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

by Dan Carlin

History is akin to traveling to a distant planet, but one inhabited by human beings. Biologically the same, but culturally alien—and a major reason is that they were raised differently.

It’s hard to know what you’re missing after it’s been gone for a couple of lifetimes.

The defenses of this metropolis were mammoth, with walls sixty feet tall and fifty feet thick stretching more than three miles on each side, and deep ditches carved out below them. The Halzi Gate itself had a 220-foot-tall facade and was flanked by six towers.

Xenophon wrote the Anabasis—now considered a classic of Western literature—about his experience commanding Greek mercenaries in a Persian civil war.

Later, they came upon yet another city. From here, a day’s march of eighteen miles brought them to a large undefended fortification near a city called Mespila. . . . The base of the fortification was made of polished stone, in which there were many shells. It was fifty feet broad and fifty feet high. On top of it was built a brick wall fifty feet in breadth and a hundred feet high. The perimeter of the fortification was eighteen miles.

The historian Gwynne Dyer has said that Sennacherib destroyed Babylon as thoroughly as a nuclear bomb would have. In fact, the only difference between the ancient world and the modern is that it took a lot more human muscle power to accomplish the same thing. The Assyrian soldiers pulled the walls down and burned the city. (Imagine what would be involved trying to create a Hiroshima or Nagasaki if human hands had to do the work.)

In addition to killing the citizens of Babylon, the angry “king of the world” diverted a river over the city, and then had salt and thorny plants sowed into the soil to create an environmental wasteland.

If one could transport the Roman army one thousand years into the future, it’s hard to imagine them losing to any European army until the high Middle Ages.

On Christmas Day 800, something weird happened with Charlemagne and the pope in Rome in front of a lot of people. The event is traditionally one of history’s “great” moments, but there’s a great deal about this event that is unclear.

This is a perfect example of how different the optics are between “defending the church with the sword” and, as Roger Collins has phrased it, “armed evangelizing.”

Saint Lebuin—who it was said devoted his life to converting the pagan German tribes—is, according to Barbero, supposed to have given his famous ominous warning to the Saxons about Charlemagne: “If you will not accept belief in God, there is a king in the next country who will enter your land, conquer it, and lay it waste.”

There has not been a war for more than seven decades between great powers such as we’ve seen from Mesopotamia onward—the world wars, the Napoleonic Wars, the Thirty Years’ War, the Hundred Years’ War, the Punic Wars.

Armies doubled in size between the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 and the Battle of Sedan in 1870, and then doubled again by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. The changes to the power of their weaponry was even greater. The largest artillery pieces of the First World War fired shells that weighed more than Napoleon’s heavy cannons of a century before, and the infantryman’s rifle in 1914 outranged those eighteenth-century horse-drawn artillery pieces.

“Seldom, if ever, has a war ended leaving the victors with such a sense of uncertainty and fear—with such a realization that the future is obscure and that survival is not assured.”

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.

When the bomb exploded on an island in the Pacific, it created a fireball more than three miles wide. Lightning crackled inside it. The subsequent crater measured more than 6,000 feet across, and the hole was more than 150 feet deep. This