After World War II, premillennialism reached an eschatological frenzy. Atomic weapons with incomprehensible destructive power and delivery systems left no place safe from the threat of thermonuclear annihilation. Israel was established as a Jewish state and successfully defended its territory during the ensuing decades.
Furthermore, the United States and the Soviet Union entered a Cold War; in evangelical circles, this was portrayed not as a geopolitical conflict but as an ideological struggle capitalism versus communism, democracy versus dictatorship, freedom versus slavery. And such themes pervaded the prophetic and apocalyptic literature that rolled off the evangelical presses in the 1960s through the 1980s.