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It probably seems strange to younger people but, when I was born, motor vehicles and aircraft were comparatively new fangled. The first ever powered flight of a heavier than air craft took place a dozen years before my mother was born. Telephones, radios and gramophones were also in their infancy. Outside of large towns and cities, many homes were still without electricity.

In the decade before my birth men split the atom, thereby creating the possibility of unleashing an endless supply of cheap energy – one of many predictions that fell well wide of the mark. The same technology also offered the possibility of terrible destruction, a fact used to devastating effect, when I was just 3 years old, to end a brutal war in the far east. Throughout my childhood and teenage years Britain, the USA, France and Russia…