Three years before 9/11, columnist and author Peggy Noonan wrote of "nuts with nukes"—dictators and terrorists to whom the normal processes of rational thinking don't apply.

"When you consider who is gifted [with the ability or means to acquire weapons of mass destruction] and crazed with rage . . . when you think of the terrorist places and the terrorist countries . . . who do they hate most? The Great Satan, the United States," she wrote (Forbes ASAP, November 1998).

In a January 2005 column she revived her phrase about "nuts with nukes," again commenting on how dangerous a world we inhabit. As if on cue, in early February the spokesman for Iran's powerful Supreme National Security Council, Ali Agha Mohammadi, vowed that it will never scrap its nuclear program, which it insists is for peaceful purposes.

Barely a week later, Iranian President Mohammad Khatami promised "a burning hell" for any aggressor against his country. Meanwhile, European Union negotiations with Iran to halt its nuclear work were at a standstill, and it appeared that the issue may go to the UN Security Council for possible sanctions against Iran.

Almost simultaneously, North Korea publicly stated that it possesses nuclear weapons and will not return to the six-nation talks aimed at shelving its nuclear-weapons plans. North Korea's foreign ministry said that it needed the nukes for self-protection against "gangsters" such as the United States and that "only powerful strength can protect [North Korea's] justice and truth."

A few days earlier, North Korea had threatened to turn U.S. bases "into a sea of fire" should war break out on the Korean peninsula, and to "thoroughly" wipe out those who would aid the United States—presumably South Korea and Japan, hosts of U.S. bases. While an estimated 1 to 2 million North Koreans have starved to death in the last decade, the paranoid dictatorship fields an army of almost 1.2 million troops, the fifth largest in the world.

No wonder Jesus Christ said of the time of the end: "For then there will be great distress, unequaled from the beginning of the world until now—and never to be equaled again. If those days had not been cut short, no one would survive . . ." (Matthew 24:21-22, New International Version).

To understand where these trends may be leading, request our free booklets Are We Living in the Time of the End? and The United States and Britain in Bible Prophecy. (Sources: Forbes ASAP, Associated Press, Reuters, WorldNetDaily.)