conflict. When the Soviet Union tested its own nuclear weapon in 1949, the arms race accelerated, and several other nations followed suit. The Eisenhower administration responded with a doctrine of massive retaliation, threatening nuclear strikes in answer to even a minor conventional attack. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 brought the two superpowers to the very edge of that escalation, and in its aftermath the doctrine of mutually assured destruction gained wide acceptance: a full nuclear exchange would annihilate every participant. At the 1985 Geneva summit, American and Soviet leaders jointly declared for the first time that a nuclear war "cannot be won and must never be fought." Yet the debate continues—deterrence theorists argue that nuclear arsenals prevent great-power war, while disarmament advocates insist the risks far exceed any protective benefit.

Contingency Blueprints for the Unthinkable

War games had been used to prepare for both World War I and World War II. In April and May of 1945, British forces drafted Operation Unthinkable, the first known Third World War scenario. Prime Minister Churchill, alarmed by the sheer size of the Red Army across Central and Eastern Europe and by what he saw as Stalin's unreliability, pushed for a plan whose stated aim was to impose the will of the United States and the British Empire upon Russia. The Chiefs of Staff Committee rejected it as militarily unfeasible. A more detailed American plan, Operation Dropshot, emerged in 1949. It envisioned a combined nuclear and conventional war across Western Europe and Asia, calling for 300 nuclear bombs and 29,000 conventional high-explosive rounds against 200 targets in 100 cities and towns. The goal was to destroy 85 percent of Soviet industrial capacity in a single blow, with 75 to 100 of the nuclear weapons aimed at ground-based combat aircraft. Because intercontinental ballistic missiles did not yet exist and warheads lacked the precision to strike a military base without leveling the adjacent city, the plan was a countervalue strategy—later abandoned under Kennedy and McNamara in favor of counterforce targeting.

Naming the Unnamed War

The label "World War III" did not emerge from a single moment of panic. Time magazine is generally credited as an early adopter, if not the originator, of the term. The first known usage appeared in the magazine's 3 November 1941 issue, under its "National Affairs" section, in a piece titled "World War III?" about Nazi refugee Hermann Rauschning, who had just arrived in the United States and predicted a pause in fighting before Hitler would attempt to invade Great Britain. The magazine reused the exact title on 22 March 1943, this time in its "Foreign News" section, to frame statements by then-Vice President Henry A. Wallace, who warned that the United States would decide in 1943 or 1944 whether to "plant the seeds of World War III" in reference to a potential conflict with the Soviet Union. Time continued to use or reference the term throughout the rest of the 1940s—in stories touching on bacterial warfare in 1946, for instance—and the phrase has persisted in the publication's pages ever since, appearing as recently as a 2015 book review subtitled "This Is What World War III Will Look Like."