Terrifying thoughts of nuclear war were dredged up last week, when my hero Jeremy Corbyn told the sneaky Today programme that he would never use nuclear weapons. What did they expect him to say? But good. At last we have a potential leader who doesn’t want to blow us all to hell. And then surprise, surprise – I saw on Twitter that 82% of respondents to a Telegraph poll online also agreed with Jeremy. The Telegraph!
Could it be true? I hope so, because he’s right, and this Trident business has reminded us that the world is still stuffed with 16,400 of these insane weapons, which frightened the crap out of us in the 60s. Fielding, aged 15, was about to play rugby at school, at three o’clock, just as the Cuban missile crisis was about to blow. The rugby teacher looked ashen, and made the boys wait in their tracksuits in the changing room, in case the world ended. It didn’t, so they resumed play at 3.10. But imagine how scary it was.
We lived on a knife-edge, protested, marched about, watched Dr Strangelove and The War Game in a cold sweat, imagined ourselves incinerated, and scorned civil defence instructions: build yourself an “inner refuge” under the stairs or a table, cover it with sandbags, stay inside it for 14 days. If you lived in top-floor flats, bungalows or caravans, you were stuffed. But you did have a tiny window of opportunity between the attack and the fall-out descending, “to do essential tasks”, like rolling anyone who was on fire up in a rug. “Do not smoke.” Meanwhile the Government and close chums stayed safely in vast, secret underground bunkers. For God knows how long.
Now here we go again, except that Trident is 100,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. And it’s not even really ours to control. Vital chunks of it are made, serviced and maintained by the US, for us, so long as we do as we’re told.
Perhaps we thought we could forget about the Bomb and Mutual Assured Destruction.
MAD. But we can’t. That’s what it was. MAD. It still is.
