For example, China’s Yellow River winds toward the sea like an elevated highway. Alongside its banks, dikes protect the peasants living on the plain below. But in times of flood these walls sometimes burst, turning the plain into a sea of terror. Over the centuries some ten million Chinese have died in floods, making the Yellow River the cause of more human suffering than any other natural feature on earth!

Just five years earlier, a disaster occurred that some believe was more devastating than the dropping of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki! Commenting on a report from SIPRI (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute), the magazine New Scientist said: “It was the dynamiting of the Huayuankow dyke of the Yellow River, which stopped Japanese troops advancing through China in 1938, but which also drowned several hundred thousand of China’s own people.” Millions more were left homeless.