![]() ![]() Yet everyone knowingly lived with that insanity for decades. It was “insane”, US president John F Kennedy felt, that “two men, sitting on the opposite sides of the world, should be able to decide to bring an end to civilisation”. It wasn’t only powerless city-dwellers who were terrified (“select and fortify a room in which to shelter”, the UK government grimly advised). The fear – the pervasive, enduring fear – that characterised the cold war is hard to appreciate today. Despite scientists’ hopes that the weapons would be retired, in the coming decades they proliferated, with nuclear states testing ever-more-powerful devices on Pacific atolls, the Algerian desert and the Kazakh steppe. “All the scientists are frightened – frightened for their lives,” a Nobel-winning chemist confessed in 1946. Reports came of flesh bubbling, of melted eyes, of a terrifying sickness afflicting even those who’d avoided the blast. ![]() The thought proved impossible to shake, especially as, within the year, on-the-ground accounts emerged.
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