Word: armageddon
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...long ago, preventing Armageddon was the only objective U.S. and Soviet leaders had in common. That is why the issue of arms control so dominated earlier summits. Yet there was always an underlying paradox about the enterprise: the arms to be controlled were the consequence, not the cause, of the hostility that infused U.S.-Soviet relations. The cause was a combination of ideology and geopolitics. The two leaderships differed profoundly over the treatment of the individual citizen by the state, and they had conflicting interests in every region of the world...
...premise is a double what-if. What if sophisticated computers conspired to trigger Armageddon (you know when) and in the process created a humanoid terminator (you know who) to patrol the nuked-out landscape? Then again, what if a renegade from the future could vault back in time to keep the killer computers from being invented...
Reagan ignored his homework on the eve of a summit meeting because, he explained to an aide, "The Sound of Music was on last night." Reagan's fascination with Armageddon theology fueled his enthusiasm for the Star Wars missile-defense system. Decision making occasionally stagnated not only because of intra-Cabinet disputes, but also because his advisers often had to rely on the President's body language as a code for intentions Reagan refused to articulate. The supporting cast speaks candidly in these pages. Jeane Kirkpatrick recalls an agonizing conflict over policy toward Nicaragua, and Reagan's role: "Just absent...
...Armageddon is a fine, thumping word, almost onomatopoeic in its evocation of finality. This metaphor for ultimate conflict probably gets its name from Mount Megiddo, a scraggly hill on a great plain in northern Israel where, as many conservative Protestants believe, a great battle will end history's most terrible war. According to scenarios drawn from prophetic passages in Daniel, Ezekiel, Zechariah and Revelation, a number of nations, including Babylon (read Iraq) and led by an evil Antichrist, will invade Israel during this conflict. But then the Son of God will return to halt the slaughter and, according to some...
Ultimately, Christian critics of the millenarians can argue that they are guilty of two errors. One is emulating Abbot Joachim's egotistic heresy: falsely assuming that the age in which they live is unique. The other mistake -- an undertone in some of the Armageddon literature but overt in much of the computerized End Days babbling -- is to interpret events in the gulf with eschatological glee, as if the real message were "Hey, fellas, our troubles are almost over." No one has the right to that assumption. History unfurls as God's secret, wrote the French novelist Leon Bloy...