PREDICTIONS of a world without food kept people awake a century ago. Half a century later, the nightmare du jour was global thermonuclear war – a spectre created by the US’s detonation of a hydrogen bomb in 1952, and the Soviet Union’s test the next year.
Soon, both superpowers possessed weapons a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and both were claiming the ideological high ground. The threat of thermonuclear war loomed like a vast, dark mushroom cloud.
Merely acknowledging this threat provoked widespread fear and loathing. Those who actually stared at the problem…
