Human imagination long ago pictured Hell, but it is only through recent skill that men have been able to give reality to what they had imagined. The human mind is strangely poised between the bright vault of Heaven and the dark pit of Hell. It can find satisfaction in the contemplation of either, and it cannot be said that either is more natural to it than the other.
Source： Bertrand Russell: Human Society in Ethics and Politics, 1954, part II: The Conflict of Passions, chapter 10: Prologue or Epilogue? n3
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Many nations and peoples have ideas and stories related to "heaven and hell." Events such as great famines or mass deaths caused by pathogens (such as the plague) can be described as hell on earth, but most of these are natural disasters rather than man-made ones. However, with the development of nuclear and biochemical weapons (so-called ABC weapons), even the extinction of all humankind is no longer confined to the realm of fantasy. For instance, weapons like the cobalt bomb are weapons of mass destruction that could wipe out all life on Earth--doomsday weapons that were once unimaginable.
Before World War I, no matter how powerful a ruler might have been, acts like ethnic cleansing were virtually impossible in practice. But today's superpower leaders, though restrained by global scrutiny and thus unlikely to carry out such actions, do in fact possess the capability (enormous military and economic power) to conduct ethnic cleansing. President Trump, for example, would not be able to behave so outrageously if he lacked such power. Without any power at all, no matter how loudly he shouted, Trump would be dismissed merely as a troublesome old man with delusions of grandeur.
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