Those of us old enough will recall what it is like to live in a world threatened by nuclear war. Until the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, there were periods of heightened concern that we would all be blown to smithereens, or die a horrible death in a nuclear winter. Since the early 1990s, aside from worries that Iran, or Pakistan, might be developing a nuclear capability, we have had little to worry about.

That was the case until last week, when tensions between the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the USA heightened after accelerated progress was made by the DPRK with their ballistic missile programme. Not quite on the scale of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the fact that North Korea has both nuclear capability and long range ballistic missile capability means that they cannot be too far away from successfully marrying the two, threatening the west coast of America, and a wide range of countries in between. I was told the news about Donald Trump’s promise to unleash “fire and fury” against North Korea by the British Ambassador to South Korea as I arrived in Seoul for a trade mission. It sure concentrates the mind when watching CNN report on US early warning systems in the pacific when you are just 35 miles from the demilitarized zone dividing the north and south. As it turned out, the citizens of South Korea are rather sanguine about the situation. As one pointed out to me, they have been in range of DPRK artillery for 60 years. At any practical level, not much has changed for them.

I agree with Jeremy Corbyn, a long-standing campaigner against nuclear weapons, that a world free of these horrific weapons of mass destruction is one to aim for. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty, of which we are a signatory, seeks to stop more weapons being created, if not actually reduce the number. The problem is, as a species, humans have been engaged in an arms race ever since the first caveman picked up a rock and clubbed his neighbour over the head with it. Human history is a relentless progress of weaponry invention and it has never reversed. That is why I could never agree that a way forward for this country would be to unilaterally disarm. With ever increasing numbers of despots going nuclear, we must always protect ourselves from a threat.