Nuclear Fear: The Prologue, Part 2

Summary

Atomic Hobo – Nuclear War Podcast

Episode: "Nuclear Fear: The Prologue, Part 2"

Host: Julie McDowall
Release Date: April 1, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode continues the wide-angled prologue on the cultural and psychological dimensions of nuclear fear. Julie McDowall (through narration) unpacks how the nuclear threat has seeped into every facet of modern life—from policy and war planning, to film, music, fiction, and even the way we imagine our future and shelter from existential threats. The episode delineates how our responses have ranged from pride and celebration to horror and fatalism, ultimately explaining why the shadow of nuclear dread never quite lifts, even in brief moments of apparent peace.

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Key Sections and Insights

1. Living on Luck: The Ever-Present Threat

[02:35]

• The modern world, since 1945, has “got by on luck” rather than solely on policy or deterrence.
• Nuclear weapons engender both fear and a twisted necessity: “We hate the nuclear bomb. We fear makes us scared and sick, but we can't get by without it.”
• Quote (Martin Amis, 1987, on “The Fate of the Earth”):

  "Nuclear weapons are a sickness for which there is no cure. Because if you eradicate the disease by banning the bomb, then you're left defenseless against its inevitable resurgence. ... The only remedy is the sickness itself." [05:12]

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2. Atomic Optimism: The Bomb’s Arrival and Its Allure

[06:00]

• The aftermath of Trinity (1945) and Hiroshima—atomic energy as symbol of American triumph, sex appeal, and modernity.
• Las Vegas embraced atomic testing, using mushroom clouds as mid-century spectacle:

  “Why not ogle Miss Atomic Blast, who was crowned at the beauty pageant at El Rancho Las Vegas in 1952, then enjoy an atomic cocktail on the roof terrace of the Fremont whilst watching the mushroom clouds bloom on the horizon?” [07:58]

• Anecdote: Casinos had special rules for dice knocked loose by nuclear test tremors.

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3. Dawning Horror: From Celebration to Anxiety

[11:05]

• Russian bomb (1949) ended the US monopoly, accelerating arms buildup and dimming pop culture’s atomic gleam.
• The birth of the hydrogen bomb (“a weapon of genocide”) led to cultural anxiety:
  • Hollywood and Japanese cinema responded; “Godzilla” as literal manifestation of atomic terror.
  • Films like “Them!” (1954)—radiated ants symbolize uncontrollable consequences.

Notable Moment

• The Castle Bravo disaster ([13:55]): A hydrogen bomb test goes awry, harming Japanese fishermen and exposing the wider terror of fallout:

  “This new bomb, the hydrogen bomb, was not simply a bigger version of the original atomic bomb. This one came with the threat of fallout, an invisible killer which could float and drift on the wind…” [15:20]

• Fallout’s impact on health drove fears home; baby teeth surveyed for radioactive contamination.

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4. Red Scare, Paranoia, and Popular Imagination

[18:03]

• Soviet advances (e.g., Sputnik) and potential for missile strikes obliterate sense of geographical safety.
• Paranoia filters into pop culture—"The Twilight Zone: The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" as a parable for Cold War suspicion.
• Proliferating technology means nowhere, and no one, is safe from possible attack.

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5. Accidents, Near Misses, and Madness of the System

[20:32]

• Catalogue of nuclear accidents and near-misses in both US and Soviet arsenals.
• Special Pentagon terms for such mishaps: “bent spear,” “broken arrow,” “empty quiver.”
• Stanislav Petrov’s heroism ([21:55]):

  “The luck of having Cam Petrov on duty that night. So the sheen had worn off and the bomb was no longer a fabulous invention representing victory, science and progress. It was now a device threatening sickness, death and maybe even the end of all things.”

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6. Shelter Craze and Regression

[23:03]

• Shelter mania (JFK era) reflected primal impulses; critics saw it as regression to the Stone Age.
• H.G. Wells already anticipated the “subterranean” consequences of perpetual sheltering in “The Time Machine.”
• Culture mirrors these fears—cf. “The Shelter” (Twilight Zone), “Ladybug Ladybug,” “Threads,” “The Day After,” and novels like “Brother in the Land.”

  “Following the rules gets you nowhere in a nuclear war, popular culture warned.” [28:40]

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7. Nuclear Winter: The Ultimate Futility of Preparation

[24:02]

• Carl Sagan and TTAPS introduce the world to nuclear winter ([24:02]), shifting the discourse from immediate blast survival to planetary catastrophe.
• Sagan’s public campaign:

  “In a major exchange, more than a billion people would instantly be killed. But the long term consequences could be much worse.”

• Nuclear winter makes individual sheltering seem pointless—emerging years later only to face “a twilit world of cold, cancer, and famine.”
• Popular culture responds with films (“Threads,” “The Day After”) and graphic novels (“When the Wind Blows”).

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8. The Dream of ‘Limited’ Nuclear War—and Its Undoing

[27:12]

• Military planners flirted with “limited nuclear war,” especially as US vs. USSR missile deployments saturated Europe.
• Nuclear winter theory destroyed the illusion of safety—even those not directly targeted would suffer.
• “Nothing unites like nuclear Windsor… This horror helped nudge us towards peace.” [29:20]
• Reagan’s ideological shift, Soviet disasters, and Gorbachev’s openness paved the way for détente, arms reductions, and, symbolically, the fall of the Berlin Wall.

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9. Residual Fear: 9/11 and the Persistence of Nuclear Dread

[32:50]

• Atomic habits die hard—after the 9/11 attacks, people defaulted to nuclear scenarios (e.g., lowering the window blind on a passenger jet to protect from the atomic flash).
• Cold War civil defence frameworks (bunkers, emergency protocols) were immediately repurposed.

Notable Quote

• Condoleezza Rice:

  “My kind of Cold War nuclear war training kicked in... If our military increased its readiness level, the Russians would see it and they would increase theirs, and pretty soon you get into a dangerous standoff."

• The mutual cooperation between the US and Russia in that moment symbolizes a rare, hopeful post-Cold War moment.

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10. Cultural Aftershocks: Post-Apocalyptic Imagination

[36:23]

• Even after the Cold War, nuclear fear didn’t die—it mutated.
• Literature that explores the farther future of nuclear catastrophe:
  • “The Chrysalids” (John Wyndham): Post-nuclear intolerance, mutation, and religious fundamentalism.
  • “Riddley Walker” (Russell Hoban): Ruined, devolved civilization cycles back to gunpowder and apocalypse—“history will plod in the same worn, ruinous circle.”
  • Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road”: An unnamed apocalypse evokes every existential fear; nuclear dread becomes amorphous.
• The post-Cold War era’s “blockbusters”—from asteroids to zombies—function as substitute apocalypses.

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11. Return of the Bomb: Russia–Ukraine War and Renewed Anxiety

[40:13]

• Recent history (after Russian invasion of Ukraine) prompts a sudden, uncomfortable revival of nuclear anxiety.
• Governments once again issue advice on shelters, evacuation, and stockpiling.
• The enduring nature of nuclear threat:

  “The bomb never went away. It dwindled but didn't die.”

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Memorable Quotes

• On the paradox of the bomb:

  "We hate the nuclear bomb. We fear makes us scared and sick, but we can't get by without it." [05:00]

• On cultural adaptation:

  “All we can do is turn to fiction and song and cinema and express our massive fear and tiny hopes in the land of the imagination, where there is nothing that cannot be said.” [06:40]

• On atomic Las Vegas:

  “Nuclear Vegas was glamour for some, but for others it was a disease, a nightmare, a paradise for the misbegotten.” [09:45]

• On the futility of shelter:

  “When the radiation had dwindled to a tolerable level, you could pop your head out once again. You would be emerging into a twilit world of cold, cancer and famine.” [25:15]

• On the cyclical nature of destruction:

  “History will plod in the same worn, ruinous circle, the Stone Age towards tools, towards gunpowder, towards enlightenment, towards industry before we blow it all up…” [38:36]

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Conclusion

“Nuclear Fear: The Prologue, Part 2” is a sweeping, evocative meditation on how the bomb has haunted humanity—not just as a weapon, but as an agent of our imaginations, anxieties, and social arrangements. Julie McDowall’s narration weaves history with pop culture, politics with personal anecdotes, and literary insight with chilling statistics, maintaining a thoughtful yet deeply human tone.
The episode ends on a somber, unresolved note: nuclear dread recedes but never disappears, always ready to resurface as world events shift. The question is not whether we can banish the bomb, but how we live alongside this ultimate uncertainty.

Transcript

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As I write this, in the hot summer of 2025, there has not yet been a nuclear war. We've had nuclear attacks and Nuclear scares, nuclear tests and nuclear threats, and nuclear accidents, although never the big one. But I believe it will happen one day. Because since the summer of 1945, when the thing was born out in the sands of the desert, we have got by on luck. Propped up by nuclear deterrence, certainly, but we've mainly coasted on flimsy, wobbling, spectacularly audacious luck. But it will happen one day. Until that moment, we think about how it will be. We agonize over it, we dread it. And musicians, directors, authors and actors have obsessed over the thing too, and used it to produce nuclear stained popular culture, some of which has been magnificent and some of which has changed history. Throughout the Cold War, nuclear pop culture has managed to get to number one in the charts, made Ronald Reagan depressed, got itself banned by the BBC, won an Oscar, was debated in Parliament, left a country sleepless, provoked talk of mass suicide has been set back in the swinging 60s or 2000 years hence, up in the frozen north of Canada or down on the beaches of Australia. Made in grim black and white film, or as a softly hued cartoon. Some of it has been deadly serious and some just plain silly. But it all tells a strange story of how it is to live under the ludicrous threats of nuclear war. And it is indeed ludicrous. We hate the nuclear bomb. We fear makes us scared and sick, but we can't get by without it. In 1987, Martinimus said, after reading the best selling book about nuclear weapons, the Fate of the Earth. At last I knew what was making me feel so sad. Sick. But nuclear weapons are a sickness for which there is no cure. Because if you eradicate the disease by banning the bomb, then you're left defenseless against its inevitable resurgence. And if one country finds a vaccine, but only distributes it to its own population, then that would terrify and enrage the others who may feel that possession of that same disease is their only protection. It may seem that the only defense against the sickness is to acquire more vials of that hideous potion. The only remedy is the sickness itself. Yes, it's ludicrous, but we are stuck with them, even though they threaten everything and everyone. So how can we respond to such a ludicrous situation? If politics and logic and reason won't touch the sides and activists just chant the same phrases and march the same routes, then all we can do is turn to fiction and song and cinema and express our massive fear and tiny hopes in the land of the imagination, where there is nothing that cannot be said. When the bomb was born, in July 1945, popular culture responded with pride and glee. This was the ultimate in American exceptionalism, even though the thing had been created by a rainbow of international scientists, including Brits, Hungarians, Germans, Austrians, Ukrainians, Poles, Czechs, Italians and Russians. And the word atomic was pinned to anything that was new, gleaming and sexy in the post war era. Why not ogle misatomic blasts? Who was crowned at the beauty pageant at El Rancho Las Vegas in 1952, then enjoy an atomic cocktail on the roof terrace of the Fremont whilst watching the mushroom clouds bloom on the horizon? The proximity of America's nuclear tests at the Nevada Test site, just 65 miles north of Vegas, was a source of pride for the city and it was folded into the dodgy allure of the upstart desert town. But practicality was also involved. Many Vegas casinos displayed signs saying that if any rumble from a nearby nuclear test caused the dice to jump free from the table, then the house's decision would be final. If you're tired of the tables and wanted to watch the tests, a fine view could be had from the tall windows of the Desert Inn's famous Sky Room. Nuclear tests often occurred at dawn, so crowds would pack the Sky Room and drink and carouse all night long, calling for more wine and song before greasing the mushroom cloud. As morning broke, one reveller recalls the unnatural atmosphere as they waited for the flash. They sang as if they were on the Queen Mary and it was going down. LOUD DESPERATE VOICES Nuclear Vegas was glamour for some, but for others it was a disease, a nightmare, a paradise for the misbegotten. Pop songs in the early Cold War also celebrated the supposed dazzle and sexiness of the atomic the secret of all that fabulous, constrained power which America and others had cracked and which had won the war and would now secure the peace and would bring cheap energy and cures for disease, whilst reminding everyone who was top dog in the new post war world. But then the Russians ruined the party by exploding their own atomic bomb. In 1948, America no longer had a nuclear monopoly and so felt obliged to take the next step up the nuclear ladder by developing the so called super the hydrogen bomb. A bomb denounced by many nuclear scientists, including the great Oppenheimer, as a weapon of genocide. This dimmed the sparkly atomic enthusiasm and popular culture was suddenly no longer keen to associate the bomb with sex, cocktails and bikinis. Instead, a slew of films was released which expressed our rising fears about the bomb and our ascent up this shaky nuclear ladder, especially when we didn't know what lay at the top. Had science gone too far? Did our puny boffins know what they were dealing with? Had something awful hatched in the desert in July 1945 and we, too giddy with excitement and victory, had failed to control it? Had we created a monster? Japanese cinema took that literally with the creation of Godzilla. A creature rose from the depths of the ocean by nuclear explosions. Cinematic monsters also stalked the land in New Mexico. In them, 1954, where the radiation from nuclear tests transforms ordinary ants into monsters, tentative and frightened questions were being asked about the bomb, and popular culture offered possible answers that politicians, ensnared in the politics of the Cold War, were unable to give. Then came Castle Bravo. This was a 1954American nuclear test of that dreadful new hydrogen bomb out in the Pacific. The boffins got their calculations wrong, and the bomb was three times more powerful than predicted, throwing lethal fallout well beyond the exclusion zone. Radioactive ash soon began to patter down onto the deck of the Japanese lucky dragon fishing boat, falling like crunchy snow. The fishermen began to sicken, so they pulled in their nets and headed for shore. Several men fell ill and one died. The fact that the crew were Japanese added a particular pain, and it became an international incident, alerting the public to the horror of nuclear fallout. This new bomb, the hydrogen bomb, was not simply a bigger version of the original atomic bomb. This one came with the threat of fallout, an invisible killer which could float and drift on the wind and find you even as you sail your tiny boat in the midst of a vast ocean, and it can follow you home like a spirit which has possessed you and kill you. The fear of this new and invisible killer appeared in the 1957 novel on the Beach, later made into a 1959 film with Gregory Peck and Eva Gardner, where the population of Australia wait helplessly for the slow, drifting arrival of fallout from an apocalyptic nuclear war in the Northern hemisphere. One by one, the innocent countries of the south are snuffed out as a lethal fallout smothers the globe. Coming for Australia at last, fallout made all those Vegas atomic cocktails and beauty pageants seem a bit silly now, especially as scientists in Missouri began collecting American children's baby teeth so they could track how much fallout was making its way into our bodies. Nothing felt safe anymore. Even children's bones and teeth were being affected even as they grew up seemingly safe and sturdy in America, with two oceans to protect them from an enemy. And if you couldn't keep your kids safe, did safety exist? As the Soviet Union advanced in the nuclear arms race, so Americans were consumed by the Red Scare, and it provoked films and fiction about the fear of communist invasion and infiltration. The launch of the Soviet Sputnik satellite in 1957 shook American confidence, proving that the enemy was surging ahead in the space race. But it also proved that they had the ability to launch intercontinental ballistic missiles. Suddenly, those vast oceans were no protection against attack or invasion. The enemy could get you. He could already be here. Can you be sure that your neighbour is who he claims to be? Brilliant episodes of the Twilight Zone, like the Monsters are due on Maple street capture this paranoia which sees residents of a leafy American street descend into violence and hysteria when they suspect one of their number might be an alien. The nuclear arms race spurred both sides on, and advancing weapons technology now meant the nuclear attack could reach you anywhere on the planet, whether via blast, fire or fallout. And with that knowledge came fears that the technology might run out of control. Puny man had created the means to extinguish life on Earth. Now could puny man control it? As nuclear proliferation spread, so did the rate of accidents and near misses. A fire in a nuclear missile silo in Arkansas in 1965 killed 53 men. In 1980, an explosion deep in a nuclear missile silo again in Arkansas killed one man, ejected the warhead and destroyed the silo. In other incidents, the Americans accidentally dropped nuclear bombs on Spain, Greenland and North Carolina. And through simple luck, there were no resulting nuclear explosions, although there was widespread radioactive contamination. And in the Spanish incident, one hydrogen bomb remained stubbornly missing and was only recovered three months later, deep in the Mediterranean. There have been so many accidents and errors with nuclear weaponry that the Pentagon developed its own terminology for these incidents bent spear, broken arrow and worst of all, empty quiver. Behind the Iron Curtain, an officer with the Soviet Air Defence Forces called Stanislav Petrov, later to be nicknamed the man who Saved the World, avoided plunging the world into nuclear war. In 1983, when the early warning system kept telling him most insistently that the Americans had launched ICBMs at the Soviet Union. Had he followed protocol and alerted his superiors to this incoming attack, the Soviets may well have launched theirs in imagined retaliation and all hell broken loose. Things can fall apart. The centre might not hold again. Luck saved us, the luck of having the Cam Petrov on duty that night. So the sheen had worn off and the bomb was no longer a fabulous invention representing victory, science and progress. It was now a device threatening sickness, death and maybe even the end of all things. And so, rather than toasting and boasting and Glorying in it. We sought to hide from it. Taking shelter is one of the most elemental and basic things man can do. We did it back in the early days, scratching around in caves. And now here we were doing the same in the 20th century. Nothing changes. Hiding from the saber toothed tiger, sheltering from the cold, ducking out of the storm. A zillion years have passed and yet we still have the need to curl up and shelter and inside the earth. But that's no way to live. When the shelter craze took hold in America in the early 60s, with JFK himself urging people to build a fallout shelter in their basement or under the garden, many people declared this was cowardly and un American. It was regressive, taking us back to the Stone Age. Even before the bomb's creation, the prophetic H.G. wells, who foresaw versions of aerial bombardment and atomic warfare in his novels the War in the air, 1908 and the shape of Things to Come, had shown in the time machine, 1895, what might happen to a civilization who retreat below the earth. His novel shows the future human race has split into two versions. The Eloi, graceful children of the upper world who toss flowers and clap the little hands. And then the Morlocks quote the bleached, obscene nocturnal things who live underground, one strand of humanity useless, the other brutish. Were these the alternatives facing humanity should nuclear war come? Both were dreadful. Popular culture had plenty to say on what might become of us and what the incessant need for shelter from the nuclear storm might do to us. The Twilight Zone episode the Shelter showed a citizen who was orderly and responsible. He followed government advice and built a fallout shelter for his family according to official instruction. But when the siren wails, his terrified and unprepared neighbors hammer on the door, begging for entry. When he refuses, they turn into a mob, arming themselves so they might batter their way in. We see similar in Ladybug, Ladybug 1963, a film based on a true story about an elementary school in California who received false alarm of an incoming nuclear attack. They activated the evacuation protocol, which was to send the frightened children running for home in the hope that they'd make it back to mother before the bomb dropped. The film is a kind of Cold War Lord of the Flies, showing the kids turning brutal in their fight for the perceived safety of home and shelter space, and excluding those they dislike. And in the 80s, the two mammoth nuclear films of the decade Threads and the Day After. Both show responsible homeowners who have carefully followed civil defence advice and prepared shelters being either shot or beaten to death by those who have none. Well, the novel Brother in the Land shows shelter owners, nicknamed badgers by the resentful survivors above ground being smoked out of their shelters and murdered for their small supply of tins and batteries. Following the rules gets you nowhere in a nuclear war, popular culture warned. But for the obedient and the dutiful who had studied the plans, consulted the booklets, and built their own little fallout shelter beneath the house, a nasty shock was coming.

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In October 1983, a magazine article appeared which made all these shelters, all the millions of tons of concrete and tin stew and all the hideous chemical toilets and scratchy blankets made them stupidly redundant. Carl Sagan was a trendy scientist who had captivated millions with his 1980 TV series Cosmos and who wowed the crowds at conferences around the world. But his celebrity status was no distraction from crucial research. As Part of the TTAPS group of scientists, they stunned the world with their distressing theory of nuclear winter. Research on forest fires and volcanoes had shown how soot and ash could drift and hang in the atmosphere, blocking out sunlight. This had been noted as far back as 1816, the infamous so called year without a summer, when it was abnormally cold, crops failed and there were spectacular sunsets, all of which was apportioned to volcanic activity in what is now modern day Indonesia. Computer modeling was now able to demonstrate what may happen with even bigger volcanic eruptions, such as the so called super eruption, which is apparently due for Yellowstone or Tokyo. The TTAPS group applied this same modeling to a nuclear war scenario and asking what would happen if cities across the globe endured firestorms and if oil refineries were also targeted in the war. The results were horrifying. It was suggested that such quantities of soot and ash might be lofted into the troposphere and would hang undisturbed in that layer by any weather and would block sunlight from reaching earth on the ground. This would result in a catastrophic cooling of the temperature, failure of crops and subsequent global famine. There would be an increased risk of cancer. Many who did not starve might freeze. This was nuclear winter and it made your little fallout shelter futile because when the radiation had dwindled to a tolerable level, you could pop your head out once again. You would be emerging into a twilit world of cold, cancer and famine. The TTAPS group had been due to reveal their findings in the eminent journal Science. But Carl Sagan, with perhaps one eye on making the news, couldn't resist preempting the scholarly article with a piece in the hugely popular Sunday magazine Parade. They put the story on the front cover in ominous red and black and said, would nuclear war be the end of the world? In a major exchange, more than a billion people would instantly be killed. But the long term consequences could be much worse. Sagan's colleagues may have been irked that he went to the popular press, but he achieved his goal in getting people talking and worrying about nuclear winter. And popular culture was quick to respond. Because which filmmaker or writer could fail to be moved by this ultimate nightmare scenario? Threads 1984 was the first film to portray nuclear winter on screen, showing the survivors of the nuclear war years after the catastrophe, hacking at the dead ground, trying to coax crops out of the earth. They gouge at the earth under filthy grey skies and are draped in cloth and wearing ski masks to protect their eyes from the UV rays streaming down from the stricken sky. Famine causes the population to drop to medieval levels and Ruth, the main character, dies exhausted with her eyes bleached white with cataracts the day after 1983. A big budget American nuclear war film had been released the previous year before the news of the nuclear winter theory had broken, so its main character, Dr. Oakes, ends his days in weirdly inappropriate sunshine. Jim and Hilda blogs, the naive elderly couple from Raymond Briggs graphic novel when the Wind Blows also enjoy some post nuclear sun setting up deck chairs in their garden after the bomb drops. But this lethal sunbathing is absent from the film version which appeared in 1986. They go for a walk in the garden after the bomb drops, but the sky hangs low over them, bleak, heavy and grey. Nuclear winter threatened to eliminate the future in the 1950s and again in the early 80s, there had been talk from strategists and politicians of so called limited nuclear war. The naive and dangerous belief that such a conflict could be fought using small nukes being restricted to the battlefield, carefully avoiding cities and civilians. Keep it nice and controlled, chaps. Stick to the rules and there's no reason why it need escalate into a global apocalyptic conflict. But concerns about the fog of war and of human nature itself quashed this idea. It might have seemed plausible in the 1950s when the Americans were the only country to possess these small tactical nuclear weapons, and so they could dabble in such ideas with no fear of the Soviets responding. And it arose again under Reagan when technology had vastly improved targeting and when it seemed from the American point of view to be a solid option for stalling a Red army advance across Western Europe brackets. Western Europeans were less enthused as it would be their land which would become the battlefield when the Soviets and Americans started lobbing their little nukes. Fears that an east west showdown, either limited or apocalyptic, might take place solely on European soil were sparked when the Soviets began deploying their SS20 missiles in 1976. These were intermediate range weapons, meaning they could not reach any American city. They were aimed solely at Western Europe to maintain the delicate balance of terror. The USA sent Pershing and cruise missiles to the uk, to West Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Belgium. A nuclear war could now be fought, which in theory need not directly touch America. But nuclear winter changed all of that, because if this limited nuclear war did break out, America might well avoid the missiles but couldn't dodge the winter. The theory had united every living soul on Earth. NATO spoke of its collective responsibility and the communist countries spoke of their comradeship. But Nothing unites like nuclear Windsor. If this theory was accurate and who dared test it, then the whole Earth would be stricken. Even those in the southernmost tip of British Tierra del Fuego. Even the Aussies, safe in the sunny down Under. Even the penguins tottering around the crystal Antarctic. Horrible unity at last. This horror helped nudge us towards peace. Ronald Reagan, who had exacerbated much of the nuclear tension of the early 80s with his inflammatory language, military build up, belief in the inevitability of biblical Armageddon and his destabilizing Star wars scheme, suddenly changed his tone. He began reaching out to the Soviets to find ways of avoiding nuclear war. The Soviets were contending with some mid-80s horrors of their own, such as Chernobyl and the Armenian earthquake, which had shown the population how rotten the Soviet system was. And this compelled them to look outwards for help. This, paired with their new and receptive young leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, led to progress conferences, cosy chats with Reagan and arms reduction treaties. Things were looking brighter. The Wall fell, the Soviet Union followed and the threat of nuclear war seemed to dwindle. Dwindled, but didn't die. On the morning of 9, 11 passengers on a flight from Chicago to Orlando heard the captain say they were making an emergency landing. Due to a national emergency, all airspace in the United States has been shut down, he announced. Rick Grayson was on the flight with his teenage daughter, and his first action on hearing those words was to reach across her seat and lower the window blind. I guess I was expecting incoming nukes. I wanted to protect her from the flash, he said. In this father's imagination, the only thing severe enough to merit the closing of all airspace was nuclear war. What else could pull all the planes to the ground? Of course, a unique terror was taking place, but thoughts still turned to nuclear war. To express the horror of that day, the military and emergency workers turned to disaster plans which had been drawn up for responding to nuclear attack. And top politicians headed to bunkers which had been built to shelter them in a nuclear war. And in a rare point of light that day, Condoleezza Rice contacted Moscow because, as she describes it, my kind of Cold War nuclear war training kicked in. And I knew that we were worried about something called a spiral of alerts. If our military increased its readiness level, the Russians would see it and they would increase theirs, and pretty soon you get into a dangerous standoff. So I thought I'd better call the Russians. I talked to President Putin and I explained to him that we were raising our alert levels. He said I know we're bringing our alert levels down. We're canceling our exercises. Is there anything else we can do? And I thought, the Cold War is really over. Perhaps the Cold War was indeed over. Some argue it never ended. Others say we are now in Cold War too. Either way, nuclear fear is back. Once again, we are aware of the bomb and afraid of the bomb. And again, governments are issuing civil defence pamphlets on stockpiling, evacuation and taking shelter. The bomb never went away. It dwindled but didn't die. As I mentioned at the beginning, we simply cannot get rid of it. So here we are again with our fingers crossed. You can't blame those who danced on the Berlin Wall or popped champagne in Wenceslas Square. They were anticipating a brighter future and pop culture was right there with them. Bibi and the Stones in Berlin and David Hasselhoff in a flashing leather jacket singing by the smashed wall about freedom. But there were others who had never been tricked into seeing a happy future. Back in 1955, the British Science fiction writer John Wyndham Robert wrote the Chrysalids, which showed a future society ruined physically and morally by nuclear war. It set 1,000 years in the future after the nuclear holocaust has left the land devastated, with stretches of the shore fused by the heat into inky black glass. And with people, plants and animals suffering terrible genetic deformities. Trees are misshapen and horses are monstrous. These differences are accepted. The mass of horses are put to good use in farming. But when deformity is discovered in a human being, it cannot be tolerated. The people have responded to the nuclear catastrophe by turning to religion, which seems to offer rules, stability and a comforting link with the innocent past. But instead of preaching love and tolerance, this religion is as gnarled as the trees. And one of its chief commandments is watch thou for the mutant. Any child born with a difference, something as simple as an extra tool is to be exterminated. The misshapen desire to be good and wholesome once again has created a society of intolerance and fear. In 1980 came the spectacularly weird novel Ridley Walker, set even further in the future, 2,000 years after nuclear war. The book is narrated by Ridley, a young boy wandering the wilderness of devastated Kent and speaking to the reader in a gnarled version of post nuclear English. Society has regressed to a new Stone Age, and Ridley and his companions hunt with spears and gather round the firelight to hear tales of the old days before the war. But Ridley is intelligent, precocious, and he asks questions, wondering especially about the ornate ruins of Canterbury Cathedral and how the broken arches in the crypt look like stone trees, and he wonders what the people of the old days were trying to do, and how might we recapture the wisdom and the magic they surely had? Unfortunately, others far less thoughtful than Ridley are trying to grope their way back to knowledge too, and one of them finds the secret of how to spark an explosion. Gunpowder has been rediscovered, suggesting the history will plod in the same worn, ruinous circle, the Stone Age towards tools, towards gunpowder, towards enlightenment, towards industry and then scientific splendor before we blow it all up and are left to stir through the ashes to find ourselves back in the Stone Age again. And so it goes. The end of the Cold War lined up roughly with the approach of the new millennium, and this gave artists the perfect excuse to drop the nuclear holocaust and turn to millenarian horrors instead. And so we got a spate of Hollywood blockbusters about asteroids, alien invasion, plague, zombies, volcanoes and climate change, while the finest novel of the post Cold War era, the Road by Cormac McCarthy 2006, offered us a vision of the end of the world without naming what was responsible for the cataclysm. It was a malleable Armageddon to feed every fear. Then, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the nuclear threat came roaring back. And how silly we felt.

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