“Nagasaki became a city of death where not even the sound of insects could be heard. After a while, countless men, women and children began to gather for a drink of water at the banks of the Urakami river, their hair and clothing scorched and their burnt skin hanging off in sheets like rags. Begging for help they died one after another in the water or in heaps on the banks . . . Four months after the atomic bombing, 74,000 people were dead and 75,000 had suffered injuries.”

The testimony of the mayor of Nagasaki still horrifies. But the end of the cold war took much of the passion out of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Now, however, fears of nuclear conflict are rising again. But there is a difference with the 1980s. Then, nuclear anxiety was widespread among the general public. These days it is politicians and policymakers who seem most worried.