Stop the sabre-rattling

I have been wondering these last few weeks whether it would be cheaper to excavate a basement and buy a Geiger counter and iodine tablets, or emigrate to New Zealand. Call me frit, but I don’t like the way things are heading. Probably the second option is easier: Armageddon outta here, etc. I can re-enact Nevil Shute’s On the Beach from some rocky cove near Dunedin, waiting for the fallout to arrive.

I was sentient only during the latter stages of the Cold War but from what I can remember, the two sides, them and us, behaved for the most part with a degree of rationality and common sense. (I like my politicians to be pragmatic rather than charismatic, which is why, if you were to ask who my favourite Soviet despot was, Brezhnev would always be the answer. Rather his grey, oppressive stolidity and détente than Khrushchev’s flaky, table-thumping, peasant-in-a-strop hyperbole.)