For those of us who lived through the early 1980s – a period of great international tension between East and West, with a hawkish Reagan administration and a fearful Soviet leadership – nuclear war did not seem unthinkable. In November 1983, the sick and suspicious Soviet leader, Yurii Andropov, had come to believe that Ronald Reagan’s arms build-up and the “Star Wars” project for space-based ballistic missile defence meant the US was planning a nuclear first strike.