Nuclear war remains a real risk to everyone

STAGGERING under the weight of its many awards, Oppenheimer, about the father of the atomic bomb, has finally opened in Japan, where those terrifying bombs were deployed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

These many decades later, we’ve managed to devise even more destructive weaponry: it’s no accident that MAD was the acronym once deployed by governments for ‘mutually assured destruction’.

The reaction of the Japanese public to this movie has been instructive. One critic said he wondered what had happened to the scene showing what Hiroshima looked like the morning after the carnage before. Because there was apparently no room to chronicle the utter devastation these Japanese cities lived and died through.

Sometimes I think we’ve all become much too blasé about what nuclear war is about. Every time Vladimir Putin threatens to deploy battlefield nuclear weapons in Ukraine or elsewhere, everyone seems to think it means (a) less destructive power and (b) it’s happening somewhere else anyway.

Wrong on both counts. All it takes is for a prevailing wind to blow the fallout in our direction, as many people found out after nuclear facilities had fires in, ironically, Ukraine and Japan.

All the world doesn’t need is a madman in Moscow and the possibility of a twin renegade in the Washington White House.

I’m not about to queue up for Barbie and, happily, neither she nor Sindy were given houseroom in my home.

Thanks, mum, for letting me keep the household devoid of plastic women in absurd costumes, though I still remember with a shudder the Christmas I asked for a cowgirl ensemble and was given a doll’s house.

But at least you can’t get killed by a surfeit of pink.