One of the greatest anti-war movies must be “Dr Stangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” by Stanley Kubrick. Peter Sellers played three characters including the terrifying Dr Strangelove.

The scene I’ll always remember is where the Air Force Chief, General Buck Turgidson is brawling with the Soviet Ambassador, Alexi de Sadeski in the control room bunker.

“Gentlemen,” cries U.S. President Merkin Muffley, “you can’t fight in here; this is the war room!”.

In the real world, the atomic age started on the morning of August 8 1945, when an air-raid warning alerted the authorities in the Japanese city of Hiroshima that American planes were on the way. When it was realised there were only three planes in the sky above the alert was cancelled.

During the previous six months more than fifty Japanese cities had been devastated by swarms of bombers but Hiroshima had been left untouched. Of course they were not to know that this was not luck — the Americans had other plans for them.

A Boeing B-29 Superfortress usually carried ten tonnes of explosive bombs. This morning, at 8.15 am, the bomber ‘Enola Gay’ dropped a bomb named ‘Little Boy’ which unleashed the explosive force of twenty thousand tonnes.

The people of Hiroshima suffered in one flash the destruction that previously needed two thousand bombers to wreak.

This fearfully powerful new uranium bomb had been tested the previous month in remote New Mexico. The scientists knew that the atom bomb worked and Hiroshima was selected to test its effect.

Sadly, the scientists had also made a plutonium bomb, ‘Fat Man’ and it was decided to test this one on a city also. Three days later Nagasaki was flattened by another atom bomb, the Second World War was ended and the world moved into the nuclear age.

Within a few years ‘nuclear proliferation’ joined ‘cold war’ as new expressions were required to describe the atomic cloud hanging over post-war diplomacy.

Humanity had extended its conquest of nature to finding a way of wiping out all life on the planet. The best way to cope with this apocalyptic scenario was to go MAD.

Mutually Assured Destruction has kept the world safe from nuclear war for more than half a century. So far, all the players with fingers on the button have baulked at blasting enemies when it means atomising friends as well.

The world now faces a new threat, slower than “one flash and you’re ash” to be sure, but potentially just as deadly for the future.

Global warming, brought about by excessive carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, is also a case of mutually assured destruction. The proliferation of fossil fuel burning is threatening us all.

If we can agree that to suddenly wreck the planet by the use of nuclear weapons is mad, why are we allowing our governments, swayed by the self-interest of the resource sector, to dither about on carbon emissions?

Polluting the atmosphere and changing the climate might be wrecking the planet more slowly but surely it’s just as MAD.