“THEY'VE started fighting, the Americans and the Russians - me dad says you have to come home now!”

Those words have been etched on my brain since the mid-1980s, when I sat down with my student housemates to watch Threads, a film about a nuclear attack on Sheffield.

Part documentary, the film, written by Barry Hines of Kes fame, set the scene with the everyday lives of ordinary people going about their business while, elsewhere in the world, tensions between superpowers rise.

The day of the attack begins as any normal day, with people going to work, milk being delivered, shoppers heading to the town centre. And then the conflict escalates.

The scene that lodged in my head was that of a young lad racing into the supermarket and shouting to his mum to get home quickly. Pandemonium breaks out as everyone races for the door. “Hey, you haven’t paid for those things!” the checkout operator yells.

There are many scenes to follow in that film that are equally memorable and far, far more terrifying. The thing that struck a chord with me, and many other viewers, was the film’s realism. If something like that were to happen, this is, I imagine, very much how things would play out.

I watched Threads again recently and it scared the life out of me as much as it did 40 years ago.

What is happening in the world right now, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, is utterly terrifying. As we go about our business, it’s there, in the back of everyone’s minds, the fact that life as we know it could easily come to an end.

I was only one-year-old during the Cuban missile crisis, so was oblivious to the tense stand-off between Russia and the USA. But I made up for that by spending a lot of my youth worrying about nuclear war. As a CND badge-wearing student I went on protest marches at Aldermaston Atomic Weapons Research Establishment in Berkshire. We would travel from London with hundreds of others, in fleets of coaches.

It was in the 1980s that the Government issued its Protect and Survive pamphlet, describing how to make your home and your family as safe as possible under nuclear attack. Even back then its contents seemed to me woefully inadequate, but I obviously took some of it on board - in my garage I have a corner stocked with bottled water, tinned food, candles and dozens of empty sacks to fill with earth, to shore up the shelter they advise you construct in your home using internal doors.

The nuclear threat receded after the end of the Cold War and the adoption of deterrence based on Mutually Assured Destruction.(MAD). As the years went on I began to stop waking up in the middle of the night worrying about fallout and nuclear winters.

But it’s returned with a vengeance. It’s now a very real possibility and we are powerless to do anything about it. I'm back to thinking about it almost constantly.

The scary thing is that across the world, so many lives are dependent on the decisions of a handful of individuals, and it only takes the actions of one to upset the world order and trigger Armageddon.

In January the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists announced its annual reading of The Doomsday Clock - which keeps track of the likelihood of a man-made global catastrophe. It declared that mankind is '100 seconds from annihilation'.

It’s probably more like 60 seconds now.

We humans have a beautiful planet, we are privileged to live on it, but we don’t appreciate it and are unable to live peacefully and enjoy it.

We all want to see our children and grandchildren grow up but, even if mankind somehow survives this latest threat, what sort of a world are we passing on to them?