British GQ - 09.2019

GQ

FOREWORD

I

know that everyone who grew up

during the Cold War claims to have been

haunted by the prospect of nuclear

Armageddon, but it really was true. I

used to have a recurring dream in which

I was sitting on a beach and – as they used

to say – the balloon went up on the horizon

and people just sat and stared, waiting for

white hot annihilation to reach the shore. It

was grim but at least it was by the sea and the

sun was shining. Every mushroom cloud, eh?

Those of us exposed to the 1984 BBC drama

Threads had to consider the inevitability of

We get it: it’s a scary place out there, with risk, conflict and mendacious global leaders on

the rise. And yet the one thing keeping us safe might just be the biggest threat of all...

Story by George Chesterton Illustration by Tom Haugomat

It’s still a mad,

MAD world

horrible death coming to a post-industrial

Britain already ravaged by unemployment

and heavy rain. And then there were the

baby boomers recalling how they cowered

under their desks in school as the terror of

the Cuban Missile Crisis drifted over their

impressionable minds like radioactive miasma.

Perhaps it’s because I’m getting older or

because I have children, but 2019 is the

first time I’ve been frightened of the world

since the Eighties. It feels like the game of

real-time Risk has entered a new phase,

pushing us the closest we’ve been to a global

crisis since the days of Ronald Reagan and

whichever semiconscious Soviet leader he

happened to be facing that week. As a new

Cold War begins, the chances of the next one

being hot bring all that 20th-century anxiety

rushing back. It’s now been 74 years since

the last Great Power war. That seems quite

a long time...

There are always reasons for a parent to be

worried, though the heightened empathy that

comes with a family is usually accompanied

by a mixture of smug browbeating and self-

congratulation. The question “What kind >>

09-19Foreword.indd 49 04/07/2019 13:04