“The nuclear arms race ought to be stopped,” Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev said in 1986. Western leaders agreed. It wasn’t hard to see that the threat was too grave. The stakes were too high. The doomsday devices that the Soviet Union and United States had been making more and more of for decades were far too destructive to keep building.

So the Russians and Americans began paring down their arsenals. Landmark treaties and arms control agreements limited the construction and use of these unfathomably destructive weapons. In the 1990s, Russia even started taking highly enriched uranium from dismantled nuclear missiles and selling it to America for use in nuclear power plants. Weapons of annihilation were being turned into fuel to power human life. Megatons to megawatts. It seemed for years like we were stepping back from the ledge.

But that time is over.

The world has now entered a “new age” in which “the bomb is back,” the Wall Street Journal wrote on January 13.

Evidence of this chilling fact is everywhere. Tactical nuclear weapons are increasingly considered as a means of winning a battlefield advantage. One of two critical agreements, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, has collapsed. The other, the New start Treaty, expires in months, reviving the potential of a new nuclear weapons race between Russia and America.

The Chinese, meanwhile, are not waiting for the starting gun.

Since 2015, China has doubled its arsenal of nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles, bringing the current count to 600. Every one of them can strike the U.S. mainland, according to the Pentagon’s assessment of Chinese military power published last month. Chinese leaders consistently reject proposals to meet with U.S. authorities to discuss formal limits on nuclear weapons, and their pace of building new ones keeps increasing. China also recently became the world’s third nation, after the U.S. and Russia, to achieve a nuclear triad—the capability of delivering nuclear payloads from land, sea and air.

At the same time, Iran continues pushing ahead in its fanatic drive to develop nuclear weapons. North Korea is expanding its nuclear arsenal and improving nuclear delivery systems, thanks in large part to Russian technology. German military personnel are receiving ongoing training on how to mobilize and drop the nuclear bombs that the U.S. keeps in Germany. And more concerns and questions are arising over how vulnerable Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are to terrorist hijacking, especially with America having pulled out of neighboring Afghanistan.

At the same time, discussions are underway about the possibility of other countries—namely Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, Turkey and Ukraine—obtaining nuclear arsenals of their own.

Nuclear developments in so many countries reveal the brittle fragility of the global order. They show that Gorbachev’s proposal to reverse course on nuclear proliferation failed. They show that all of the efforts by the United Nations and other international organizations to temper the nuclear risk have failed. None of man’s various disarmament programs, treaties or peace plans have secured real and lasting peace.

In all such efforts, there is no mechanism to forcibly prevent civilization-ending weapons from being used. And there is no true cause for hope.

But there is hope in the Bible.

Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry writes about this in his 2017 booklet Nuclear Armageddon Is ‘At the Door.’ After writing about several of the specific nuclear threats around the globe, he states: “Only God can solve our number one problem: that of human survival.”

Mr. Flurry’s booklet makes plain that a plan is laid out in the Scriptures that will give mankind a sure and hope-filled solution. But he explains that the Bible also contains some somber warnings, showing that the current threats and tensions around the world will keep rising. And in the near future, they will culminate in nuclear war.

Matthew 24:21-22 record Jesus Christ saying: “For there will be greater anguish than at any time since the world began. And it will never be so great again. In fact, unless that time of calamity is shortened, not a single person will survive. …” (New Living Translation).

This future “time of calamity” that will have the potential to end all human life could only be describing a global nuclear war with enough weapons used to effect nuclear winter. This dark time is coming soon, and it will threaten to wipe out every human life.

Amos 5:3 shows that in some cities, only 10 percent of the population will survive. Jeremiah 2:15 shows that other cities will be entirely obliterated by nuclear bombs, without a single soul remaining. These are terrifying prophecies. And they show that the new nuclear era that mankind has entered is not one we will navigate through unscathed.

But the Bible’s prophecies do not end with nuclear weapons wiping out all human life. Continuing the passage in Matthew 24, just after Jesus said that nuclear war at the end of this era would be so cataclysmic that it could kill all people, He added a vital detail: “But it will be shortened …” (verse 22; nlt).

So nuclear World War iii will be interrupted. Before Russia, China and other powers launch enough nuclear missiles to erase mankind, Jesus Christ will bring an abrupt end to the havoc and bloodshed.

Mr. Flurry explains:

The good news is God will shorten the time span and save us alive. But if He did not intervene, there wouldn’t be anyone alive on this planet. He will let it go a long way so that people learn they can’t rule themselves. Men don’t know the way of peace. God knows—and if you keep His law of love, it will bring great joy and peace into your life.

Immediately following that time of unprecedented death, Christ will bring in an epoch of unprecedented prosperity and peace. Amos 9:14 shows that those cities that will have been left with only 10 percent of their people will then be reconstructed. “[T]hey shall build the waste cities, and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and drink the wine thereof; they shall also make gardens, and eat the fruit of them.”

Jeremiah makes clear that as the people carry out this vast rebuilding project, each person will come to know the true God. Every person will learn to keep His law of love. As a result, that “great joy and peace” that Mr. Flurry discusses will saturate every nation of the world.

“We are now at the edge of this nuclear abyss!” Mr. Flurry writes. “As all these horrible signs come to pass, we know Christ is about to return.”

These are vital truths to understand: both the warning about the war in the near future and the news about the hope and peace that lie just beyond it. But it is possible to learn to begin enjoying that “great joy and peace” that comes from choosing life even today. A great way to start your study into these topics is to order your free copy of Mr. Flurry’s booklet Nuclear Armageddon Is ‘At the Door.’