Chamblee54

There is a phrase these days, existential threat. The birthday of Elvis might be a good day to consider it. The existential threat to Elvis, was Elvis.
The phrase existential threat today means a threat to the existence of a nation or a people. This means a war or movement that could eliminate a nation from existence. With nuclear weapons, a nation could indeed be totally eliminated…as could all of mankind.
One country that regularly talks about existential threats is Israel. A geographically small territory, Israel could indeed be wasted by a few well placed nukes. There is concern about Iran getting the bomb. This concept…Iran with nuclear weapons…is probably the number one use of the phrase “existential threat”.
The philosophical movement called existentialism was first articulated in the aftermath of World War Two. According to Wiktionary, existentialism is “A twentieth-century philosophical movement emphasizing the uniqueness of each human existence in freely making its self-defining choices, with foundations in the thought of Soren Kierkegaard (1813-55) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) and notably represented in the works of Karl Jaspers (1883-1969), Gabriel Marcel (1887-1973), Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80). “
PG is trying to make a connection between existentialist philosophy and the concept of the existentialist threat.