Britain’s new prime minister, Andy Burnham, is already having to make one of his gravest decisions. He has to issue the instructions that he alone gives to the military, setting out the UK response in a doomsday scenario of a nuclear weapons attack on us. He will, as I did two decades ago, sign a piece of paper telling commanders whether or not to retaliate and, if so, whether through targeting civilian conurbations or military sites. These instructions are written down in the aptly named “letter of last resort”.

Now, more than at any time since the 1960s Cuban missile crisis, the European public fears a third world war. With the nuclear Doomsday Clock developed by atomic scientists moving ever closer to midnight, and Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, Poland and Germany contemplating either acquiring nuclear weapons or siting them on their soil, our world is descending from a rules-based order to a power-based one, where might is deemed right and brute force dominates.

Russian president Vladimir Putin has abandoned any pretence of supporting international law – “no one is ready to play by rules set by one person somewhere far away,” he has said – while China’s president Xi Jinping has warned that reunification with Taiwan “cannot be stopped by any force or anyone”. And with Donald Trump’s recent threat of genocide against the Iranian people – “a whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back again” – and his further threat to even bomb an ally, Oman, the American president has demonstrated yet again his contempt for every single pillar of the previous US-led order: human rights, multilateral cooperation, humanitarian aid and the rule of law itself.

But what should give us a measure of hope, is that people’s rising fears of conflict are now matched by a clear demand that the world come together to counter this collapse into chaos. This has been revealed in a survey........

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