It's the Dawning Age of the Apocalypse .

February 13, 2003

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld tells reporters that a nuclear attack on the United States is only "a matter of time." And in his State of the Union address last Tuesday, President Bush said, "It would take just one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known."

How quickly things change.

Ten years ago, we read professor Francis Fukuyama's essay and toasted the end of history. That was followed by professor Samuel Huntington's musings on clashing civilizations. Now it's worse: We're being warned to worry not just about the clash of civilizations, but the end of civilization as we know it, the end, perhaps, of the world itself.

Last week was a pretty typical one in this new age of the apocalypse. Last Sunday, White House chief of staff Andrew Card refused to rule out the use of nuclear weapons by the United States against Iraq, perhaps preemptively, vowing that "the United States will use whatever means necessary to protect us and the world from a holocaust." On Monday, Indian Defense Minister George Fernandes threatened that Pakistan would be "erased from the world map" if it were to launch a nuclear attack on India. On Tuesday, Pyongyang Broadcasting Station said that "the United States is in danger of falling into the grave that it has dug" and if it does, it "will never again survive."

The language of our nation's top leaders reflects this grim sense of what the future might hold. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld tells reporters that a nuclear attack on the United States is only "a matter of time." And in his State of the Union address last Tuesday, President Bush said, "It would take just one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known."

Not surprisingly, perhaps, 43 percent of all Americans -- and 61 percent of Washington area residents -- have taken specific precautions against terrorist attacks, according to a 2002 Pew Research Center poll. But the underlying fear can't be stuck in a box alongside the emergency food and water supplies.

In the good old days of the 1990s, Bill Clinton was extending democracy and expanding free markets. History was "over," or at least communism was. "Rogue" states were minor annoyances; the term itself implied that these wayward nations were outcasts and not part of the norm of international affairs. Information technology was empowering democracy from Boston to Beijing, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was headed toward 12,000, globalization was bringing world prosperity and democratic peace was sweeping the world.

Now Big Brother is reading your e-mail, the Dow flops miserably in the depths, mobs riot against globalization all over the world, and we're looking at a two-front war against a weapons-of-mass-destruction-brandishing Axis of Evil. In a June 2002 CNN/Time magazine poll, 59 percent of those surveyed said they think the Revelation prophecies will come true. Seventeen percent said the biblical prophecies of the end of the world would be fulfilled in their lifetimes.

What happened to optimism? What happened to "morning in America"?

A better question is, what happened to progress -- the idea that technological advances were bringing better times for us all? That's been the ruling idea of Western civilization since the Enlightenment, not just the '90s. Ten years ago we thought we were standing somewhere near the mountaintop. Now if feels as if we're hanging by our fingertips on the edge of a cliff.

Sept. 11, 2001, may have crystallized the new mood, but bigger forces are at work.

We seem to be at a tipping point, where faith that technological progress was building a better world is yielding to fears that technology is empowering rogues and -- like Frankenstein's monster -- turning on its creators.

This is not the first time progress has created a sense of euphoria, only to be brought up short by a violent dose of reality. A century ago, people in Edwardian England looked back on a previous century of economic progress and social improvement and thought that, well, history was over and that they had solved all their problems. Economists argued that growing interdependence, and the ruinous costs of modern warfare, would make war so prohibitively expensive that no rational nation would engage in it. War would die out.

Right. The horrors of World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution dented the world's faith in progress. Then came World War II, the Holocaust and Hiroshima. "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds," said J. Robert Oppenheimer, quoting the Hindu god Shiva as he watched the first successful nuclear test at Alamogordo, N.M., on July 16, 1945. With the birth of the nuclear age, end-of-the-world fantasies -- a standard of the religious and mythic imagination in apocalyptic prophecies -- were no longer the exclusive property of a sectarian fringe. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists put a doomsday clock on its cover, where it remains, with hands indicating how close the editors believe we are to annihilation. And it was scientific progress that made this possible.

Optimism was a survivor somehow. Progress continued, especially in medicine. Wealth spread throughout the Western world and Japan, improving the lives of most people. But the Holocaust had introduced a nagging doubt about whether humanity has the moral strength to manage the power that technology has conferred.

Another more subtle change happened, too. God began to move back to the center of history. When Israel captured the Western Wall in the 1967 Six Day War and utterly defeated its numerically superior enemies, many Christians and Jews believed that they were seeing the hand of God in history. Here, for many believers, was confirmation that the Holy Scriptures were inspired by an all-knowing, all-foreseeing God. If biblical prophets spoke thousands of years ago about a second exile and a second return, surely they could be believed on other matters.

For Muslims, too, conflict in the Holy Land and the defeat of secular Arab nationalist forces brought religion back into politics, with a different frightening vision.

The '90s were an Indian summer for the Age of Progress. The fall of the Soviet Union made the nuclear nightmare seem less likely, and the Middle East peace process appeared to reduce the chance of a literal Armageddon between Israel and its enemies. Technology drove globalization; globalization spread democracy and free markets around the world; progresswas back.

Then, just after the millennium, the peace process broke down (again) and the intifada returned in the Middle East, spreading despair. Sept. 11 brought terrorism home to the United States and sparked new fears of doomsday biological and chemical attacks. Progress in cloning, real or purported, demonstrated just how rapidly science was putting new power in human hands, while the steady advance of AIDS, malaria and Dtuberculosis was demonstrating the limits of science's ability to stop disease. Throw all that together with the end of the stock market bubble, and you get the ugly and frightening world, so far, of the 21st century: the world of Apocalypse Soon.

There have, of course, always been prophets of doom. Sir Isaac Newton used to stay up late calculating the arrival of the Antichrist based on biblical prophecy. Religious revivals of the 19th century were driven in part by visions of the apocalypse. Paul Ehrlich and the Club of Rome issued one environmental doomsday scenario after another in the '70s, warning of mass famines, resource exhaustion and rampaging glaciers.

What's different now is that apocalypse anxiety has moved into the mainstream of American politics and culture. The calculus of annihilation was once the preserve of an elite of nuclear planners. In the current climate, ordinary citizens do back-of-the-envelope computations every time they cross the George Washington Bridge or enter a shopping mall or plan a vacation.

The possibility of an apocalyptic event has also riveted American policymakers. Pakistani nuclear scientists were friends with the Taliban. India's nuclear arsenal has come under the control of a Hindu nationalist government with strong ties to some very scary people. Is Syria hiding Iraqi weapons? American foreign policy seems based on doomsday visions of rogue plagues and loose nukes.

In a worst-case, but not unlikely, scenario, Biblical prophecies of Armageddon could become self-fulfilling. Zealots from any of the three great monotheistic faiths could set off a chain reaction of strike, counter-strike and mass death. Jews build settlements on holy sites; Muslims resist with fanatical determination; Christians lobby the American government to support extreme Jewish claims. The result: Tensions rise and more people embrace fundamentalist ideologies and policies. This may not end well.

The Age of Apocalypse will be with us long after the current obsession with Saddam Hussein has passed. Except in old Europe, secular modernism is in retreat and religious fundamentalism is on the rise. Whatever happens to al Qaeda, the spectacular attacks of Sept. 11 will attract new cohorts of discontented youths to increasingly violent conspiracies against a hated West. The growing ranks of the violent and alienated global movement against capitalism are likely to spawn groups of highly educated and occasionally effective terrorists like the bomb-throwing anarchists and nationalists who attacked European and American society 100 years ago. Assassin Gavrilo Princip triggered World War I; one hates to speculate on what kind of turmoil his successors will cause when armed with more than a revolver, two small bombs and a vial of cyanide.

Against this witches' Sabbath of madness and turmoil, policymakers possess only the old tools of reason, moderation and police work. By restarting a Middle East peace process, they can perhaps turn down the temperature before the pot boils over. Thoughtful economic policy can strengthen and widen the global sense that economic development is bringing a brighter future. Police work and international cooperation can identify new dangers and take steps against them: Technology is neutral and can help the policeman as much as it helps the mass killer.

But a line has been crossed. This is Oppenheimer country. The Age of Progress is in the past and this is the era of Shiva, destroyer of worlds.

Walter Russell Mead is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of "Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How it Changed the World" (Knopf).
© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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