New York, Sep 5 : Former President Donald Trump has asserted that there was an imminent risk of World War III and global conflagration from nuclear proliferation which only he could prevent.

"We're heading into World War III territory," he said on Wednesday.

This was "because of the power of weapons, nuclear weapons in particular, but other weapons also", he said, adding that he hated to update the US atomic arsenal.

"You need a president that's not going to be taking you into war," he said.

"We won't have World War III when I'm elected," he said. "But with these clowns that you have in there now, you're going to end up having World War III, and it's going to be a war like no other," he said.

Trump made the ominous claim during a town hall meeting hosted by Sean Hannity, a conservative Fox News broadcaster, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

The first of the two segments of the event was broadcast on the channel Wednesday night.

To support the claim, Trump quoted Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban: "He said, 'Everybody was afraid of Trump, you bring him back, you're not going to have any problems. It's all going to go away.' The world is blowing up."

On what he thinks about the leader criticised by liberals as authoritarian, Trump said of Orban, "Sometimes you need a strongman he's a strongman".

Trump said he stressed the risk from the destructive power of nuclear armaments because "I know the weapons better than anybody because I'm the one that bought them".

"We rebuilt our entire military. We upgraded our entire programme. And, you know, the one programme I hated to upgrade, hated it, was the nuclear programme," he said.

"The Ukraine War, the Gaza conflict and the deadly October 7 terrorist attack on Israel by Hamas that sparked, it would have never happened if I had been the president," Trump claimed.

Trump, who had scrapped the agreement with Iran to stop its quest for nuclear weapons, said that he would have made a "fair deal' with Iran which was "broke".

Trump and his Democratic Party rival Vice President Kamala Harris are neck and neck in Pennsylvania with both averaging 47.2 per cent, according to the latest aggregation of polls by RealClear Politics.

In 2020, he lost the state, which could be crucial to determining the winner this year, by a little over 1 per cent.

Because it is one of the seven swing states where neither party has a strong majority, both parties are campaigning heavily there.

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, the Democrats' vice presidential nominee, campaigned 60 kilometres away from Harrisburg in Lancaster on Wednesday.

Harris campaigned with President Joe Biden in Pennsylvania on Monday and will return to the state on Thursday.

Although the presidential elections are scheduled 61 days away on November 5, in some places in Pennsylvania citizens can begin voting on September 16 under early voting programmes.

Trump and Harris are only five days from their debate ' probably the only one between them as both parties jettisoned the usual format of several encounters.

He called the debate host ABC the "worst network" and impugned their fairness.

"Her best friend is the head of the network," he said in an apparent reference to Harris and Dana Walden, the co-chair of Disney Entertainment which owns ABC.

Walden is a longtime friend of Harris and a Democratic Party donor.

Most of the town hall was a rerun of Trump's insults against Harris and the litany of her policy reversals on drilling for gas using a method called fracking, which is vital to the state's economy, cutting police budgets, and illegal immigration.

(Arul Louis can be contacted at arul.l@ians.in and followed at @arulouis)

/IANS