With the conflict in Ukraine, the threat of nuclear war has resurfaced.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine, three decades after the Soviet Union's demise, has reignited dormant concerns of a cataclysmic nuclear war.

The world lived under the shadow of Mutually Assured Destruction for most of the second half of the twentieth century, a suicide pact between superpowers that accepted neither would survive the effects of an all-out nuclear attack.

The spectre of MAD has returned thirty years after the fall of the Soviet Union.

On February 24, Vladimir Putin announced Russia's invasion of Ukraine, warning that those who oppose him "must know that the Russian response would be quick and lead to repercussions you have never seen in history."

'Now I am Death, the destroyer of planets,' says the character.

The first atomic bomb was detonated in the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945, ushering in the nuclear age. "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds," said Robert Oppenheimer, the project's father and an eyewitness to the test.

Within a month, American bombers had dropped the bombs on Hiroshoma and Nagasaki, bringing Imperial Japan to its knees and bringing World War Two to a conclusion, killing up to a quarter of a million people. It was the one and only time such weapons were utilised.

a nuclear explosion's aftereffects