No longer. Last week the Pentagon issued a new national defence strategy that put China and Russia above jihadism as the main threat to America. This week the chief of Britain’s general staff warned of a Russian attack. Even now America and North Korea are perilously close to a conflict that risks dragging in China or escalating into nuclear catastrophe.

As our special report this week on the future of war argues, powerful, long-term shifts in geopolitics and the proliferation of new technologies are eroding the extraordinary military dominance that America and its allies have enjoyed. Conflict on a scale and intensity not seen since the second world war is once again plausible. The world is not prepared.

The pressing danger is of war on the Korean peninsula, perhaps this year. Donald Trump has vowed to prevent Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s leader, from being able to strike America with nuclear-armed ballistic missiles, a capability that recent tests suggest he may have within months, if not already. Among many contingency plans, the Pentagon is considering a disabling pre-emptive strike against the North’s nuclear sites. Despite low confidence in the success of such a strike, it must be prepared to carry out the president’s order should he give it.

Even a limited attack could trigger all-out war. Analysts reckon that North Korean artillery can bombard Seoul, the South Korean capital, with 10,000 rounds a minute. Drones, midget submarines and tunnelling commandos could deploy biological, chemical and even nuclear weapons. Tens of thousands of people would perish; many more if nukes were used. Without America’s commitment to the international order and the hard power to defend it against determined and able challengers, the dangers will grow. If they do, the future of war could be closer than you think.

The clock which serves as a metaphor for how close humanity is to destroying the planet was moved forward by 30 seconds, to as near as it has ever been to the hour of the apocalypse. The last time the clock was at two minutes to midnight was in 1953 when the United States and Soviet Union were testing hydrogen bombs.

"In this year's discussions, nuclear issues took centre stage once again," said Rachel Bronson, president and CEO of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. She mentioned new testing by North Korea, an enhanced commitment to nuclear weapons in China, Pakistan and India, and "unpredictability" embodied by the US president in tweets and statements. She said: “The actions and policies of the nuclear-armed states are winding the Doomsday Clock towards midnight.

"We have been lucky to avoid conflict through intentional or accidental means, but recent posturing and the false alarms in Hawaii and Japan show our luck is about to run out if we don’t move quickly. A security based on luck is reckless and foolish; it’s exactly what the nuclear states have now."

The Doomsday Clock was created in 1947 and its time has changed 20 times since then, ranging from two minutes to midnight in 1953 to 17 minutes before midnight in 1991. Last year it moved from three minutes before midnight to two-and-a-half minutes. Beatrice Fihn, Executive Director of International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), said we are currently heading to catastrophe.

"And I think that really is the message," Trump told pool reporters who trailed him at each scheduled meeting at the gathering of bigwigs in the snowy Alpine town. Trump also renewed his public pitch for investors to pour money into the US. "It's been going really well. A lot of people are coming back to the United States. We are seeing tremendous investment," he said."And today's been a very exciting day, very great day and great for our country."   

Trump landed on Thursday in Switzerland, where his outsized personality and determination to push an "America First" agenda was upending the annual Davos conference. "Our economy is now booming and with all I am doing, will only get better… Our country is finally WINNING again!" he wrote. Trump's Commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, has warned new US trade actions could be coming.

But Alibaba CEO Jack Ma warned here: "Don't use trade as a weapon." He added: "It's so easy to launch a trade war, but it's so difficult to stop the disaster of this war." There is broad concern in European capitals that 2018 could be the year Trump's bark on trade turns into bite, as he considers punitive measures on steel and threatens to end the 90s-era North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico.

Why did water levels in these wells some 3,800 miles away from the earthquake's epicenter change? Vibrations that move through the earth called seismic waves are the culprit. Seismic waves are depicted by the upward and downward lines on seismographs used to detect earthquakes around the world.

"Water levels in wells respond to the seismic-wave induced expansion and contraction of the aquifer tapped by the well, in turn causing step or oscillatory fluid-pressure changes," the USGS says. The changes in groundwater levels are often seen hundreds, or even thousands, of miles away from an earthquake's epicenter.

After an 8.5 magnitude earthquake near Alaska in 1964 water level changes were reported at 716 wells in the United States, according to the USGS. Occasionally, changes can be extreme. A 5.2 magnitude northwest Pennsylvania temblor in 1998 rendered dry about 120 wells for local homes for about three months.

In recent years, this forum for Big Thought, aka the Munich Security Conference, has quietly become the event for the world’s great and the good. Its alter-ego, the World Economic Forum, held this week in the remote Alpine redoubt of Davos, grabs more media attention, with its coterie of Hollywood stars, Silicon Valley prominence and Russian oligarchs. Problem is, despite Davos’ lofty declarations of purpose, critics say there’s no real there, there.

“Munich is still the jewel in the crown of the international security conference circuit and the one that is guaranteed to make headlines,” said Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former Danish premier and NATO secretary-general who’s in Davos this week. “Munich is similar to Davos in many aspects: It’s a whirlwind of events and networking where the fringe is often just as interesting as the speeches in the main hall.”

​By rejecting Davos’ jet-set ostentation, however, Munich has made itself the thinking person’s preferred destination. “Munich is the place to go to hear bold policies announced, new ideas and approaches tested, old partnerships reaffirmed and new ones formed,” Biden, a regular since 1980, gushed while he was still US vice president. “Like no other global forum, today’s Munich connects European leaders and thinkers with their peers from across the world.”

The Munich Security Conference 2018 will take place from 16 to 18 February 2018

The 2018 Italian general election is due to take place on March 4, after the country’s Parliament was dissolved by President Sergio Mattarella in late December. The leader of Italy’s traditional far-right ‘Lega Nord’ party hopes that his ‘Italians first’ slogan will sway enough voters to land him in office. Salvini is betting on Italians’ anti-migrant sentiments to bring him to power as part of a center-right alliance led by Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia (Go Italy!).

Following Trump’s somewhat unexpected victory in the US elections, a number of anti-immigrant political parties in Europe have shot to unprecedented prominence. The leader of the National Front, the right-wing populist party in France, Marine Le Pen, came in second place during the presidential election in the country last year. The right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party also made big gains and entered parliament for the first time in its history with 12.6 percent of the vote in the German election.

She slammed “protectionism” and said that a hundred years after World War One leaders had “sleep-walked” into another catastrophe, with a resurgence of national democracy and a faltering of the European Union (EU). “Have we actually learned the lessons of history? We haven’t really,” she said, claiming the supranational projects that followed World War Two were fading. “We see populism on the rise, we see a polarising atmosphere, and a polarising state of affairs.”

Nations seeking to close their borders with physical barriers and guards are a large problem, she added. “Ever since the Roman Empire, ever since the Chinese Wall, we know that shutting ourselves off doesn’t help to protect your borders. You also need good cooperation with your neighbours, you need good agreements, valid agreements, that are respected.”

Comments, videos and test results posted asking "Who is Jesus?" The general response from Google Home is "I'm not sure how to help you with that." There's still no response from the Google company on why. "It's kinda scary, it's almost like Google has taken Jesus and God out of smart audio," Sams said. "First it started with schools." Google Home refers to Jesus Christ when asking about the Last Supper and even Saint Peter. And there's plenty of information on the prophet Muhammed, Buddha - even Satan.

Nashville resident Martin Collins says she thinks this feeds into a bigger problem. "They took prayer out of schools, they think just taking Jesus out of everything is politically correct these days and I think that's the stem of a lot of our problems," Collins said.

Collins has no doubt Google has purposefully programmed Jesus out of its audio speakers. "To keep from stepping on toes, political correctness," Collins said. "That seems to be more important these days than what's right and what's wrong."

While the series of cataclysmic activity has come in rapid succession, scientists say most of them occurred thousands of miles apart and there is nothing to suggest they are connected. "It's very unlikely that these things are related," William Yeck, a research geophysicist for the US Geological Survey, told ABC News on Tuesday.

Yeck said the Ring of Fire, which encompasses 452 volcanoes and where more than 80 percent of the world's largest earthquakes occur, is constantly active. The Ring of Fire stretches 25,000 miles. It goes from New Zealand up through Indonesia, the Philippines and Japan, and then across the Aleutian Islands and down the coasts of Alaska, Canada, the West Coast of the United States and all the way down to the tip of South America.

In addition to the volcanic eruption in Japan and the earthquake in Alaska, a magnitude 6.1 earthquake occurred off the southern coast of Java, Indonesia's mainland, on Tuesday. Also Tuesday, Mount Agung in Bali and Mount Mayon in the Philippines blew their tops, spewing red-hot lava and causing the evacuations of thousands of people.