Doomsday Men: The Real Dr Strangelove and the Dream of the Superweapon
By P.D. Smith
Allen Lane £20, 552 pages
FT bookshop price: £16

The idea that all life on earth might be extinguished very soon, and that human technology will be the cause, is deeply ingrained in our culture. Indeed, historians of the future, assuming there is a future, may be intrigued by how easily we have switched from nuclear anxieties to the environmental kind: do we enjoy thinking that we’re destroying the planet?