With the death of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the era of the Cold War seems more remote than ever. The Iron Lady was in her penultimate year of office when the Berlin Wall came down, and with it decades of the enveloping fear that at any moment a global nuclear exchange might end the world. That was nearly a quarter of a century ago. In that time, the existential threat posed by nuclear weapons has been almost entirely displaced by another. I speak, of course, of climate change, the great ‘inconvenient truth’ and ‘moral challenge’ of the times in which we find ourselves. Where once the emblematic colour of this fear was red, it is now green. An overarching sense of anxiety remains, with ecological catastrophe having replaced a hail of Soviet nuclear warheads as the principal nightmare.
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Climate of fear and a nuclear winter
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