Waiting for Armageddon is, in a curious way, one of the morbidly titillating preoccupations of our time. Novelist Walker Percy has written of "the old authentic thrill of the Bomb and ... the heart's desire of the alienated man to see vines sprouting through the masonry." Since the days of the bomb-shelter boom in the early '60s, nuclear holocaust has receded a bit in the apocalyptic imagination, replaced now by visions of economic collapse—industry's furnaces grown cold, fleets of cars broken down, and frenzied looters rampaging in the street.
But it is instructive to note that the Doomsday mind, like...