Toby Young Toby Young

Nuclear war, magic mushrooms and a teenage trip I’ll never forget

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Vladimir Putin’s decision on Sunday to put his ‘deterrence forces’ – code for nuclear weapons – in a high state of readiness revived a fear in me that I haven’t experienced since the fall of the Berlin Wall. As someone who spent his teenage years during the Cold War, the threat of nuclear war was never very far from my mind. Indeed, one of the biggest political battles back then was between unilateralists and multilateralists and I was firmly in the latter camp, even starting a local anti-CND group called ‘A Sensible Approach to Nuclear Questions’. But the two sides were united in their fear of Armageddon, only disagreeing about the best way to avoid it.

Peak anxiety for me occurred in 1980. I was a 16-year-old living in south Devon and this was not long after the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. It was a Saturday afternoon and an older boy from Dartington Hall, the trendy private school down the road, had given me some magic mushrooms. These grew wild on the nearby hills and were the drug of choice for the local teens. They tasted disgusting and often gave you a tummy ache, but the resulting ‘trip’ could be a lot of fun provided you got the dose right – which wasn’t easy. The recommended amount was between 30 and 40, but they came in many different shapes and sizes, so that rule of thumb wasn’t terribly helpful. On this occasion I swallowed too many, which made for a bumpy ride. But that wasn’t the main reason I had a bad experience.

Milo told me war had broken out and a quiver of nuclear missiles were arrowing towards us

No, that was because the boy who’d given me the mushrooms – let’s call him Milo – waited for them to ‘come on’ and then told me war had broken out between the superpowers and a quiver of nuclear missiles were arrowing their way towards us.

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