A Nuclear Weapon is a hugely powerful explosive device that generates its destructive force from nuclear reactions within. There are two types of Nuclear Weapon: the nuclear fission weapon or the more powerful nuclear fission/ nuclear fusion combination – both types release vast quantities of energy from small amounts of matter. Fission bombs are also known as Atomic Bombs while fission/fusion bombs are sometimes known as Hydrogen Bombs or Thermonuclear Bombs.
To give an impression of the destructive power of these weapons of mass destruction, a thermonuclear weapon weighing little more than 1,000 kg can produce an explosive force comparable to the detonation of more than 1 million tons of TNT (traditional explosive material). Thus, even a small nuclear device no larger than a traditional bomb could devastate an entire city from the combination of its blast, fire, and radiation fallout. Continue reading Chapter 17: Nuclear Weapons→
The Holocaust is the name given to the genocide (mass murder of a people) of approximately 6 million Jews during World War 2 – two thirds of the 9 million Jews living in Europe at the time. It was state-sponsored murder orchestrated by Adolph Hitler and his Nazi Party within Nazi Germany and its occupied territories. The Holocaust is perhaps the most shameful act humans have ever committed against other humans, and it all happened within the last century.
So how could this have happened? To even begin to understand, we need to look at the atmosphere in which Hitler’s Nazi Party formed, flourished and rose to power. Continue reading Chapter 16: Holocaust→
The Protestant Reformation was a major split in the western Christian Church in the 16th and 17th Centuries. Its influence is felt to this day as it essentially divided the European Christian nations into Catholic and non-Catholic countries.
There had been significant attempts to reform the Christian Church prior to the Reformation, but it was the German preacher Martin Luther’s protest – writing his Ninety-Five Theses in 1517 and nailing it to the door of the Catholic Church in Wittenberg, Germany – that generated enough momentum for the widely-held religious discontent in Europe at the time to turn into a full breakaway movement that split the Church. Continue reading Chapter 15: Protestant Reformation→
Jesus Christ is one of the most contentious figures in history and gaining an objective understanding of him will be a crucial stage of the World Peace Adventure. He is the central figure within the religion of Christianity, and also revered within the religion of Islam as the prophet Isa. Christianity holds Jesus to be the Son of God made real on Earth and the ‘Messiah’ (saviour) prophesised within the ancient Jewish religious texts that Christians now call the Old Testament. The word ‘Christ’ is Greek for ‘the anointed one’, a translation of the Hebrew word Messiah. The following is the generally accepted Christian consensus around the life of Jesus: Continue reading Chapter 14: Jesus Christ→
Wikipedia describes World Government as “the notion of a single common political authority for all of humanity.” Many people commonly mistake the United Nations as being a form of World Government. In truth the U.N. is limited to a mostly advisory role. Its stated purpose is to foster co-operation between existing national governments, not to exert any kind of authority over them. As at 2014, there is no worldwide military, executive, legislature, judiciary, or constitution that has jurisdiction over the entire planet.
The concept of having an all-encompassing ‘World Government’ dates all the way back to Ancient Greek Philosophy and was picked up in practical terms with the formation of the Roman Empire (the first of many regional empires which would make a tilt for global control over the centuries, none of which ultimately succeeded). Continue reading Chapter 13: World Government→
The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict is the ongoing, wide-ranging, often violent struggle between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs centred around each side’s right to live in – and claim as their own – the Middle East region often referred to as The Holy Land; in particular the ancient city of Jerusalem and its surroundings, which hold high religious significance for all three Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam).
Although the state of Israel has only technically existed since shortly after World War 2, this conflict forms part of a much longer running struggle between Jews and Arabs for dominance in the region and sadly shows little sign of being resolved any time soon. The conflict is currently being waged by the Israeli government on one side and the two parties of Palestinian opposition, Fatah and Hamas, on the other. A two-state solution is generally agreed to be the best and only way forward, but significant disagreement on the detail of achieving that has for decades prevented this solution becoming a reality. Resolving this difficult conflict will be one of the major barriers to surmount if humans are ever to actually achieve World Peace. Let’s try to break it down. Hold tight, it’s complicated. Continue reading Chapter 12: Israeli-Palestinian Conflict→
The Space Race was the name given to the Cold War ‘competition’ between Super-Power rivals America (the United States) and Russia/ the Soviet Union lasting roughly 1955-1972 for supremacy in the new concept of space-flight capability. Victory in the race was seen by both sides as vital both for their national security and as proof of their ideological superiority. It was the Soviets that launched the first satellite (Sputnik) into space in 1957, but the US is largely acknowledged as having ‘won’ the Space Race by landing the first man on the Moon in 1969.
The origins of the Space Race began at the end of World War 2 as the US and the USSR tried to position themselves as the world’s most powerful nation in a post-war world. Both countries engaged in a missile and rocket-based arms race and competed to seize key rocket technology and personnel from Nazi Germany at war’s end to advance this. The US managed to capture the idealistic young German scientist Wernher Von Braun who had dreams of sending rockets into space; Sergei Korolev was Von Braun’s Russian equivalent and, although they never met, the two scientists also became locked in an intense individual battle for supremacy. Continue reading Chapter 11: Space Race→
The Soviet War in Afghanistan (1979-1989) was the final ‘proxy war’ contested between America and Russia during the Cold War, where neither side directly fought each other but they supported opposing sides. The fighting itself took place between the Soviet-led socialist PDPA (People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan) and a rag-tag collection of insurgent groups known as the Mujahideen (trained in Pakistan, but said to have been financially and militarily aided by the US, UK and Saudi Arabia).
There were no ‘winners’ as such in this war – involvement contributed to the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union, and the
consequences of the US helping to arm the Mujahideen are still being felt to this day. Hundreds of thousands of Afghan civilians were killed during the hostilities and millions more fled to the neighbouring countries of Pakistan and Iran. So how did this war even begin, and why did Afghanistan become embroiled in the US-USSR ideological struggle? Continue reading Chapter 10: Soviet War in Afghanistan→
World War 2 was the most deadly conflict in human history, a global war in the mid-20th Century lasting from 1939-1945 (though some regional conflicts that became part of World War 2 started earlier than that). The conflict involved the vast majority of nations in the world, who essentially divided up into two camps knows as the Allies and the Axis. The major participants of World War 2 were in a state of ‘total war’, putting their entire economic, industrial and scientific capabilities behind the war effort and blurring the distinction between military and civilian resource.
Between 50 million and 85 million people died, including 6 million
Jews in the genocide known as The Holocaust, mass Japanese war atrocities against the Chinese, a German-Russian bloodbath on the eastern front, the bombing of civilian population centres by all sides, and around 250,000 killed in the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the first and thus far only use of nuclear weapons in war. World War 2 was the darkest period of human history, and it is all so staggeringly recent. So how did it happen? Continue reading Adventure 9: World War Two→
Catholicism is the term that has come to describe the Christian traditions of the Roman Catholic Church under the episcopal jurisdiction of the Pope, Bishop of Rome. Catholicism literally means “according to the whole” (from Greek) and the term became interchangeable with Christianity in the centuries after the death of Jesus Christ when describing his followers.
Although the Roman Catholic Church (which at 1.2. billion followers comprises 50% of all Christians worldwide – around one sixth of the world’s total population) would dispute alternate usage, the term ‘Catholicism’ is also used by a number of other churches that believe
they can trace their lineage back to the very earliest days of the Church. Continue reading Adventure 8: Catholicism→
