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“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, 
 but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”

What exactly was the historical context of this statement he made, and what precisely did he mean by it?

The meanings I can thing of for it are:

  • that all engineers, scientists, technicians, libraries(implicitly internet?), electronics devices and movie dvds and everything similar will be destroyed and noone will ever attempt to think about more advanced primate tools (with some brain restricting illness maybe?) until next war or
  • humanity vanish, other primates evolve and war with sticks and stones or
  • only one side wins, which enslaves other side and slaves are not permitted to use any metal tool including electronics also libraries are destroyed so maybe generations later, they don't even remember what world war was, then they just simply attack each other because any advanced technology will be perceived as "god" so they simply obey and continue attacking each other using whatever they have (sticks and stones)? [by "side", I don't mean any country or any religious group]
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    I don't think any of the selected tags actually apply. I'm also struggling with whether this is actually a question about history. Anyway, Einstein was merely saying that the next war would be so destuctive that the modern world would effectively vanish. Jan 13, 2017 at 21:30
  • You mean everyone dies then? Jan 13, 2017 at 21:33
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    You don't need everyone to die, just enough destruction of infrastructure to make continuing at the current technological level impossible. That is, the war would make the survivors revert to subsistence levels rather than having any spare capacity for development. Jan 13, 2017 at 21:39
  • @KillingTime If people alive, to have a world wide war with just stones, that must happen quick or some people wouldn't be happy with just stones and develop higher tech even if they are hungry. 50-100 years maybe? Jan 13, 2017 at 21:56
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    @huseyintugrulbuyukisik Einstein was indulging in hyperbole. If the world was literally at the sticks-and-stones level then it would be almost impossible to conduct a worldwide war. Jan 13, 2017 at 22:07

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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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