In Dr Strangelove, the US President has to get on the hotline to beg a drunken Soviet premier not to retaliate when a rogue squadron of B-52s visits thermonuclear Armageddon on the entire Warsaw Pact. It’s high farce. When the film was made in 1964, it was also terrifyingly plausible.

Some scaremongers’ memories are very short. Say what you like about nuclear proliferation — and there is much to be said, none of it comforting — but we are no-where near the cliff edge of mutually assured destruction on which humanity teetered for much of the Cold War.

It’s true that the nuclear club has almost doubled in size since the sixties; true that Russian nuclear security is an oxymoron; true that Iran has no reason to enrich plutonium other than to blow it up; true that Kim Jong Il is borderline psychotic. But it is only hindsight that says Cold War deterrence was always going to work just because it did. One slip, one misjudgement, and it really could have been curtains for us all.

The Doomsday Clock should certainly twitch in response to North Korea’s nuclear test. Nuclear power’s return to fashion because of climate change will also make more nuclear fuel available to upgrade for weapons. But what about climate change itself? That needs a whole new clock, with the last minute before midnight divided into milliseconds.

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