Since the dawn of the atomic age, when we gained the capacity to destroy everything there is, we have grown superficially accustomed to the possible end of civilized life—or even of all human life—on earth, blunting the edge of a wholesome and salutary fear. But, of course, to live with full, unremitting awareness of how precarious our condition really is would be intolerable, so a certain insouciance proves wholesome, and salutary, too. The balance of terror—a term commonly used in the current unnerving geopolitical situation—pertains as well to the individual psyche, which must somehow achieve an equilibrium between cringing abjection in the face of the all-too-real possibility of thermonuclear holocaust and cavalier indifference to a cataclysmic war one may be sure will never happen—pretty sure, anyway, and not any time soon. 

This modern predicament furnishes the backdrop for The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation by the masterly Victor Davis Hanson, which concentrates on four wars long ago. Although only seven pages in the final chapter are devoted to contemporary flash points where wars of annihilation could be touched off, one feels the presence of these current dangers