The End Is Always Near: Apocalyptic Moments, from the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses

by Dan Carlin

“When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

Had a full-scale nuclear war broken out, especially after about the late 1960s,* we would still be trying to recover today.

A descendant of ours reading a history in the future would be justified in thinking us to be the functional equivalent of the stereotypical reckless and childish “barbarians” that the Romans wrote of, although in possession of absurdly strong weapons they couldn’t hope to control.

How much would it affect your feelings about a murderous event from history if you found out that you were alive today only because of it? How many strangers’ lives from the past is your life today worth?

The rules of the game when it comes to modern* warfare are complicated, often contradictory, and, during wartime, usually in flux.

It’s a difference in methods, not outcomes.

Ethical lines that might be respected in a limited war* get crossed with impunity in Total War. The stakes are so high that the lens through which everyone begins to view things is a simple one: life or death.

Combat creates a different reality and different rules, rules that might appear less rational in peacetime. Combat also exerts pressures on the human psyche, tapping into fight-or-flight response and various biochemical releases* that help humans survive dangerous situations. Such conditions and such pressures are not the most conducive to reflective thought. It is for this reason that distinctions are made between actions carried out in “hot blood” versus ones carried out in “cold blood.”

They make hard decisions, but they try hard not to make crazy ones.

In war, rational decisions are made for less than rational situations.

don’t forget it’s all relative),

The War in the Air

terror bombing. (At least, that’s what you call it when the other side is doing it to you; it’s morale-targeted bombing if you’re doing it to someone.)

Fascinating proposals were advanced after the war to put airpower solely in the hands of the international community for safekeeping via the League of Nations (the forefather of the United Nations).

Douhet wasn’t worried about morality or feasibility—he was concerned only about effectiveness,

After the war, Spaight came up with an idea that’s since been used as a science fiction premise: he suggested that one could warn the enemy to evacuate a targeted city ahead of time.

While such theoretical discussions were going on, tensions around the world began to greatly increase. Fascism came to power in Italy, and then in Germany. This added to the global tension already in place because of the radical revolutionary Bolshevik state called the Soviet Union centered in the former Russia and the growing violence between the Japanese and Chinese. The Great Depression was also hitting across the globe. And the entity that was meant to ensure such pressures didn’t lead to another world war was failing dramatically.

In the Spanish Civil War, several future World War II belligerents began aiding one side or the other, with Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, for example, offering training, equipment, supplies, and even pilots to the Nationalists in their rebellion against the Republican government; while the Soviets, Mexicans, and French (in a clandestine way at least) gave aid to the Republicans.

the bombing of the Basque city of Guernica, an incident immortalized in the Picasso painting of the same name. The Italians and the Germans claimed to have been after military targets, especially a bridge, but it was allegedly a market day, which meant the city would have been more crowded than usual.

The governments might have been shamed, but the architects of the attack were elated.

With accuracy like that, allowing bombing in civilian areas in order to go after military targets was the same as saying it was legal to kill civilians.

Is anybody going to cry “war crime” if the Nazis are landing fifty miles from your house?

To Destroy a City:

“There are a lot of people who say that bombing can never win a war. Well, my answer to that is that it’s never been tried yet, and we shall see.”

Delayed-fuse bombs, for instance, which were dropped with timers so they didn’t go off until hours after they hit the ground, had two roles: first, to kill any rescuers; second, to tell people not to bother sending rescuers next time.

this was all done, and justified, in the name of shortening the war by making it worse.

It takes time to get to a point of logical insanity.

“When used with the proper degree of understanding, the bomber becomes, in effect, the most humane of all weapons.”

Many were asphyxiated by the carbon monoxide that blew into bomb shelters or were deprived of oxygen after the firestorm sucked the air from a room. (Photos of such scenes exist; beware, they are gruesome.)

Great Fire of 1666.

If there was ever a time to look into the abyss and turn away, that would have been it.

The United States would lose more people in the final year of the hostilities than it lost in the entire rest of the war.

MacArthur actually put his troops in harm’s way and lost men in order to protect civilians and not bomb civilian targets, a decision even today some would argue was wrong.

Some of the most powerful people in the world seemed powerless to halt the momentum of these atrocities.

he didn’t want the attacks to stop, necessarily, he was just disturbed that more people weren’t upset about it.

distance makes killing possible and how the farther away one is from the target, the easier it is to kill.

at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, the defendants—most of whom would be hanged for crimes against humanity—complained about the Allied bombings of German cities.

The logic of Total War is brutal.

Fermi Paradox is named after the famous physicist Enrico Fermi, who did the math and figured out that, statistically speaking, the universe should contain a ton of intelligent life.

why extraterrestrial life might not be here, and one of them was that they didn’t survive long enough to migrate beyond their home world.* This idea is part of an aspect of the Fermi Paradox known as the Great Filter. It’s possible most life on other planets never made it through the great filter.

Whether you are optimistic or pessimistic about our civilization’s long-term chances may depend on your view of how much we human beings can change.

If we do what we have always done, we can depend on outcomes that are disastrous.

If we engage in another total war between the great powers, we will do damage on a scale that has no comparable historical analogy.

invent-our-way-out-of-it scenario.

maybe the idea that tough times make tough people will remind us that we as a species are survivors. Children will be raised differently, expectation levels will change, and we could easily see people adapt as much to fit into their less rosy world as we have seen humans adjust and evolve into the world created once the era of computers and cell phones began.

What if there were far less power and energy available in the world a hundred years from now?

If our children do not have our level of capabilities because the power doesn’t exist, does that mean they live in a worse time? Or is it a better time because they are possibly making headway against extremely significant, potentially extinction-related problems we are currently far from solving?

If the true threat to humanity turns out to be something more like a virus or an asteroid, it might be the very societies that most endanger us environmentally or militarily that have the advantage in dealing with the danger.