The World as We Know It Hangs by a Thread

I’ve just finished one of the most frightening books I’ve ever read. No, it’s not a tale of suspense or a novel in the horror genre. It’s not fiction, but it’s also not a true story, at least not yet.

Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War is terrifying because it isn’t pure speculation. Based on interviews with top-level officials and on declassified documents, it describes in gruesome detail what would happen to civilians and soldiers alike in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States. But the horror isn’t merely in the death toll—it’s in the cascading consequences. Civilization as we know it would collapse, swiftly and irrevocably.

The sheer fragility of the world’s systems is staggering. We take for granted our daily lives—communication networks, financial markets, supply chains, the basic infrastructure of modern existence. Yet Jacobsen shows how quickly everything could be upended. A single detonation wouldn’t remain an isolated event. Because of the built-in logic of deterrence, the impulse toward self-protection, and the need for quick retaliation, nuclear war is unlikely to begin with just one catastrophic explosion. If the first missile launches, more will follow. Counterattacking missiles would already be in the air before the first detonation on U.S. soil occurred—a deadly sequence set in motion by paranoia, miscommunication, and distrust.

And if you think such a scenario is unthinkable, consider how World War I began. Read the accounts of what took place in the summer of 1914—the triggers, the diplomatic blunders, the domino effect that led world leaders to bumble into a war no one knew how to stop, gutting Europe of an entire generation of young men. It doesn’t take a madman with a death wish—just a moment of miscalculation from someone with their fingers on the nuclear button.

A World Destroyed in Hours

What stands out to me about Nuclear War is the speed of the catastrophe. The book takes 10 times longer to read than it would take for the entire scenario to unfold. In half the time it takes to watch a typical two-hour movie, the world would be forever changed.

This timeline is unlike anything humanity has ever experienced. Other wars stretched over years, even decades. This one would be measured in minutes. There would be no time for deliberation, no strategic planning, no last-minute efforts to de-escalate. Once the chain reaction begins, there’s no stopping it. Within an hour, major cities across multiple continents would be reduced to smoldering craters, with radiating fallout sweeping over the countrysides. Think Mount Vesuvius and Pompeii—but everywhere. Governments would fall. Communications would cease. The world as we know it would be over, just like that.

A nuclear exchange wouldn’t merely be another war—it would be an extinction event. The 1970s preparation plans telling American schoolchildren to hide under their desks are laughable. Millions of civilians—families, children, entire populations—would be incinerated in an instant. And those who survived? They’d be the unlucky ones, either dying over the next days and weeks in excruciating pain or inheriting a world unrecognizable, a wasteland of radiation and ruin, something resembling the bleak post-apocalyptic horror of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

Love in Light of Loss

I said this book is frightening, and it is. But despite the underlying stress from encountering such a scarily plausible scenario, another emotion emerges: gratitude. Contemplating how quickly the world could be lost makes me love it all the more. Chesterton once wrote, “The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost.”

We’ve all felt this in smaller ways. The gut punch of hearing about a tragic accident involving someone else’s child—followed by the instinct to hold our own children a little tighter. The realization that life is fragile makes it more precious, not less.

In Saint Francis of Assisi, Chesterton describes the saint’s vision of his beloved town upside down. “Whereas to the normal eye the large masonry of its walls or the massive foundations of its watchtowers and its high citadel would make it seem safer and more permanent, the moment it was turned over the very same weight would make it seem more helpless and more in peril.”

A strange paradox. Seeing the world on the edge of disaster, with all the systems and structures we depend on for protection now transformed into massive vulnerabilities—seeing the whole world hanging by a thread doesn’t lead to despair. It leads to love. It leads to joy. It leads to service.

A World Hanging by a Thread

This sense of love is tied to something even deeper: dependence.

Chesterton explains how St. Francis, after seeing the world from this new perspective, loved it more, not less.

He might see and love every tile on the steep roofs or every bird on the battlements; but he would see them all in a new and divine light of eternal danger and dependence. Instead of being merely proud of his strong city because it could not be moved, he would be thankful to God Almighty that it had not been dropped; he would be thankful to God for not dropping the whole cosmos like a vast crystal to be shattered into falling stars. Perhaps St. Peter saw the world so, when he was crucified head-downwards.

This is what Nuclear War made me feel—not just fear but a renewed awareness of how much the world depends on the mercy of God. How much my very life depends on the will of God. The threat of mass extinction is a magnification of our individual vulnerability. Any one of us is an accident or a stroke away from death . . . all the time. One minute you’re alive, the next you’re dead. All our lives hang by a thread, and God is the One who pulls on it.

And God is the One who extends mercy. It’s true that history is full of horrors. Human evil and suffering have sometimes run their course unchecked—the decades-long wars in centuries past, the horrors of Auschwitz, the fallout of Chernobyl. But history is also full of unknown deliverances—wars that didn’t happen, disasters that didn’t strike, atrocities narrowly averted. These moments are there, too, unseen by us but woven into the fabric of providence.

We don’t know what the future holds. We don’t know how close we may be to the next catastrophe. But we do know this: God upholds all things. He restrains evil more than we can fathom. He continues to give us breaths, each one undeserved. And he has promised that, even in the darkest moments, he will bring good out of evil.

Who knows? Perhaps Jacobsen’s book will serve as a warning, a deterrent—one more tool that in God’s providence will prevent leaders from tumbling down the tunnel into darkness.

Regardless, a book like this helps us see the world’s fragility for what it is, increasing our sense of dependence on God, helping us see in a scenario of world destruction the vision of the world’s glory. As Chesterton said,

He who has seen the whole world hanging on a hair of the mercy of God has seen the truth; we might almost say the cold truth. He who has seen the vision of his city upside-down has seen it the right way up.

Trevin Wax is vice president of research and resource development at the North American Mission Board and a visiting professor at Cedarville University. A former missionary to Romania, Trevin is a regular columnist at The Gospel Coalition and has contributed to The Washington Post, Religion News Service, World, and Christianity Today. He has taught courses on mission and ministry at Wheaton College and has lectured on Christianity and culture at Oxford University. He is a founding editor of The Gospel Project, has served as publisher for the Christian Standard Bible, and is currently a fellow for The Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics. He is the author of multiple books, including The Thrill of Orthodoxy, The Multi-Directional Leader, Rethink Your Self, This Is Our Time, and Gospel Centered Teaching. His podcast is Reconstructing Faith. He and his wife, Corina, have three children. You can follow him on Twitter or Facebook, or receive his columns via email.