On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall was broken down amid scenes of wild rejoicing which resonated around the world. In the two years that followed, the Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union progressively collapsed.
On December 25, 1991, Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev declared an end to what he called ‘the mad militarisation’ that characterised the Cold War.
After more than 40 years in which East and West had lived beneath the spectre of nuclear annihilation, a new era began. It seemed that liberal democracy had triumphed.
North Korea and the U.S. are engaged in a poker game that could go disastrously wrong. U.S. President Donald Trump also itches for a showdown with Iran
The flatulent American sage Francis Fukuyama foolishly announced ‘the end of history’. Yet today, less than three decades later, the world appears almost as dangerous a place as it did in the years of superpower confrontation.
We may comfort ourselves by recognising that the absolute destruction of mankind, which the U.S. and Soviet Union had powers to bring about, is much less likely.
But the risk of somebody, somewhere, exploding a nuclear weapon is greater than it has been since World War II, and most unlikely to go away.
North Korea and the U.S. are engaged in a poker game that could go disastrously wrong. U.S. President Donald Trump also itches for a showdown with Iran.
Less conspicuous, but just as alarming, is the precarious relationship between the two nuclear-armed powers India and Pakistan.
The Western intelligence and security community fears that Pakistan will one day implode into chaos, and that one or more of its nuclear weapons could fall into the hands of terrorists — ISIS, Al Qaeda or such like — who are demented enough to detonate it on a Western target.
Washington and its allies have little power to influence events in the sub-continent. But they should consider carefully, and hard, what the Cold War should have taught us — about how to avoid precipitating catastrophe.
The first and biggest lesson is to accept that for any power, in any circumstances, to explode a nuclear weapon would be a supreme crime, for which no excuse would be acceptable to posterity.
President John Kennedy recognised this as he successfully managed the most dangerous moment of the long confrontation, the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.
Although there were terrifying moments, a fundamental wisdom and discretion prevailed in the centres of power, which is conspicuous by its absence from today’s White House, as well from the Pyongyang residence of Kim Jong-un
He eventually induced the Russians to withdraw ballistic missiles they had installed on Cuba, in exchange for a secret promise to remove their American equivalents from launch-sites in Turkey.
Despite the public sabre-rattling of his Soviet counterpart Nikita Khrushchev, he, too, secretly shared Kennedy’s profound anxiety to avoid a showdown.
That same year, 1962, the Kremlin leader surprised the newly-appointed ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Dobrynin, by telling him he must never forget that conflict with the U.S. was unthinkable. The envoy’s foremost priority, said Khruschev, was to work to prevent this: ‘Don’t ask for trouble.’
You may say that today, it is obvious nobody in his right mind would countenance the release of a nuclear weapon.
Alas, however, that is far less well understood by some people than it was to earlier generations for whom the fate of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — targets of the U.S. atomic bombs dropped on Japan in August 1945 — was a ghastly living memory.
If the Americans ever decide to take military action to destroy nuclear facilities in either North Korea or Iran, the U.S. Air Force would almost certainly be obliged to use nuclear bunker-busting weapons to achieve this, because key plant and storage facilities are located deep underground, invulnerable to conventional weapons.
Even if the Americans used small tactical weapons rather than strategic city-destroyers, an atomic bomb is an atomic bomb: once the nuclear threshold is crossed, anything could happen.
Yet last month, disturbing new polling in the U.S. shows that 60 per cent of Americans would endorse the use of nuclear weapons to save the lives of U.S. servicemen in a war with Iran.
The authors of this Stanford University survey, Scott Sagan and Benjamin Valentino, say: ‘Americans are willing to approve of a presidential decision to use nuclear weapons . . . a majority of [American] respondents [to a YouGov poll] approve of killing civilians in an effort to end a war’ during which American troops are suffering serious casualties.
The proportion willing to endorse such action rises further if there was evidence Al Qaeda was building a nuclear facility.
On December 25, 1991, Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev (pictured in 2013) declared an end to what he called ‘the mad militarisation’ that characterised the Cold War
Any similar poll of British public opinion would almost certainly show only a tiny minority of us share such views, or would endorse the use of British nuclear weapons in any circumstances, except that we ourselves had already fallen victim to a nuclear strike.
Nonetheless, it is a strange reflection, that while tens of thousands of people marched to Aldermaston (the Berkshire nuclear weapons factory) behind the banners of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the Sixties and Seventies, today scarcely anybody seems to talk about the nuclear threat, even in university student unions.
While the young agonise about gender and income inequality, climate change, GM crops, fracking, race issues, exams and maybe about not getting enough sex, they seem curiously oblivious to the threat of being incinerated, which is not as small as they might like to suppose.
Remember those interminable protests in the Eighties by the Greenham women and others at RAF Molesworth in Cambridgeshire against the deployment of American nuclear weapons in Britain?
One of the latter was a Quaker housewife named Jeanne Steinhardt who lived quite close to the cruise missile site. She explained: ‘The shock for me was that it was going to be 17 miles from where I lived with my children. I thought: “I don’t want them to grow up to be part of this way of living.” ’
Mrs Steinhardt became, for years, an impassioned protester in the so-called ‘Rainbow village’.
Most people at the time dismissed the silly arguments of CND and the anti-nuclear movement —the ‘Ban-the-Bombers’ — who naively believed that if the West abandoned its own nuclear weapons, we would all become safer.
But they may have contributed something useful to the debate —merely by voicing loudly and persistently their passionate revulsion at the notion of using weapons that some U.S. generals were crazy enough to find seductive.
Much more useful, in the Cold War era, were the many intellectuals who were not pacifists, but who laboured at writing papers, delivering speeches and attending conferences to debate how the world could avoid blowing itself up.
Prominent among them was the Australian Hedley Bull, a brilliant Oxford professor of international relations. Bull favoured both a ban on nuclear-testing and restriction in the production of weapons.
But he argued it was easy to exaggerate the influence of disarmament on the prospect for peace.
The central issue is, of course, that what occurs in international politics is a matter of will as well as weapons; of intentions as much as capability.’
Bull argued, surely rightly, that it was far less important what weapons a nation held, than how willing it was to use them.
The risk of war by accident was much greater than of war by design — a scenario depicted by Stanley Kubrick in his 1964 movie Dr Strangelove.
The real-life nuclear stand-off during the Cold War was fraught with black comic moments.
On several occasions, nuclear weapons accidentally fell off American bombers, mercifully without exploding.
In January 1953, thousands of mice got into an arsenal in central Russia and ate the insulation on the missiles stored there — a development that reduced rocket designer Sergei Korolev to tears of laughter.
The general in charge, ‘Wolfhound’ Volkodav, found the story less than funny, however: he was sacked for criminal negligence — and was fortunate not to be shot.
Those in the vicinity of the arsenal may also have been fortunate — that the rodent invasion did not provoke a ghastly bang.
Hedley Bull was among the smart people who urged that the best way to avoid an accidental Armageddon was to talk, talk and keep talking to the other side. Which is what the Americans and Russians and their respective allies did for four decades.
A British ambassador to the Geneva nuclear disarmament talks in the Sixties once told me that although the sterile meetings and countless hours of recitals of propagandised position papers were dreary and dispiriting beyond belief, he believed those encounters made a significant contribution to keeping us all alive.
He was almost certainly right, which is why it is so depressing today to see Trump slashing resources at the U.S. State Department — dismissing diplomacy as a waste of time.
The outcome has been an unprecedented rash of resignations by senior officials and veteran diplomats, who see no purpose in continuing to work for a government that does not value their services.
For its part, the British Foreign Office is much less important on the world stage, but it is depressing to find it in the same parlous condition, as a result of contemptuous cuts imposed by successive governments.
Our demoralised diplomats have been entrusted to the stewardship of a buffoon, Boris Johnson, who has made Britain an object of mockery in the chancelleries of the world.
There are no successors among British ambassadors to match such wise mandarins as Sir Nicholas Henderson and Sir Robin Renwick. The former brilliantly represented Britain in America during the Falklands War, while the latter, as our ambassador in South Africa in the Eighties, made a critical contribution to securing the release of Nelson Mandela and the end of apartheid.
Their modern successors, even in such important capitals as Washington and Moscow, are ciphers by comparison.
Meanwhile, there are no good military options for dealing with nations that have nuclear weapons, which is why diplomacy is critical.
It’s why almost everybody except President Trump thinks the 2012 American agreement with Iran to halt its nuclear programme in exchange for the lifting of international sanctions was the least bad on offer, and must be sustained.
A consequence of the West’s 2003 toppling of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and its support for the overthrow of President Gaddafi in Libya in 2011 is that the world’s tyrannies got a grim message: only possession of nuclear weapons can make them safe from similar fates.
Who supposes that Gaddafi would have been killed if he had had a nuclear bomb?
In the years ahead, it is going to become ever more difficult to prevent nuclear proliferation.
Rodric Braithwaite, a former British ambassador in Moscow, concludes a new book on the Cold War, Armageddon And Paranoia, by warning that the perils of the Bomb remain acutely alarming.
‘The raw material for new confrontations continued to accumulate. The likelihood that the nations would agree to effective international control remain vanishingly small.’
Humanity has got itself into a fix from which it seems incapable of extricating itself, says Braithwaite. People will have to continue living atop a volcano, ‘relying as best they could on luck, helped perhaps by some good management’.
Today, many thoughtful students of international affairs feel a perverse nostalgia for the bleak certainties of the Cold War.
At least then there were only two massive players in the game, Russia and the United States, with the marginal addition of China.
Although there were terrifying moments, a fundamental wisdom and discretion prevailed in the centres of power, which is conspicuous by its absence from today’s White House, as well from the Pyongyang residence of Kim Jong-un.
Nobody in Washington, Beijing and Moscow has much idea what is going to befall us next, because so many rash people have fingers on or close to lethal buttons.
Less than a month ago, President Trump proclaimed without apparent unease that if North Korea continues to threaten the U.S., it ‘will be met with fire, fury and, frankly, power the likes of which this world has never seen’.
It is a frightening possibility that this almost deranged man could mean what he says.