• According to the Doctor, Turmezistan sits “on the strategic intersection of the three most powerful armies on Earth” – the US, Russia and the People’s Republic of China – raising the prospect that World War Three might somehow be triggered. We know that there will be a World War Three, ever since the Ninth Doctor (Christopher Eccleston) described how he’d already seen “World War Five” in The Unquiet Dead (2005) – but various Doctors have helped avert that conflagration, thus far. In the near-contemporaneous The Mind of Evil (1971), the Third Doctor (Jon Pertwee) prevented the Master (Roger Delgado) from using a stolen missile to wipe out a World Peace Conference, bringing about said conflict… which would next have kicked off in Day of the Daleks (1972), had the same Doctor not prevented the assassination of diplomat Sir Reginald Styles (Wilfrid Carter). The Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker) helped stop the fascist SRS organisation from instigating a nuclear apocalypse in Robot (1974-75); and his successor (Peter Davison) stopped the Silurians and Sea Devils from doing likewise a century or so later, in Warriors of the Deep (1984). According to Dalek (2005), failed companion Adam Mitchell (Bruno Langley) nearly caused WWIII when he hacked the US defence system at the age of eight. Finally, in Aliens of London/World War Three (2005), the alien Slitheen family also tried to bring the eponymous conflict about.
