Four blogs, which I wrote back in September 2017 have become something of a barometer for the state of the world’s stability.  As accurate as the Doomsday Clock, which the members of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists recalculate each year, similarly, the reading figures of How to Build a Nuclear Fallout Shelter in your Local Pub reflect how close the world is to some kind of global catastrophe.  The blogs were intended as a light-hearted muse on dealing with adversity by downing a pint and blotting out your worries; now they have become something altogether more serious.  At the time, the ‘crisis’, which had got me thinking along these lines was the posturing that was happening across the Pacific between Donald Trump, then President of the USA, and Kim Jong-un, leader of North Korea.  Since then we have had differing degrees of nuclear angsts, in Iran, between Pakistan and India, in China, in Russia, in the US, in North Korea again, plus several retractions from and several rewordings of various important nuclear treaties, each time with the effect of increasing anxious Google searches for “How to Build a Nuclear Fallout Shelter” and so pushing unsuspecting readers towards my blogs.

And, no more so than now.

Since Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and to use a WordPress phrase, my stats are booming.

And I wish it were not so. 

Back in 2017, I predicted that we were all ultimately doomed, but I did not think that it would end like this.  Personally, I had expected a race to the bottom for lowest common denominator stupidity to be the downfall of humanity rather than nuclear Armageddon, but I guess that it all comes down to the same thing at the end of the day.

© Beery Sue

Beery Sue is off down the pub.  Although not to build a nuclear fallout shelter.