From CND marches, to books, films and music, fear of the bomb was everywhere in the 1980s. Now, for many, the war in Ukraine has brought back that sense of dread
Across the years of 1983 and 84, I thought every plane going over my head contained a nuclear bomb that would be dropped, or not dropped, according to the mood of the pilot. It was an absolutely pure terror, a literal chill darting around my body, from my heart to the balls of my feet. Last week, due to the war in Ukraine, I felt that same freezing feeling for the first time in almost 40 years.
The first time, I would have been about 10. Thanks to Raymond Briggs’s When the Wind Blows, the brutal 1984 apocalypse drama Threads and various clergymen-orators at CND marches, I knew a huge amount about the impact of a nuclear blast. I was all over the skin peeling, the radiation sickness, the nuclear winter, the relative horrors of being at the centre of the blast radius (ideal) or on its outer edges (you would limp on for a few weeks with your teeth falling out of your gums, creeping toward death). But I didn’t have a clue about the nuts and bolts of the matter – the fact that a nuclear war would probably be preceded by at least a small amount of conventional war, and even then, commercial airlines wouldn’t be equipped with warheads.
