For, me it bordered on a fully-blown phobia: I still remember the sensation of sick dread that would accompany the titles of daily BBC news bulletins (or, even worse, unexpected news flashes), as I firmly anticipated the seemingly inevitable apocalypse being solemnly announced by a quivering Jan Leeming or Richard Whitmore. It is almost impossible to encapsulate in mere words the all-consuming horror of the situation. Daily topics of conversation in my suburban primary school playground included four-minute warnings, fall-out shelters, blast impacts and radiation poisoning.
I was 11 at the turn of the year, and the prospect of a seemingly imminent nuclear exchange began to dominate my childhood. In late 1983, a total of 572 new Pershing II and GLCM (Cruise) missiles were deployed throughout Western Europe, including 160 of the latter at RAF Greenham Common in Berkshire, with an ultimately even greater arsenal of SS-20 missiles stationed throughout the Soviet Union and primed to launch in the opposite direction. Some context: 1984 was arguably the apotheosis of global nuclear paranoia. “There is no hope in my story,” declared Robert Swindells, in an afterword appended to the book in 1985. Such is the fundamental message of Brother In The Land, perhaps the bleakest indictment of human nature ever to be presented to any audience, let alone the unsuspecting secondary school readership for whom it was intended. And, even after effectively destroying itself and the planet it inhabits, it will continue to fail again and again, in a repeated cycle of perpetual, apocalyptic self-sabotage, because mankind is essentially brutish, violent and stupid: doomed to repeat the same animalistic, catastrophic mistakes over and over until nothing remains of the Earth but a charred, lifeless cinder.
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