Imagine there’s been a nuclear attack. Here’s how Britain should respond

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If readers of Saturday’s Telegraph were hoping for light relief from the Tory leadership election, they would not have found it in their newspaper’s comment pages. “The West should prepare for the real risk of nuclear war,” read a headline atop a column by weapons expert Hamish de Bretton-Gordon.

We live in very dangerous times, De Bretton-Gordon argued. He cited tension over Taiwan; Iran and North Korea’s progress in developing nuclear arms; and Vladimir Putin’s threats, veiled and not veiled whatsoever, of using nuclear weapons against Ukraine and Nato. The war in Ukraine also poses the risk of an accident – “or worse” – at Zaporizhzhia, the nuclear power station currently occupied by Russia. “If we do not contain these threats,” wrote De Bretton-Gordon, “everything else vexing us at the moment will prove horrifically irrelevant.”