James Blunt apparently prevented a third world war. The singer made the claim in an interview about his military career. "I was given the direct command to overpower ... 200 or so Russians [in Kosovo]," he said. "And the practical consequences of that political reason would be then aggression against the Russians."

The man who later sold 11m albums with a song about a beautiful woman on a subway was once a cavalry officer in the British army, serving among 30,000 Nato troops in Kosovo. The year was 1999, and Blunt was at the head of a column that had been ordered to seize Pristina airfield. "I was the lead officer with [a] troop of men behind [me]," Blunt told Radio 5 Live's Pienaar's Politics. "[It was a] mad situation."

Although US general Wesley Clark had issued a command to "reach the airfield and take a hold of it", the Russians had arrived there first. "We had 200 Russians lined up pointing their weapons at us aggressively," Blunt recalled. "The direct command [that] came in from general Wesley Clark was to overpower them. Various words were used that seemed unusual to us. Words such as 'destroy' came down the radio.

"The soldiers directly behind me were from the Parachute Regiment, so they're obviously game for the fight," Blunt said. But he wasn't willing to risk major conflict with Russia. "There are things that you do along the way that you know are right, and those that you absolutely feel are wrong," he said. "That sense of moral judgment is drilled into us as soldiers in the British army." The singer-songwriter claims he would have declined the order even at the risk of a court martial.

It didn't come to that. British general Sir Mike Jackson sent an admonishing message down the wire. "[His] exact words at the time were, 'I'm not going to have my soldiers be responsible for starting world war three'. [He] told us why don't we sugar off down the road [and], you know, encircle the airfield instead." Asked if he thought the original order could indeed have set off a third world war, Blunt replied: "Absolutely."

Blunt's new album, Some Kind of Trouble, has yet to spark any major international conflicts.