Einstein's World War IV quote?
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Einstein is recorded by Wikiquote as saying this in an interview with Liberal Judaism 16 (April-May 1949), which was presumably a magazine. At the time, the USA was the only power with nuclear weapons.
The USSR tested its first one in August 1949, and it was something of a surprise that it had succeeded so soon. However, nobody was in the least surprised that the USSR had been developing them; they had been clearly the new measure of military power from August 1945. The possibility of new and more powerful kinds of nuclear weapon was quite visible to physicists; Edmund Teller had wanted to work on the hydrogen bomb during WWII.
This time was also the first phase of the Cold War. The Berlin Blockade and Airlift were in progress at the time of the interview, and the Chinese Communist Party was winning in the Chinese Civil War, with Soviet support. It was not clear what else the USSR might do, but its military power was vast and the failings that would bring it down forty years later were not obvious at the time.
So Einstein was saying that he didn't know exactly what kinds of weapons would be used in a hypothetical World War III, but that they would be so destructive as to destroy modern civilisation. The idea of a World War IV fought with sticks and stones is hyperbole, since you can't fight a world war without some better tools, but he felt that those would be the best weapons humanity could make after WWIII. We would be reduced to scattered small tribes and clans, with no mining or metalworking.
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Source: stackoverflow.com
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