The fear of nuclear annihilation raises its head once more

Like many children of the 1980s, David Barnett grew up with the fear of nuclear war. As global tensions over Ukraine intensify, he really doesn’t want to go back there

It felt in the early 1980s that the world was ruled by fanatical warmongers (Getty/The Independent)

Ah, the spectre of nuclear annihilation once again raises its mushroom-shaped head, resurrecting the latent dread that is baked into the DNA of anyone who lived through the 1980s.

Not that the fear of nuclear war is the preserve of Generation X, Boomers and older cohorts; when atomic death starts raining from the skies, we’ll all be either immediately vaporised or reduced to scrabbling around the ruins of our cities hunting for rats to eat.

But for those of us who did live through the Cold War, the threats emanating from Russia do conjure up a particularly unpleasant set of memories of the time when nuclear war felt like a very real possibility — and sometimes, an inescapable probability.