One evening in the early 1980s I responded to a friend's remark about the "arms race" by suggesting that it was simply not possible to think of nuclear war all of the time. My friend's rejoinder has stuck in my mind ever since: I do think of it all the time.
We were crossing a road in London, I remember, on our way to a local pub. We were talking about how that pub, as well as everything and everybody else we could see, might at any moment disappear in the flash of an atomic explosion. Rumour had it that a new kind of bomb was coming too, one that killed people but left buildings intact. Like so many other public houses in the UK, that pub did in fact disappear (the building has remained intact), while the local community it supported, and which supported it in turn, gradually adapted to the three-job, no-time-for-sleep (or talk) economy.
The reason I remember the exchange, however, may hinge less on our vision of disappearing cities (however realistic) than on the fact that nuclear Armageddon was on my friend's mind all the time. These words expressed a vulnerability I shared and which I think must have been universal, even if many people had no words for the scarring pressure bearing down on their everyday thoughts and feelings. Forty years before that conversation the chief source of anxiety had been war, too. Is there a similar anxiety forty years on? The answer may not be the most obvious one.
