There are signs that a new nuclear arms race could be starting. When this has happened before, it’s been a matter of grave public concern, leading to arms control treaties. We could do with some of that protest spirit now, writes Rebecca McQuillan

Seventy years ago, the world’s superpowers were in the grip of collective madness. The first test of a thermonuclear weapon – hydrogen bomb – took place in 1952, using atomic fission to trigger a much larger fusion reaction, creating an explosion so huge it dwarfed the ones that destroyed Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

By 1967, the United States had amassed 31,255 nuclear bombs, including thermonuclear devices, a demented enterprise pursued by seemingly rational men. Russia had more than 8,000. It left the whole world under a cloud of existential dread until the late 1980s.

Many of us alive today remember the fear. Détente in the 1970s had failed. A new nuclear arms race – the so-called Second Cold War – began in 1979 after the Soviets broke trust by invading Afghanistan.

I was a schoolgirl and my parents shielded me from the true depths of their fear but we kids all knew about the horror of nuclear war. I don’t remember how I found it out, but I was aware as a child of 10 or 11 that if a nuclear bomb dropped nearby, you were vaporised. We knew that survivors got horribly burned; we knew about radiation sickness and that everything around you, food, soil, houses, was contaminated. We knew that hiding under the stairs and stockpiling food couldn’t save you, whatever the government told you; nothing could.

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