Here’s a cheery thought. For two successive nights, I watched a two part made for (British)TV disaster movie. Called “Flood”, it had a pretty good cast….Robert Carlyle, David Suchet and Tom Courtenay….yet bop or special effects and probably a plot which was too over-the-top …even for a disaster movie. In the movie, 200,000 die….seemingly without much panic when Londwas is hit by the perfect storm of high tide and rain. The movie would actually have been more effective if only 15,000 had died.

Still it got me thinking that there is probably a once-in-century disaster out there with our name on it. Basically when this century ends, there will be some big headline chapters in the 21st century history books.

We already have regional wars…Iraq, Afghanistan….but surely there are other regional conflicts out there which could get extremely nasty….obviously IsraelPalestine but Pakistan-India, Korea-China-Japan are just some conflicts that could go nuclear.

Is it far fetched? I am a child of the 1960s. I remember the Berlin Wall getting built and I can remember (I was ten years old) the Cuban Missisle Crisis. Seems a bit hard to believe now but in the 1960s and 1970s we really did believe we were on the Eve of Destruction. In summer of 1980, I spent ten nights in Moscow and I remember one night when it crossed my mind that if nuclear war did break out, I was in the wrong place. I laugh at it now but when you can’t get to sleep in a hotel room in Moscow, strange things come into your head.

Certainly the Cold War was thawing but looking at old Brezhnev thru a pair of binoculars at the Olympic Opening Ceremony remains one of the strangest moments in my life. Certainly the first ten years of the Troubles was spent against a background where we all thought we would die in a nuclear winter anyway….certainly 1979 seemed safer (in Cold War terms) than 1970. But I think….locally….we tend to ignore the global context. Americans, Russians….all to some extent thought that we would all…..accidentally…..stumble into a global nuclear war.

The fact that the threat ended has made us….I think….a little over-confident that it will now never happen at all.

I think we are lucky….living where we do. If Britain is ever involved in a real war….unionists will be lining up to get Irish passports because frankly the North Koreans, Iranians and Pakistanis couldn’t care less about us. And even if Europe breaks apart in conflict between North and South then we still won’t be on the front line.

I just cannot see that we (and I know I am too old to see it) go thru a century when the very existence of European states will not be threatened.

We are much too parochial. We are not exactly masters of our own fate. Just weeks ago, people were talking about unionist outreach and now it is in tatters as much as the British Flag on a Sandy Row lamppost.

The carefully stage-managed Decade of Centenaries fell at the first hurdle….the whole shared history nonsense did not get past the Covenant March. And perhaps it is time to think…not of contrived local Decade of Centenaries and start to look at a Centenary of Decades in a global way….there are potential wars out there which could make Norn Iron a sideshow.