ABSTRACT
The key strategic and cultural issue of the Cold War was, as Stanley Kubrick suggested so deliciously, ‘learning to live with (“love”) the bomb’.1 Everyone, from Pentagon planners, to spy fiction novelists, came up with fictional cures for the atomic dilemma, ranging from MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) to James Bond. Fear of the bomb remains with us, although the nightmare scenarios are under revision. It is no longer nutters of the General Ripper variety, Frankenstein villains such as Ian Fleming’s Dr NO, or the dread possibility of accidental or uncontrollable nuclear war between the superpowers, that preoccupies us. Since September 11, 2001, it is the twin threats of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and the spectacle of future attempts at ‘superterrorism’ by Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations of similar, unbounded malevolence.2
