I recently thought of writing about the danger of a massive human tragedy of enormous scope. I am writing about the potential of acts of war that can bring untold death and destruction. C. E M. Joad was one of the more significant philosophers of the 20th century. He was an atheist who used to argue for atheism on British Broadcasting Company Radio. Then he converted to Christianity and wrote two books which were a great influence on me in my days of searching. One was The Recovery of Belief and the other God and Evil. Both books argue that evil is endemic to human life and proves the Bible view that the human race is under a curse and cannot extricate itself from evil but must have a Redeemer. One part of his writings shows that all inventions for human progress also involve concomitant evil and tragedy. The invention of cars leads to untold tragedies in highway deaths. We accept this as progress. Industrialization led to pollution and diseases form dirty air and the death of minors from mining coal. Insecticides that increase crop production and feed more people, then cause cancer. Nuclear discovery gives us nuclear power and nuclear waste. The worst aspect is that nuclear knowledge gives us nuclear bombs. We create robots to make life easier, but the robots will lead to the loss of millions of jobs in the near future. We produce computers with artificial intelligence, but artificial intelligence, something, will eventually control the people who made it. We produce robots for war and could find ourselves being destroyed by robot armies!
In this article, I want to note just two of the terrible possibilities. One is a pulse nuclear bomb that is set off in the atmosphere and shuts down the electrical infrastructure of a nation. The other is a sophisticated cyber-attack that can also shut down the whole electrical grid not only of a small country like Israel but the United States. Yet, politicians do not address these concerns. They make climate change a minor issue by comparison. The article in the J. Post today did not assert that millions would die as others have asserted. Rather, it pointed to the loss of medicine due to refrigeration being shut down and the lack of needed medicines leading to death and disease. The loss of transportation means the loss of food. Fuel pumps would be shut down and transport would come to a halt. While connecting everything by computer and internet seems to be a great advance, it is fraught with the greatest danger.
To avoid a pulse attack, we have to be vigilant to prevent regimes that would use such a weapon from getting it. Today Iran is a primary worry for such a weapon delivered by a missile. Of greater concern is the cyberattack. A rouge movement like Al Qaeda, ISIS or others who have computer geniuses could conceivably do this. Experts say that the way to prevent this is to have parallel grids disconnected from the internet system and also to decentralize the grid with regional separate grids. This is expensive but is a lasting answer. It is amazing that no politician is addressing this. Yet it seems to be the most pressing of issues.
I would think that secularist would lose sleep over this. I do not because I believe in God. The word apocalypse means revelation, but its common meaning is a disaster of terrible proportions. This is because the judgments in the book of Revelation seem so devastating and that is one name of the book. Yet, we could conceivably be in danger of a terrible disaster where millions will suffer and die. Politicians are terrible at caring about the long term issues and the sacrifice needed to prevent disaster. Shouldn’t followers of Yeshua be sounding the alarm?