Fear of nuclear war

Did you ever have that?
In the Eighties it used to haunt my every waking (and a lot of my sleeping) hours.
I still have this stupid superstition that if I don't start and finish walking up or down stairs on my right foot, it will cause a nuclear war.
Apparentlly Switzerland is littered with underground shelters people had built in preparation for the inevitable Armageddon.
I wonder what they do with them now?
It might be fun to set up a tourist industry where people go and spend two weeks in one of them, pretending that the outside world has obliterated itself, and they just sit in there, eating corned beef and pooing in a chemical toilet, before emerging to find that the earth is still a beautiful place where birds sing and trees grow.
It might make everyone realise that nuclear weapons are a pretty stupid idea.
To date, only the ones dropped on Japan in the Second World War are the only nuclear weapons ever to have been used. And to be fair, the people who did it didn't really realise how devastating they were going to be. And as is the nature of science, when the first one had such a devastating effect, they thought, "Maybe we had better test another one, just to make sure the first one wasn't a fluke."
That was good news for scientific research, but bad news for people living in Nagasaki.
The first one wasn't a fluke.
Thus the MAD policy grew up. Mutually Assured Destruction.
The Russians took it to mad proportions, when in the Eighties they developed a bomb so big, it could annhialate all life on the planet.
Instead of asking them to wise up, the Americans started talking about a "Star Wars" plan, to launch sattelites to shoot down the "Sword of Damocles" and protect the USA.
Meanwhile, I lay in my bed, worrying equally about my O'Levels and being burnt to a crisp at any second.
I don't know why it never happened. Because for ages, I thought it was only a matter of time.
Maybe it was Mikhael Gorbachov, maybe it was people just saying, "This is madness."
But it is strange how the cold war all ended so quickly all of a sudden.
And kids growing up now don't live under the fear of the bomb the way we did.
Maybe our parents and grandparents grew up under the shadow of a real and horrific war, but I feel that I grew up under the threat of something I had no control over, something that scared the life out of me.
I hope that is gone now.
If I may just add an opinion to this, and it is only an opnion, I think our Government would do better to furnish our troops better in the wars they are engaged in, than to spend a vast amount of money on re-newing a nuclear arsenal that we are we are never going to use.
And maybe while I am at it, I can add an observation. Does the word, "opinion" not bear quite a resemblance to the the word, "onion"?