This week marks 80 years since the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as the few remaining witnesses tell of incinerated, melted and obliterated families. Soon there will be none left to remember. Survivors’ graphic accounts of “the noiseless flash” were captured by John Hersey in his book Hiroshima, read by my generation with shock and fear. Nevil Shute’s On the Beach taught us every gut-wrenching detail of the radiation sickness I fully expected to die of. Civil defence leaflets told families how to hide under the stairs with a radio and torch.
I grew up expecting early death by nuclear war. My father was a 1957 founder of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament who didn’t expect us to survive inevitable nuclear holocaust. He carried a large bottle of suicide pills, enough to kill us all when the bomb fell, to save us from slowly perishing by strontium-90. When he left the jar behind driving on holiday to Wales, he had to turn back halfway there to fetch it. We lived under the shadow of the mushroom cloud. We knew that the three white geodesic domes of the Fylingdales early warning system would give us exactly four minutes, enough to boil an egg or run a very fast mile.
