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

by Dan Carlin

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.

In modern times, we worry about our kids’ exposure to simulated violence on television or in video games and whether it desensitizes them to real-life atrocities. But in many past eras it may have been actual violence, not the made-for-TV variety, that desensitized children to more of the same. Think of the children who grew up in cultures where they would have seen real-life killings and torture up close by the time they were five, six, or seven years old. In some cases, they might have even participated in it.*

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are commonly given the names Conquest (or Pestilence), War, Famine, and Death. In much of the modern world, the horsemen don’t seem as scary as they used to. War and conquest are still around, of course, but no World War III (yet). We are no longer able to relate to what our forebears went through with disease (pestilence).* And mass, society-wide famine is almost unheard of in most of the world. It seems like much of the darkness that humankind lived with from time immemorial has been banished from our future. But it’s never wise to bet against any of the Four Horsemen long term. Their historical track record is horrifyingly good.

Weather-related explanations for the end of the Bronze Age are extrapopular right now given the general spotlight on climate change, but historians for many decades have theorized that drought was what really unleashed the Four Horsemen. A prolonged drought, leading to severe famine, could certainly have been the spark that set into motion chain reactions that in retrospect explain things like piracy, migrations, and perhaps internal unrest.

If something like drought or famine was the cause of the Bronze Age collapse, it didn’t wreak its changes by starving everyone to death. Famine would have been more of a spark that set off side effects.

There’s an apocryphal story about Charlemagne seeing Vikings near the end of his reign. They were not yet the large problem they would be a few decades hence, but the story is relayed as a sort of premonition. A monk named Notker, writing in about 887 (Charlemagne died in 814), claimed that the emperor was visiting what is now modern-day France near the coastline and saw a lone Viking ship. Affronted by its boldness, and with tears in his eyes, Charlemagne could supposedly see the future—that is, that it wouldn’t be long before these Vikings would become a nightmarish headache.

While the story reeks of an after-the-fact prediction coming true, there’s an aspect of it that seems to make some sense—if anyone should understand the potential danger posed by warlike “barbarians” from the frozen north, it would be a Roman emperor. This “Roman” emperor might have been expected to know this better than most; he was, after all, a tall, light-haired, mustachioed, blue-eyed German-speaking warrior king. And he was a man who had been fighting “pagan” German tribesmen long before he became the first Roman emperor to rule in the West in three hundred years. Sometimes in history, what goes around, comes around. Charlemagne might have known that, too.

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

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.”

The road to hell, it is said, is paved with good intentions, and if a nuclear holocaust had happened, or ever eventually occurs, evil was never why people poured their lives and reputations into such endeavors. So many who helped pave the way to this reality, rather than being murderous Adolf Eichmann–type monsters, were instead hoping their efforts would lead to better outcomes.*