“Vicious,” said Lou Reed laconically in his cherished 1970s hit of that name. “You hit me with a flower.” Something of that bathetic air of high camp came across this week when the Victoria and Albert museum announced its big autumn show, Cold War Modern. The exhibition, which opens in September, aims to remind us that design and aesthetics, just as surely as nuclear missiles, were essential elements in the battle between the postwar superpowers.

It was a strange time: military paranoia and mass consumerism swept through their respective lands, creating a new aesthetic that was both brashly confident and deeply insecure (brilliantly captured in the early Bond films and the dark satire of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove). While the US and the Soviet Union threatened each other with grim scenarios of mutually assured destruction, they were also taking part in surreal games of domestic oneupmanship.