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

by Dan Carlin

If literacy declines in a later era because reading is less important, is this indicative of living in a “dark(er) age”? Or would it be more a case of people adjusting their skills based on their needs? And who gets to decide this—we moderns looking backward at the past, or the people actually living in the earlier era? Our ideas of what was good for the inhabitants of an earlier time might be different from their own.

The Soviet Union, quickly morphing into the “other side” in the Cold War* during this era, objected to this plan, in no small part because while the United States was offering to give up its monopoly on atomic weapons, it was asking every other country to renounce them first.