At school, when I was nine or ten, we were still taught about the bomb. Not as history, but as fact. As inevitability. It was 1984 and we were being told, quite directly, that nuclear annihilation could happen any day. We built a nuclear bunker out of cardboard boxes in the corner of the classroom. Each child had to bring in one item for survival. I brought a Look-In magazine. Someone else brought baked beans. No one brought a tin opener. I remember that.
That was the futility of it all. Even as children we knew it. The bunker wouldn’t have done anything. But that was the point, there was no way to make it hopeful. No way to turn it into a civic duty or consumer choice. Nuclear war couldn’t be marketed. Not then. Not yet.
Tomorrow’s World, the BBC’s science show, once ran an entire episode imagining a Soviet nuclear strike on Britain. I can still see it: thirty minutes of calm narration, graphics of fallout plumes and emergency maps, a timer counting down until impact. Boom. We lived not far from RAF Wittering, a Harrier base, so we all assumed we’d be hit in the first wave. Not a bad guess, looking back.
Back then, the threat was absurd, but it was acknowledged. It hung over everything. Governments rehearsed it, civil servants drafted plans, children (like us) acted it out in classrooms. The Cold War was mad, but it had rules. Deterrence had a grammar. The bomb was visible, legible, and at some level, managed.
Now? It’s different. Now the bomb is background noise. And that makes it more dangerous.
We are closer to nuclear war now than we were in 1984. That’s not nostalgia. It’s analysis. Back then, two blocks held each other in check. There were backchannels, treaties, entire institutions set up just to stop one side from misreading the other. Now it’s chaos. Treaties are gone. Norms are dead. The language of deterrence has collapsed into tweets, TV graphics, and badly translated press releases.
Trump announces nuclear submarine deployments like he’s booking a conference room. “We’ve moved them,” he said last week, “they’re in place.” The location? Vague. The reasoning? Pure theatre. But the warheads are real. It’s not strategy. It’s signalling. Declining empires remind the world they can still kill everyone.
On Russian state television, Dmitry Kiselyov smiles as he describes how one nuclear torpedo could drown the British Isles. The Poseidon weapon. The “radioactive tsunami.” It’s on a loop, those animations, soundtracks, the whole thing. Not satire. Not fiction. Just another segment before the weather. The point isn’t to be believed. The point is to be repeated.
The world is ruled today by madmen. Putin, Trump, Netanyahu, Modi, Kim Jong Un—each one a product of crisis, each one clinging to power through threat and spectacle. Only the Chinese leadership offers anything resembling restraint, in words at least. Xi Jinping doesn’t talk like a man preparing for Armageddon. But the silence is strategic. China still builds the bombs. Still expands the navy. Still dredges up islands in the South China Sea and surrounds them with missile platforms. The restraint is calculated. Xi understands the danger of brinkmanship, which is why he says nothing. Not out of peace, but out of power.
This isn’t Cold War logic. This is the nuclearism of a system in decay. Empire doesn’t retire, it lashes out. And capital, facing terminal crisis, leans back on what it knows: force, fear, and spectacle. Nuclear weapons are no longer the unthinkable last resort. They’re the background hum of politics. The fire at the edge of the frame.
The Cold War dominant class wanted to survive. They believed, however grotesquely, in continuity. The people in charge now don’t. They’re exit-schemers and bunker-builders. They’ve got seed banks in New Zealand and startup shares in drone defence. They’re not trying to avoid collapse. They’re hedging against it.
The arms are being modernised. The warheads miniaturised. The scenarios rewritten. Tactical strikes, first-use doctrines, limited exchanges. It’s all back. But now without even the architecture of restraint. Britain is irrelevant except as a launch site. Europe is a buffer zone. Israel’s posture is permanent brinkmanship. India and Pakistan still circle each other. North Korea gets louder. China plays the long game. All the while, the treaties rot.
When was the last time the nuclear states sat down (really sat down) and talked about cutting what they have? When did the US, China, France, Britain, Russia last meet to reduce the number of warheads in circulation? When was the last treaty signed that actually dismantled something? It’s not even part of the script anymore. Disarmament has fallen off the agenda, replaced by modernisation budgets and launch simulations.
There is no moral here, no tidy conclusion. Just this: the bomb was never a technical issue. It was political. The weapon came from the system that built it, and it still serves that system. Capitalist states cannot coexist with nuclear disarmament. They need the bomb. Not to use, necessarily, but to hold. To hang over the world like a threat. Like memory.
You want to end the threat? End the system. Anything else is fantasy.
When we were kids, we knew the cardboard bunker wouldn’t save us. But at least we were allowed to say what we were afraid of. Now, the bomb has been swallowed up by content. Backgrounded. Normalised. Which means it’s closer than ever.
When it comes, it won’t be a countdown on a BBC special. It’ll be a glitch. A boast. A provocation gone too far. A message that can’t be unsent.
Eighty years since Hiroshima. And the fuse is shorter than ever.
