Christ appeared alive on several occasions after the cataclysmic events of that first Easter.
It was quite a European war until 1917 when the Americans joined up. They don't have the same sense of the loss of innocence and the cataclysmic loss of life. A whole generation was wiped out.
The weapons were conceived and created by a small band of physicists and chemists they remain a cataclysmic threat to the whole of human society and the natural environment.
Failure is not a single cataclysmic event. You don't fail overnight. Instead failure is a few errors in judgement repeated every day.
With everything that is complex we learn. If you don't learn then it's an utter and abject failure. If you do learn and you're able to apply that to the next situation then you take away a measure of success.