The End of the World: A 25th Anniversary commemoration

The End of the World: A 25th Anniversary commemoration

Twenty-five years ago today - September 12th 1981 - the world ended in the white-hot furnace of nuclear Armageddon. Billions perished as Reagan and Brezhnev fulfilled the prophecy of Mutually Assured Destruction, boiling the seas and burning off the atmosphere in a radioactive hell of mankind's own making.

All life on Earth was wiped out, as thousands of megatons of explosive force and the subsequent nuclear fallout spelled the end of even the most persistent of life-forms. Even the cockroaches.

It wasn't all over with one big bang, however. Those that survived the initial assault succumbed over the following days breathing the poisonous atmosphere, cursing world leaders for their blind nuclear folly. Ronald Reagan, Leonid Brezhnev, and the Whore of Bablyon whose reckless warmongering started it all, Margaret Thatcher

Still, you've got to laugh.

I remember the end of the world like it was yesterday. I went to a Battle of Britain Day airshow at RAF Abingdon, where nuclear war unaccountably failed to break out, waking up the next day in an alternative reality where all was relatively happy in the world, Whore of Babylon notwithstanding.

I mention this for one very good reason. I spent much of my teenage years crapping myself over the inevitable nuclear war, not helped in the slightest by a school friend's assertion that September 12th would mark the end of civilisation as we knew it, and that I would die a virgin. He walks amongst us now, and posts in my blog comments.

We're still here, Richard! Wrong on both counts, guy!

Still: if the world were to end, a benevolent yet destructive deity would let us choose the manner of our own demise. This would be much like much like Gozer the Gozerian falling somewhat short in his destroy-the-planet scheme when he manifested as the Stay-Puft Marshmallow man in the highly prophetic Ghostbusters film.

Plague. War. Supernova. Head in the gas oven. Planet Earth swallowed by Jade Goody's bucket-like chuff. How would you like the world to end? I'm plumping for a gigantic pair of killer space norks. I'm so predictable.

Edit: This has absolutely nothing to do with me.