Just Finished Reading: The End is Always Near – Apocalyptic Moments from the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses by Dan Carlin (FP: 2019) [246pp] 

We seem to be being bombarded with End of the World stories at the moment – from Climate Change (or as I still like to call it Global Warming), Putin’s threats of Nuclear War or the imminent arrival of aggressive AI systems. Of course, these fears are nothing new – apart from the details – but there have been times when not only was the fear very real but the reality tried its very best to live up to it. Some of those times are covered in this unexpectedly gripping narrative. 

I say unexpected because what I *was* expecting was a history of End of the World beliefs rather than the incidents themselves. But, as I found out here, that’s not a bad thing – especially when you have an author who clearly knows his stuff and has lots of interesting ideas on the things he presents. We start with the still mysterious and hotly debated Bronze Age Collapse where early (largely unrecorded because writing was still in its early stages) European and Middle Eastern civilisation went into sudden and near total collapse for, as yet, undetermined reasons. No doubt it wasn’t from a single cause but even the proposed multiple causes still don’t fully add up. Then there’s the much-studied Fall of the Roman Empire (which prompted me to think about how you could tell if your civilisation was collapsing if you were already in the middle of it) and then one of my favourite all-encompassing disasters – The Black Death. This was responsible not only for millions of deaths across Asia, the Middle East and Europe  but radically changed the course of Western history. That’s hardly surprising considering the average death toll was somewhere between 30-50% of Europeans and in some places literally killed EVERYONE. Interesting – given the publication date – the author speculated on how well we would handle a Pandemic, even one nowhere near as devastating as the Black Death. Now of course we know the answer to that one: Badly. 

Probably the most interesting chapters for me concerned the development, use and consequences of nuclear weapons. One of the things I hadn’t heard before that the intended first target – Berlin (I may have heard this before and skimmed over it but this really got me thinking of the consequences for Europe if that’d actually happened). The reason the first (and second) bombs were in fact dropped on Japan and not Germany was that Germany capitulated a few months before the first successful nuclear test. Lucky Berlin. The author then discussed the use of the bomb and its effect on the war and, of course, on the Soviets. Again interestingly, a number of hawks in the US Administration wanted to nuke Russia immediately before they eventually got ‘The Bomb’ too. It was considered it would take them up to 20 years to do so – it didn’t - and thankfully cooler heads prevailed. It was also interesting how the very existence of nukes, even before the Soviets and other countries acquired them, changed both the power of the US Presidency and US Foreign Policy to the present day. Nukes, in effect, changed everything about the modern world. 

As you can probably tell, I really enjoyed this book and consider it one of the most interesting and thought provoking reads of the year. I was impressed by the authors breadth of knowledge as well as his ability to see through the historical haze and pluck fascinating ideas and theories out for closer examination. Being the person that I am, inevitably I immediately flicked to the bibliography and was delighted by both its length and depth. So, more disasters to come.... Highly recommended for those who don’t mind an apocalypse or two in their lives. 

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