Another Nuclear Age?
What a week it was. Russia withdrew from a nuclear arms control treaty. Iran is making progress toward producing weapons grade nuclear fuel. North Korea tested long range missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads. China stated its intention to continue building its nuclear arsenal. The New York Times said, “every sign indicates the world may be on the verge of a new era of nuclear breakout,.” All this was reported in the third week of February.
Our younger members might be interested to read an article published in the Plain Truth Magazine on July 12, 1975 – almost 48 years ago.
The Nuclear Genie Is Out
The world, according to harried disarmament experts, has entered its “second nuclear age.”
They define the “first nuclear age” as the period when the United States and the Soviet Union monopolized nuclear weapons, in their “balance of terror” standoff. The second nuclear age, now picking up momentum with the rapid spread of nuclear technology worldwide, could result in upwards of twenty nations having their own atomic weapons by 1985 – only ten years from now. Within the same coming decade, forty countries will have “peaceful” nuclear power facilities generating electricity – thus ‘possessing the first necessary increment to exercising the “nuclear option.”
Until recently the United States hoped that the spread of nuclear weapons could be checked via international agreements. such as the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Under its terms three nuclear powers …: the U.S., the Soviet Union, and Britain – pledged not to help nonnuclear nations acquire atomic weapons. At the same time the three promised to work toward disarmament to discourage the desire on the part of others to “go nuclear.”
Peaceful” technology is now the biggest danger of all, in the aftermath of India’s explosion of her “nuclear device” last year. It was the first time that a reactor – installed ostensibly for peaceful purposes – had been employed in providing fissionable material for a bomb. As Fred C. Ikle, Director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency warns: “Now It is the peaceful technology that provides not only the means, but the cover, in all cases where we fear that a new weapons program might be on the way.”.
The simple fact is that signatures, pledges, and solemn agreements mean next to nothing to either ‘an irresponsible government or any nation fearful of what a nuclear-armed adversary might be capable of doing to it.
Thus, after being capped for nearly three decades, the Nuclear Genie is at last out of the bottle. There is simply no way nuclear proliferation – and mass destruction as a result of it – is going to be stopped now short of the intervention of God Almighty himself. “And except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved (Matt 24:22).
By Gene H. Hogberg
We didn’t always get the timing right, but the Church has understood the general outline of prophetic events. If, in 1975, we were entering a second nuclear age, then in 2023 we are undoubtedly in a third nuclear age. How many nuclear ages are there before God has to shorten the days?
Brian Orchard
