Nuclear war, magic mushrooms and a teenage trip I’ll never forget

Vladimir Putin’s decision on Sunday to put his ‘deterrence forces’ – code for nuclear weapons – in a high state of readiness revived a fear in me that I haven’t experienced since the fall of the Berlin Wall. As someone who spent his teenage years during the Cold War, the threat of nuclear war was never very far from my mind. Indeed, one of the biggest political battles back then was between unilateralists and multilateralists and I was firmly in the latter camp, even starting a local anti-CND group called ‘A Sensible Approach to Nuclear Questions’. But the two sides were united in their fear of Armageddon, only disagreeing about the best way to avoid it.

Peak anxiety for me occurred in 1980. I was a 16-year-old living in south Devon and this was not long after the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. It was a Saturday afternoon and an older boy from Dartington Hall, the trendy private school down the road, had given me some magic mushrooms.