I remember seeing the American Duck and Cover infomercials with school kids getting under their desks (an eerily prescient forerunner of the now ubiquitous Active Shooter drills). The thing that scared me most was the film On the beach which portrayed a world with no survivors except people in Australia waiting for the deadly radiation cloud to reach them. A fabulously understated and undramatic low budget horror movie where what’s scary is what you can’t see but can’t help but imagine.

I qualified as a radiation biologist so I was well versed in the stages of radiation sickness which killed you more rapidly the greater the lethal exposure you had received. Here again was the horror of inevitability. You knew what you would be suffering in your remaining days or weeks and that there was nothing you could do to avoid or alleviate it. Hats off to the heroic Russian helicopter pilots who flew what they knew were fatal flights over the burning Chernobyl core to get invaluable film of what was happening.

The threat of mutually assured destruction losing its preventative charm seems greater now than ever with Trump and Putin riding nuclear codes. Scant reassurance that they may just as well find other ways to obliterate us all or they may sit back and let accelerating climate change do the work for them.