“Is the world more dangerous today than it was at the height of the Cold War?”

United Press International’s editor at large, Arnaud de Borchgrave, recently asked that question.

His reply?

“Anyone who’s still anyone in the field of nuclear arms control has weighed in with a resounding ‘yes’” (May 29).

A year ago when British Prime Minister Gordon Brown published his government’s first National Security Strategy, the Independent newspaper reported that it pointed out “The UK faces a ‘serious and sustained threat from violent extremists.’ Terrorists are willing to stage suicide attacks and aspire to use chemical, biological and radiological weapons. Large nuclear arsenals remain and the ambitions of North Korea and Iran cause concern. … The upheavals in ‘failed and fragile’ states reverberate around the world” (March 20, 2008).

Addressing North Korea’s most recent nuclear test and missile firings, in addition to its renunciation of the 1953 armistice agreements, de Borchgrave stated that this was but “the latest red flag on a dark nuclear horizon.” Looking back over a career in the news industry spanning over 60 years from the onset of the Cold War in 1947 to the present day, de Borchgrave noted that “Nuclear terrorism, unthinkable during the Cold War, is now the most immediate fear of the experts” (emphasis mine).

Thirty years ago, Herbert Armstrong, referring to the nuclear threat, declared in a message to his supporters, “The unthinkable is coming!” Few believed him then. Today, as de Borchgrave stated, nuclear terrorism has become in this day and age “the most immediate fear of the experts”!

The United Nations is about to apply sanctions against North Korea. That’s like slapping the nation over the wrist with a wet tram ticket—and North Korean leader Kim Jong Il knows it. His response has been to simply ratchet up his nation’s offensive nuclear weapons program.

Added to the grave risk posed to the world by North Korea’s nuclear antics, Iran appears to have significantly destabilized as a result of alleged dubious practices during its recent election. With this nation reportedly only nine months away from possessing a nuclear capability, foreign-policy experts are increasingly concerned at how to contain any further proliferation of nuclear arms, which simply raises the risk of some madman triggering the “unthinkable.”

Reflecting over his long career as a news analyst, commentator and editor, Arnoud de Borchgrave observed that the world is “far less safe than it ever was during the Cold War.” He limited his main observations to four nations that are currently in various stages of instability—North Korea, Pakistan, Iran and Israel. De Borchgrave’s main concern is neither North Korea, nor Iran or Israel. It is the prospect of the proliferation of nuclear weapons from Pakistan leaking to non-state actors, in particular the various terrorist enterprises that inhabit the unstable region of Central Asia.

He pointed to “the Pakistani nuclear establishment in Kahuta, 36 miles from Islamabad. Created by How-I-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-bomb Abdul Qadeer Khan, the super-secret Khan Research Laboratories and missile-building facility employs some 7,000 nuclear engineers and scientists, and enriches enough plutonium to produce about six nuclear weapons a year.”

So who are the Khan Laboratories’ customers? Just where is the market for these six nuclear weapons that come off the Khan production line each year? The more nuclear weapons produced and the more terrorist enterprises there are in the market for them, the greater the risk of one crazed mind igniting a global nuclear holocaust.

Concerning Iran’s nuclear ambitions, de Borchgrave observed that they are “another red flag on a troubled geopolitical horizon that makes the world far less safe than it ever was during the Cold War. A.Q. Khan began helping the mullahs with nuclear know-how almost 30 years ago. Shortly after the clerics kicked out the late shah’s pro-Western monarchy in early 1979, the supreme leader, Ayatollah (‘Sign of God’) Ruhollah Khomeini, gave his benediction to a nuclear weapons future. The shah told this reporter Iran would one day be a full-fledged nuclear power, and when he went into exile, Iran had 10 nuclear reactors on order—five from the United States and five from Western Europe.”

Then there’s the tiny nation of Israel, struggling since its inception to establish itself within secure, internationally recognized borders. It now has to contend with the risk of the loss of its traditional protector, America, as the current U.S. administration, under the leadership of a president seemingly closer in orientation to Israel’s enemies than its friends, is in process of severing that connection.

De Borchgrave commented,

Iran’s nukes are also pulling Israel’s new Netanyahu government and the Obama administration apart. For the first time since 1956, when President Eisenhower ordered Israel, France and Britain out of their occupation of the Suez Canal, U.S. and Israeli strategic interests are no longer seen as one and the same.For Israel, Jewish settlements in the West Bank have nothing to do with Iran’s secret nuclear weapons program. A majority of Israelis say Iran’s coming nuclear attractions constitute an existential crisis for the survival of a Jewish state. For President Obama, Israel’s creeping annexation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem is making a Palestinian state impossible, which, in turn, leads to what Jordan’s King Abdullah predicts will be another war in 2010.

Jordan’s King Abdullah is observably the most moderate of all Arab leaders. His prediction of the prospect of war in the Middle East should not be taken as a threat, but rather as a dire warning of the pressures mounting in the region in the absence of any progress in the stalemated peace process between Israel and Iran’s proxies which exert increasing influence within the Palestinian movement to gain territory and legitimacy for Palestinians as a recognized state.

Plainly, Israel feels exposed to the military threat from external forces today more than at any time since Egypt and Syria launched the Yom Kippur War in 1973. But this exposure to threat now has a nuclear barb attached to it, courtesy of Iran’s aggressive pursuit of nuclear power.

What is most worrying to sensible observers of Middle East tensions is the convergence of the projected timing for another Middle East conflict as predicted by King Abdullah of Jordan, and the projected timing for Iran to achieve nuclear power status. Both predictions converge in 2010!

The amazing thing is just how inured the masses have become to this nuclear sword of Damocles hanging over their heads. While the public remain distracted by the confusion of this moment in history that they are living through—the effects of the global economic and financial crisis on their everyday lives, the politicizing of moral issues such as abortion versus the right to life, the effort to legitimize homosexual relationships, the effort to kowtow to minority self-interest groups, periodic record-breaking fraud, record corporate failures, unheard-of extremes of weather—the gravest crisis of all is largely ignored by press, politicians and pundits. It is left to a few sane and sensible observers to occasionally remind us that the risk of the whole planet being blown sky-high, triggered by just one act of nuclear terror, has become the gravest of risks to humanity that outweighs all others.

What remains largely unrecognized by most is that Bible prophecy declares indeed that the unthinkable will happen!

“Just WHY is the world in such turmoil? Why are we nearing the very end of this world? The world does not understand. The world’s leaders do not understand. They are bewildered. They know well the world stands poised for the nuclear war that could annihilate all human life from the Earth. And they don’t know how to stop the nuclear buildup or prevent such an unthinkable end to all human life.”

That dramatic statement was made fully 25 years ago by Herbert W. Armstrong, founding editor of the widely read Plain Truth magazine, in a letter to those who supported his worldwide work (June 15, 1984). It reflects the essence of the message that he preached and published over a rich and fulfilling lifetime of service to the global community from that magazine’s inception in 1934 to his death on Jan. 16, 1986. Mr. Armstrong was mentor to those who now produce this magazine, the PhiladelphiaTrumpet.

Now, a quarter of a century on from Herbert Armstrong warning that nuclear weaponry would inevitably be used, resulting in horrific devastation around the globe, one of the very few remaining legitimate journalists, Arnoud de Borchgrave, an octogenarian who plies his trade as a genuine seeker after truth, declares that the experts’ main worry is the threat of nuclear terrorism.

As Herbert Armstrong was wont to so often say, “It’s time we WAKE UP!” Yes, wake up to the reality of this most extreme and ever present threat of mass death by nuclear explosion. It is a threat made ever more present by the very real prospect of some rogue terrorist group, or, for that matter, a crazed national leader such as we even presently see leading at least one nuclear power in Asia today, pushing the button that will produce a domino effect of global destruction vastly exceeding anything mankind has ever experienced or ever imagined!

Jesus Christ prophesied of these very times that we have entered in the following terms: “For then shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be. And except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved” (Matthew 24:21-22).

Do you believe the words of your Maker? Do you truly understand their prophetic application to the days we are living through, right now, when, as Arnaud de Borchgrave declared, “Nuclear terrorism, unthinkable during the Cold War, is now the most immediate fear of the experts”?

The outcome of such an unthinkable action is one the average mind does not want to think about. It is certainly one upon which the press and mass media do not want to dwell. Yet it is one that keeps the most serious of thinkers on foreign policy awake at night. In reality, it is one that ought to drive man to his knees in supplicating prayer before his Maker, deeply repentant of the actions that have brought humankind to the brink of the unthinkable.

The Bible prophecies indicate that this world has reached the point where those nations that once worshipped the true God of Israel are beyond the reach of genuine national repentance for their collective sins. Yet Bible prophecy does indicate that there is a very brief window of time remaining for the genuine, heartfelt repentance of those individuals who are willing to turn to God and repent of personal sin—those having a genuine desire to serve their Creator in working to prepare for the only remaining hope for mankind’s survival, the coming of the Savior of all humankind to establish a global kingdom of peace and security for a thousand years!

To read of that sure hope for mankind, obtain your own copy, gratis, of our booklet, authored by Herbert Armstrong, The Wonderful World Tomorrow—What It Will Be Like! It will reveal to you the only sure hope that remains for this world which now stands on the brink of its gravest crisis—a crisis which will trigger the very events when, believe it or not, the unthinkable will happen!