Growing up under the shadow of the Bomb
Nuclear war loomed over my youth the way climate change looms over that of my children’s generation. Hitting my teens in middle class white Australian society in the 1970s, I was acutely aware that the USA and the USSR were engaged in a tense Cold War and had built up vast arsenals of atomic and other weapons, arriving at the point where neither side could make a first strike against the other on account of what was called MAD – “mutually assured destruction”. We had the destruction of the environment to worry about too, but were…
