Dr Strangelove and the (one-part absurdity and two-parts paranoia) exhortations to act like Bert the Turtle and 'Duck and Cover' when the bomb hits are a generation or two behind us. We no longer live in fear that 'someone will set the spark off, and we will all be blown away'.
Nevertheless, we are still, as the Kingston Trio put it, 'endowed with a mushroom shaped cloud'. At least nine nations (US, Russia, France, UK, China, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea) have nuclear arms. They are the most devastating weapons our species possesses and can destroy the world many times over.
We also cannot pretend that it is altruism which prevents their use. We are not 'better than that'. The myth of Hiroshima as being about saving allied lives is just that, a post war artefact: Truman spoke much truer when he exulted that, 'We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city.' One only has to look at the deliberately induced famine and cholera epidemics in Yemen or the clinical flattening of Raqqa in just the last year to realise that 'goodies' and 'baddies' (as Tony Abbott once described the Syrian scene) is not an appropriate analogy for warfare.
No, the only thing which has blunted this instinct is the cold realisation that, in a world where all the great powers are nuclear armed, going in guns blazing will inevitably get you killed.
During the 2008 Georgian War, Mikhael Saakashvili pleaded for US aid against Russia in his doomed attempt to reclaim the breakaway Georgian regions with a surprise attack on Russian peacekeepers. The US understandably would not be drawn — Russia really does have weapons of mass destruction. This is also why, for all the proxy fighting in Syria and Ukraine, neither the US nor Russia have been stupid enough to launch direct attacks on each other's troops.
The cost of this balance of fear — and the risk of accidents — has, however, been high. Ever since the narrow escape of the Cuban Missile Crisis we have been aware of how close to the brink of global annihilation these weapons bring us.
It is against this background that the major arms controls treaties should be seen. In 1972, The US and USSR agreed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in order to prevent either Cold War enemy from attempting to neutralise the