The Spectator’s Notes | 3 December 2005

One of the basic divisions in human character is between those who expect the imminent end of the world and those who don’t. This can take a religious form, but in modern times it often appears in other guises. In the early 1980s, the apocalyptists feared nuclear war. Martin Amis wrote that the idea of it made him feel sick, as if that were a knock-down argument against the Bomb. Today, when the danger from the Bomb is actually much greater because Pakistan has it, North Korea more or less has it and Iran is getting it, the millennial fear of it has not revived in the West, perhaps because the people most neurotic on the subject tend to be those with an obsessive suspicion of their own civilisation. The possible return of nuclear power will bring back their fear. For the rest of us, the word ‘nuclear’ has a warm, nostalgic feeling — evidence that the Western mind can solve the problems which it creates for itself.