Description

Are wars on the increase? Mat 24:6 And ye shall hear of wars and rumors of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. Here are some cold hard facts. Now in past history, the 30 years war resulted with about 7 million dead. (From 1618-48) Until recently and in modern times, this was declared by many as the most horrible war. It has been calculated by a former president of the Norwegian Academy of Sciences, aided by historians from England, Egypt, Germany, and India, that since 3600 B.C., over 14,531 wars have been waged in which 3,640,000,000 people have been killed." (Harold L. Willmington, Signs of the Times, Tyndale House, Wheaton, Ill, 1981, p. 18.) When we come to modern times we find that World War I (1914 to 1918) in just over 4 years killed approximately 20 million people. But only 21 years later World War II began (1939 to 1945), resulting in the loss of 62 million lives, triple the loss of World War I, while the monetary costs quadrupled from an estimated $340 billion to an estimated $4.5 trillion. There can be no question that there has been a great increase in the intensity of warfare. Today there are at least 35 nations with nuclear weapons. The United States and Russia alone having a total of 12,000 strategic nuclear warheads and about 48,000 smaller tactical nuclear weapons. The combined total of both superpowers nuclear power equaling a total of about 1,350,000 Hiroshima size bombs! Many people are worried that nuclear warheads can reach any part of the Globe within 30 minutes, and that the superpowers have stock-piled enough nuclear explosives to equal 300 pounds of TNT for every man, woman, and child on Earth. The United Nations defines "major wars" as military conflicts inflicting 1,000 battlefield deaths per year. Here is a list of such wars since 1945.