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

by Dan Carlin

The effective abandonment of international control efforts and the race to build a numerical and then a qualitative nuclear advantage resulted in the American nuclear arsenal mushrooming from just under 400 weapons in 1950 to over 20,000 by 1960.

At the EXCOMM meetings, Kennedy’s decision against launching air strikes targeting installations on Cuba was opposed unanimously by his military advisers.*

The audience for this live event in 1962—regardless of where they lived—was watching to find out whether or not they would wake up the next morning, and whether or not their children would get to grow up.

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

If arrangements could be made to lodge those fourteen thousand elsewhere, the City would become an area in which enemy bombers could do enormous material damage, but at the same time spare human life.”

The British Royal Air Force (RAF) manual rules that it’s not only okay to go after public and private buildings, but it’s part of what you do to induce the enemy to surrender—which is a nice way of saying that you can pound them into submission.

Then the “we don’t deliberately bomb cities” moral line was breached supposedly due to a tit-for-tat mix-up that had the Luftwaffe accidentally bombing London, followed by a British retaliatory raid on Berlin, followed by a full-bore deliberate assault on British cities by the Germans in response.*

“I have tried to spare the British. They have mistaken my humanity for weakness and have replied by murdering German women and children. If they attack our cities, we will simply erase theirs.”

Forty thousand British civilians were killed in strategic attacks during the war,

The British focused their reports on how much damage to historic buildings was done but rarely talked about the people who were killed. Doing so, it was felt, wouldn’t be good for morale, and Churchill wouldn’t allow anything in newspapers or magazines that didn’t show Britain pluckily holding up under the German barrage.

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.

“I felt sickened by what I knew. Many times, I decided I had a moral obligation to run out into the streets and tell the British people what stupidities were being done in their name. But I never had the courage to do it. I sat in my office until the end, carefully calculating how to murder most economically another hundred thousand people.”

The majority of the air leaders during the Second World War had fought in the First World War as pilots or soldiers, from the Luftwaffe’s Hermann Göring to Air Marshal Harris to US Army Air Force general Curtis LeMay, and to them anything was better than what they had experienced on the front lines twenty years earlier.

And when Britain began bombing Germany, some pacifist clerics brought up the question of when it was better to lose a war than to cross a certain moral threshold to win it.

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

In a situation like this, people can meet their end in any number of ways. A person could be killed by the blast itself—the lungs burst, the veins and nerves absorb the shock, and death follows. Victims could be burned to death from flames or crushed under giant pieces of concrete or buildings (unlike a bullet, which creates a personal wound that may prove fatal, bombs destroy the world around the victim, too). 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.)

Forty thousand people died in the London Blitz over a period of eight months (that’s more than most militaries in premodern times lost in a whole war); the Germans in Hamburg lost that many in one evening.

General Douglas MacArthur hated the firebombing. One of his aides, essentially writing on his behalf, called it “one of the most ruthless and barbaric killings of noncombatants in all history.” 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.

Japan, in a move that unwittingly came at unfathomable cost, decided to spread its industry among civilian areas. The Japanese made every block have a small factory on it, so that production wasn’t concentrated where bombers could destroy it.

“If bomber crew members had to turn a flamethrower on each one of these seventy thousand women and children, or worse yet slit each of their throats, the awfulness and trauma inherent in the act would have been of such a magnitude that it simply would not have happened. But when it is done from thousands of feet in the air, where the screams cannot be heard and the burning bodies cannot be seen, it is easy.”

The air force historian Bruce Hopper, after visiting the Buchenwald death camp in April 1945, wrote: “Stench everywhere: piles of human bone remnants at the furnace. Here is the antidote to qualms about strategic bombing.”