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.

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”?

If you had been an American or British general in the Second World War, for example, and had continually ordered your ground forces to destroy the structures and rip up the infrastructure of enemy cities while deliberately yet indiscriminately killing large numbers of the civilian noncombatants, you would have been removed from command. The Allied armies did not engage in this sort of deliberate conduct,* but aerial bombing, which accomplished the same thing, was considered acceptable, even routine. In fact, if an air commander could get such results reliably, he very well might have been promoted. On the surface this looks like a level of hypocrisy Genghis Khan could drive a genocide through.

The physicist Freeman Dyson, who worked for the RAF’s Bomber Command, said years after the war, “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.”