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

by Dan Carlin

Reminding us all, for example, of how many times similar occurrences have taken place in the past may help add a layer of believability to many future possible occurrences that seem more like far-fetched movie plots right now. A history professor once told me that there are two ways we learn: you can put your hand on the hot stove, or you can hear tales of people who already did that and how it turned out for them.

One is often moved to a form of historical empathy and personal reflection. These events happen to real flesh-and-blood human beings who were often relentlessly trapped in the gears of history. It’s hard not to wonder how we would cope if we found ourselves in similar situations. One of the things that I kept noticing when burrowing into the archives was a recurring, unanswerable either/or historical question. Will things keep happening as they always have, or won’t they? It is an unbelievably intense and scary question in some circumstances.

Andrew Mellon, the secretary of the treasury under President Herbert Hoover when the 1929 stock market crashed, which initiated more than a decade of economic collapse, thought the coming hardship would be a good thing. “It will purge the rottenness out of the system,” Mellon said, as reported in Hoover’s memoirs. “High costs of living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.” From Mellon’s point of view, maybe he got his wish. The Depression put an end to the Roaring Twenties, a time remembered for high living, speakeasies, jazz, flappers, the Charleston, and the advent of motion pictures. What Mellon might have thought wasteful frivolity was simply fun to others. Things got a lot less fun when money became more scarce.

The early-twentieth-century German military historian Hans Delbrück* had a theory that everything that characterizes the modern military—the organization, tactics, drill, logistics, and leadership—is designed to help offset the natural advantage of the toughness that people at a lower level of civilization possess. “Compared to civilized people,” he wrote about the ancient Germans who kept getting beaten by the more refined Romans, “barbarians had the advantage of having at their disposal the warlike power of the unbridled animal instincts, of basic toughness. Civilization refines the human being, makes him more sensitive, and in doing so, it decreases his military worth, not only his bodily strength, but also his physical courage. These natural shortcomings must be offset in some artificial way. . . . The main service of the standing army consists of making civilized people through discipline capable of holding their own against the less civilized.”*

The seemingly softer society’s use of technology, superior organizational capabilities, and money against a potentially tougher and hardier society is a dynamic that’s visible in many historical eras. The modern Afghans may be one of the toughest people on the planet right now, but their individual and societal resilience is offset by Western military forces that might as well be playing the part of the Romans in this story. However, if the Western militaries were forced to fight using the same weapons as the Afghans—AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenades, and IEDs—and they, in turn, used our drones, fighter planes, and cruise missiles, then the question of our toughness versus theirs might be crucial. Remember, the Afghans have been a people at war for forty years, against a multitude of opponents. In some ways, they might be more like our grandparents when it comes to toughness than we are.

Smallpox is one of the most infamous diseases in history. To give an idea of its virulence, it killed an estimated 300 to 500 million people in the twentieth century alone,* but the disease was eradicated from the planet in 1980*—meaning half a billion people were killed by smallpox in just eight decades.

the Assyrians were often cast, especially by their neighbors, as the equivalent of the Nazis in the biblical era.* These were people who appeared to be proud of the terrible things they did. They created great carvings in stone of their armies at war and the punishments their kings meted out to those who had rebelled against them. In some cases, these reliefs are essentially advertisements publicizing what would amount in the modern day to crimes against humanity. As if the grotesque illustrations weren’t enough, the Assyrian kings provided cuneiform text narration of their atrocities, too. When one reads what they wrote about their feats, one feels as though the Assyrians didn’t have just one bad Hitler-esque ruler, but rather that they were all like that. The artistic “court style” of Assyria’s royal reliefs is genocidal.

The Assyrians are considered by many to have built the first major empire in human history, and every empire that has followed has adopted many, if not all, of the strategies and techniques the Assyrians used to govern and administrate theirs. And one of their preferred techniques to keep their subject peoples in line was a form of state terrorism. The formula is well understood today, as it’s been used many times in history. Cities, regions, and peoples that rebel will be utterly destroyed, and the retribution will be devastating.

Esarhaddon, a son of Sennacherib, brushed off internal rebellions and did what his forebears had only thought to do: attack Egypt. It’s this attack on such a large, powerful, and faraway land that some historians cite as the Assyrian “bridge too far.” Defeating the field forces of the Egyptians proved to be relatively easy for the still formidable Assyrian armies, but holding the region proved to be a nightmarish and expensive endeavor. The main Assyrian army was tied down for a long time in the Egyptian quagmire while things festered back at the heart of the homeland. It was a classic trap of empire: military overextension.

One way to cut down on the sheer number of problems the Romans faced was to double-down on the practice of making contracts/treaties with tribes. This is what the Romans eventually did with the tribes they fought at Adrianople. More than in the past, though, the deals involved settling the tribal peoples on Roman land and allowing them to maintain a separate political identity while they defended the territory for Rome. Some have described this as a sort of feudalistic relationship that would become a feature of the Middle Ages. In 418, for example, the emperor Honorius settled the Goths in Aquitaine, and in 435, the emperor Valentinian III gave Roman lands in North Africa to the Vandal tribe. The Visigoths were ensconced in Spain, and the Franks in much of modern-day France. Without realizing it, the Roman decision makers were parceling out the empire to the people who would eventually run these regions when the central authority fell apart—in effect creating their own successor states. As the historian Roger Collins writes: “What is genuinely striking . . . is the haphazard, almost accidental nature of the process. From 410 onwards, successive Western imperial regimes just gave way or lost practical authority over more and more of the territory of the former Empire. The Western Empire delegated itself out of existence.”

Unless humankind can break patterns of collective behavior that are older than history itself, we can expect to have a full-scale nuclear war at some point in our future. The great regional or global geopolitical rivals at any given time and place have been squaring off with each other since the first cities arose in Mesopotamia, and it seems unrealistic to imagine that this has forever ended. Despite intermittent peaceful eras, there have always been wars. But the next Total War will be the first one in which both sides possess weapons powerful enough to destroy civilization—and efficient enough to do it in an afternoon.

One Hiroshima survivor, Hiroshi Shibayama, saw the explosion and ran toward the city center where the bomb had gone off. He wrote, “The people were burned so badly that it was hard to distinguish feature from feature, and all were blackened as if covered with soot. Their clothes were in rags. Many were naked. Their hands hung limply in front of them. The skin of their hands and arms dangled from their fingertips. Their faces were not the faces of the living.” The survivors’ accounts leave a modern reader slack jawed. In any third world war, the nuclear survivors would likely have similar experiences.* But as everyone knew after the first two bombs were used, in the next big war nuclear bombs will be bigger, there will be more of them, and both sides will probably have them. What if instead of two small atomic bombs, two hundred large ones are used and we begin to damage things beyond fixing?* Albert Einstein is supposed to have said that he didn’t know what sort of weapons the Third World War would be fought with, but the one after it would be fought with sticks and stones. Air Force general Curtis LeMay allegedly coined the phrase “to bomb someone back to the Stone Age.”* Both quotes, whether said by these men or not, invoke the idea of a future all-out war knocking humanity backward on the civilization scale. For the first time in their history, humans had created weapons so powerful they had the theoretical potential to spawn dark ages. Humanity hasn’t really dealt with...

The generations that grew up in the first few decades after the Second World War had the specter of a nuclear conflict hanging over them—they talked about it, wrote and sang about it, and had nightmares about it. American children often did emergency drills in school that taught them what to do and how to behave during a nuclear attack. The literature and popular entertainment of the period was saturated with themes of atomic (and later thermonuclear) war. “The End of the World” became a popular trope, a fantasy. It didn’t even matter if you lived in a so-called neutral country, because no region would escape the fallout—literally—if a third world war happened. In the era when the superbombs were new, people from many varied backgrounds—scientific, military, political, artistic, and philosophical—began to think about the odds of this happening as if their very lives depended on it.

The physicist Arthur Holly Compton* wrote, “If with such destructive weapons men are to survive, they must grow rapidly in human greatness. A new level of human understanding is needed. The reward for using the atom’s power towards man’s welfare is great and sure. The punishment for its misuse would seem to be death and the destruction of the civilization that has been growing for a thousand years.” “Must grow rapidly in human greatness” is a wonderful phrase. As is “destruction of the civilization that has been growing for a thousand years.” It seems like a nice way of saying that we as a species must become more enlightened or die. Einstein seemed to be a bit more pessimistic about the adapt-or-die question: “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything, save our modes of thinking and thus, we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” He later clarified what he meant: Many persons have inquired concerning a recent message of mine that “a new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move to higher levels.” Often in evolutionary processes a species must adapt to new conditions in order to survive. Today the atomic bomb has altered profoundly the nature of the world as we know it, and the human race consequently finds itself in a new habitat to which it must adapt its thinking. In light of new knowledge . . . an eventual world state is not just desirable in the name of brotherhood; it is necessary for survival. . . . Today we must abandon competiti...

Once the Second World War was over and emotions had cooled somewhat, questions arose about what to do with this weapons technology. How can it be controlled? What if other countries get the new weapons, too?* Many debates took place within the United States in 1945 and 1946 concerning topics such as who should be in charge of the weapons. The military seemed like the logical choice—it was the one who was going to use them, after all. But President Truman wasn’t having it,* and eventually, it was decided that going forward the US president would have the exclusive power to authorize and order the use of the superweapons. But this was a level of personal power the constitutional framers of the United States had never foreseen. And that, historian Garry Wills wrote, was one of the side effects of the bomb—it changed the American constitutional system. “Lodging ‘the fate of the world’ on one man,” Wills argues, “with no constitutional check on his actions, caused a violent break in our whole governmental system.” But it was a development that “was accepted under the impression that technology imposed it as a harsh necessity.” How, for example, would a president have time to consult with other leaders or branches of government if the enemy’s missiles were already in the air?

The military historian Gwynne Dyer doesn’t find the fact that the two superpowers soured toward each other surprising at all. He likens it to earlier geopolitical rivalries and argues that the democracy-versus-communism Cold War dynamic was a lot like the role religion played in the wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. “Each side has an ideologically watertight explanation for why the adversary behaves with such persistent wickedness and aggression,” Dyer writes. “None of the post-1945 developments would seem surprising to a 17th century Spanish or Ottoman diplomat. Neither communism nor liberal democracy would mean anything to him, other than as a useful label for the players, but he would have no trouble understanding why the victorious alliance so quickly fell apart. They almost always do after victory, because the winners are the biggest players left on the board, hence they automatically become the greatest threats to each other’s power.”

Some of the more aggressive voices at the time argued for doing just that, acting before the advantage narrowed. General George Patton famously suggested before demobilization began that, since the Western Allies already had mobilized forces over in Europe, ready to fight, they ought to confront the Soviets right away. No one knew how long that window of opportunity was going to last.* Only a fool, some thought, would squander such a chance. There were differing opinions about what to do with the United States’ atomic monopoly. President Truman’s secretary of war, Henry Stimson, described the advantage of the monopoly in poker terms: The bomb was the equivalent, he said, of a royal straight flush. How do you resist playing with a hand like that? What would Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great—or Hitler, for that matter—have done with a monopoly on nuclear weapons? Not use them? If you gave the great Carthaginian general Hannibal nuclear weapons in his life-or-death struggle with the Roman Republic, handed him the button, and said, “If you push this, all of Rome will be devastated,” does he push it, or does he say, “Maybe I should think about this”?*

Between 1946 and 1952, the bomb would fundamentally transform the US government into an entity that would in many ways be unrecognizable from the one that was attacked at Pearl Harbor in 1941. Not only did the fate of the world rest in the hands of a single individual, as the author Garry Wills has described, but in just a few years a series of new policies and laws such as the Truman Doctrine,* the National Security Act of 1947, and the Marshall Plan* created a new national security state at home and reoriented US foreign policy abroad, making the containment of communism its top concern. This was also the era when the CIA, the NSA, and the National Security Council were born, all part of a massive redesign of the US government, one intended to protect secrets, spy on our enemies, and run an increasingly globally focused military command.

In October 1949, at congressional hearings about the air force’s atomic blitz plan, the “Revolt of the Admirals” revealed the strong feelings held by those faced with doing the dirty work. As Eric Schlosser writes in Command and Control, “One high-ranking admiral after another condemned the atomic blitz, arguing that the bombing of Soviet cities would be not only futile but immoral.” Admiral William F. “Bull” Halsey—a commander of the South Pacific during the war, and a man whose battle group got Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle’s planes close enough to Japan for them to bomb Tokyo in 1942—testified thus: “I don’t believe in mass killings of noncombatants.” Admiral Arthur W. Radford—commander of the northern carrier group and eventual vice chief of naval operations during the war—said, “A war of annihilation might bring a pyrrhic military victory, but it would be politically and economically senseless.” And Rear Admiral Ralph A. Ofstie, who had toured the burned-out cities of Japan after the war, described the atomic blitz as the “random mass slaughter of men, women, and children.” The whole idea, he said, was “ruthless and barbaric and contrary to American values.”

As Michio Kaku and Daniel Axelrod write in To Win a Nuclear War, the secretary of the army, Kenneth Claiborne Royall, “spoke for the hard-liners when he said, ‘We have been spending 98 percent of all the money for atomic energy for weapons. Now if we aren’t going to use them, that doesn’t make any sense.’” Some wanted to rely on a strategy that would eventually become known as deterrence.* For deterrence to work, however, the side being deterred must truly believe that these weapons will be used against it. This meant that any nation seeking to lean on deterrence couldn’t ever publicly say anything like, “These weapons are awful, and we’ll never use them.” Yet this is exactly what the United States had said right after the war in 1945. Was the United States ready to blow up Russian cities and slaughter so many of its people if Stalin called its bluff? If he did call the bluff, and the United States backed down, its future ability to use atomic bombs as a threat would be greatly diminished—and thereby the value of its nuclear arsenal, too. This is a conundrum that would outlive most of the officials debating it in 1948.

Enrico Fermi and another physicist penned an even more apocalyptic response, arguing that these weapons would be able to create the equivalent of giant natural catastrophes. A decision on the proposal that an all-out effort be undertaken for the development of the “Super” cannot in our opinion be separated from considerations of broad national policy. A weapon like the “Super” is only an advantage when its energy release is from 100–1000 times greater than that of ordinary atomic bombs. The area of destruction therefore would run from 150 to approximately 1000 square miles or more. Necessarily such a weapon goes far beyond any military objective and enters the range of very great natural catastrophes. By its very nature it cannot be confined to a military objective but becomes a weapon which in practical effect is almost one of genocide. It is clear that the use of such a weapon cannot be justified on any ethical ground which gives a human being a certain individuality and dignity even if he happens to be a resident of an enemy country. It is evident to us that this would be the view of peoples in other countries. Its use would put the United States in a bad moral position relative to the peoples of the world. Any postwar situation resulting from such a weapon would leave unresolvable enmities for generations. A desirable peace cannot come from such an inhuman application of force. The postwar problems would dwarf the problems which confront us at present. Those who saw su...

Eventually the US/UN forces commanded by the legendary Second World War general Douglas MacArthur conducted an amphibious landing behind enemy lines at Inchon, only to trigger a Chinese response soon afterward that sent a ton of Chinese “volunteers” unofficially into the fighting. It was at this point that it became apparent that, to keep the Korean War from becoming World War III, all the major powers had to create some plausible deniability so that nobody had to admit this was World War III. There is a theory that says that even without nuclear weapons there was a decent chance Korea would have turned into World War III. But it appeared to some that Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union, Mao in Red China, and Harry Truman in the United States all bent over backward to claim that all the air strikes and amphibious naval operations and the millions of soldiers shooting at one another wasn’t “war.” When the fighting broke out—the worst since the Second World War—a news reporter asked the American president, “President Truman, is this war? Are we at war?” Truman answered, “No, we are not at war.” “So what is this? Is this like a police action?” the reporter asked, and Truman said, “Yes. That is exactly what it amounts to.” And forever after, it was called a “police action”—as though wars might call for nuclear weapons, but police actions would not. (Also, if the situation in Korea wasn’t a “war,” Truman could argue that he didn’t have to go to Congress and ask it to declare it s...

At one point in the conflict, Truman precipitated a near-constitutional crisis by firing Douglas MacArthur, his military commander. General MacArthur had been accused of insubordination for disagreeing with the way the president was micromanaging the war,* but Truman was worried about more than the war in Korea—he was clearly trying to restrain the use of force to keep things from spiraling out of control and into World War III. Someone who disagreed with this caution was Air Force general Curtis LeMay. LeMay’s attitude was shared among a lot of generals, especially the First and Second World War veterans—men who considered the most damaging aspect of modern war its duration. Because casualties reliably mounted every day, anything that could be done to limit the length of the war was humanitarian by its very nature—even if what it took to do that was a shocking amount of violence in a very short time. LeMay had wanted to unleash his heavy bombers, as he had over Japan in the Second World War, and he testified after the war was over that to do so would have been a more humanitarian approach. This is the philosophy/logic of strategic bombing, as contradictory as it may sound, highlighted by the nomenclature: the new bomber that was slated to carry out any possible nuclear destruction of places like the Soviet Union in 1950 and 1951 was the brand-new B-36, nicknamed the “Peacemaker.”

“Tactical” nuclear weapons are those which are small enough to be used in situations that have a potential battlefield utility. Nuclear artillery shells fired from cannons or nuclear mines are two examples. One such weapon was even designed to be fired by a soldier from a bazooka-like recoilless cannon.* J. Robert Oppenheimer even helped develop them, saying later that he mistakenly thought he was improving the situation because the weapons were at least smaller. Despite Oppenheimer’s hope that smaller weapons were better than those that were included in what he called “the most God-damnedest thing I ever saw” (he was referring to the air force’s war plan for 1951, a plan that called for five hundred atomic bombs to be dropped on the Soviet Union in a very short time), tactical nuclear weapons actually opened up the door to a very quick escalation to the very big bombs that Oppenheimer hoped would never be used. Rather than one instead of the other, experts worried that you would likely just get both.

Within hours of seeing the photos of the construction sites in Cuba, President Kennedy called a meeting on October 16 of what would become known as the EXCOMM, a group of handpicked national security advisers, along with some other influential voices whom Kennedy wanted to hear from, including the attorney general, his younger brother Robert. Unbeknownst to any of the participants at that morning meeting (except his brother), the president taped the meetings.* And at one point, Kennedy reminded everyone there that they were talking about the potential for strikes on American urban centers that could cause eighty to one hundred million deaths.* Has there ever been a more important series of conversations in the history of the world? As events unfolded, and with hindsight available to us, it’s hard not to be impressed with President Kennedy’s ability to push back against the most hawkish of his civilian and military advisers.* Since the invention of nuclear weapons, the US military had had its aggressive advocates for their use.* Had Truman heeded them, he’d have used them during the Berlin Blockade and in the Korean War. Eisenhower had multiple occasions when nuclear hawks counseled using the H-bomb. At the EXCOMM meetings, Kennedy’s decision against launching air strikes targeting installations on Cuba was opposed unanimously by his military advisers.*

The end of our world was almost televised.* At the moment of highest tension and drama during the Cuban Missile Crisis—with Soviet ships approaching the US naval quarantine line—enormous crowds stood in Times Square, reading the electronic news crawl flashing on the side of the buildings. All three US broadcast networks gave the crisis the equivalent of wall-to-wall-coverage. Primitive hand-drawn little maps behind the news broadcaster Walter Cronkite, with little paper ship counters occasionally being moved closer and closer to that line of quarantine, provided a countdown to catastrophe. The president and his people were watching this coverage, too, and the nation was holding its collective breath. This was quite a bit different from Edward R. Murrow’s groundbreaking live radio broadcast from London as the bombs were dropping on the city during the 1940 Blitz, because unless you lived in London, this didn’t have a direct effect on your life. 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.