end-time faith is probably immune to the lessons of history as it is to fundamental human decency. If we do destroy ourselves, we can assume that the general reaction will be terror and grief with the pointlessness of it all rather than rapture. Within living memory, we have come very close to extinguishing our civilisation when in October 1962 Soviet ships carrying nuclear warheads to installations in Cuba confronted a blockade by the US Navy and the world waited to discover whether Kruschev would order his convoy home. I think it's remarkable how little of that terrifying event survives in public memory, in modern folklore that is. In the vast literature, the crisis spawned military, political, diplomatic, there is very little on it's effect at the time on ordinary lives; in homes, schools and the workplace; on the fear and widespread numb incomprehension in the population at large. The fear has not passed into the national narrative here or anywhere else as vividly as you might expect. One historian put it, "When the crisis ended, most people turned their attention away as swiftly as a child who lifts up a rock, sees something slimy underneath and drops the rock back". Perhaps the assassination of President Kennedy the following year helped obscure the folk memory of the missile crisis, the murder in Dallas became a marker in the history of instantaneous globalised news transmission. A huge proportion of the world's population seemed to be able to recall where they were when