Threats to Physical Survival

The world changed forever in 1945. That year, with the detonations of atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, man for the first time demonstrated the frightening potential to destroy all human life.

Since that pivotal point our weapons have grown far more powerful and threatening. Those first wartime atomic bombs, though devastating, were only 12.5 kilotons—equivalent to about 12,500 tons of conventional explosives. The largest bomb successfully tested since the war, by the former Soviet Union, has been estimated at nearly 60 megatons, the explosive power of 60 million tons of TNT, which is almost 5,000 times that of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts.

Even though nuclear-weapons inventories were scaled back as a result of treaties between the United States and the Soviet Union, enough nuclear warheads remain to destroy human life many times over. The destruction that was unleashed in the Hiroshima bomb is estimated at only a millionth of the destructive power of the world’s nuclear arsenal.

Besides America and Russia, at least six other nations have nuclear weapons: Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan and North Korea. Experts assume that other countries also possess nuclear warheads and delivery systems and that still other nations are actively pursuing the development of nuclear arms.

The nuclear menace remains the most obvious threat to human survival. But by no means is it the only one. Authorities cite several ways in which human actions or natural disasters could eliminate most—if not all—human life. Among them:

• Chemical weapons. Many countries own stockpiles of nerve gas and other nightmarish concoctions so deadly that a single droplet inhaled or absorbed through exposed skin would kill a person within minutes.
• Biological weapons. Many of the same nations that have developed chemical weapons have also produced biological weapons. The resulting horrifying man-made epidemics could spread like wildfire through defenseless populations.
• Conventional weapons. Man continues to develop ever more destructive conventional bombs, bullets and rockets even as he constructs nightmarish laser weapons, particle-beam generators and neutron bombs.
• Environmental destruction. Although some nations have made remarkable strides in slowing environmental degradation, conditions are rapidly worsening in poor countries. Growing air, soil and water pollution are major threats to human health—and even life—in many areas.
• Disease epidemics. AIDS is estimated to have taken more lives than any of the world’s previous great epidemics, including the black death of the Middle Ages and the worldwide flu epidemic of 1918-19. Other mysterious killer diseases, such as Ebola, Lassa fever, Marburg virus, Machupo virus and dengue fever, have emerged in more recent years.
• Famine. Advances in agriculture have kept food production slightly ahead of population growth. But increasing soil depletion, water shortages, drought and social unrest raise the specter of devastating famines that could return at any time.
• Natural disasters. Earthquakes, hurricanes, typhoons, floods and tornadoes take thousands of lives every year. The 2004 Indonesian earthquake and tsunami killed between 230,000 and 280,000 people in 14 countries. Scientists acknowledge that asteroids and meteors have struck earth repeatedly in the past—and could in the future, with devastating impact on all of the earth’s inhabitants. Supervolcano eruptions could also be devastating to civilization.

As we will see in this lesson, many of these threats to human survival play prominent roles in prophecies in the Bible.