Once upon a time, in a corner of the Eurasian land mass, a tense stand-off over a long, contentious border was maintained for decades with remarkably little international violence.
Our wisers and betters told us that peace was kept in this region - previously the site of the most appalling wars - thanks to genocidal weapons of mass destruction aimed at potential battle zones, at most of its populated areas and at relevant power centres further afield. Some of us might have found the logic and morality of this argument disgusting, but the evident success of the European "balance of power", of nuclear "mutually assured destruction", was there to be seen; when the balance shifted, the Balkans duly gave us something resembling experimental validation of the theory.
Now that it appears similar weapons will take their place along another Eurasian fault line, those old nuclear-blackmailers are changing their tune. The powers who held Europe to ransom in the name of peace now tell us - ably assisted by the news media - that this new balance of terror constitutes a crisis, that atomic bombs are there to be used, that India and Pakistan are "edging towards all-out war". The hypocrisy is literally blinding.
Spinning the dial last Friday, I came across a few minutes of a BBC interview with a man who was there at the start of all this madness, but walked away. I must add, shamefaced, I didn't get his name or that of the programme (answers on a postcard, please), but this Polish-born scientist deserted the Manhattan Project months before the first successful atomic test at Los Alamos. In fact, the first he knew that the Bomb was more than "calculations on paper" was when he heard a BBC report about Hiroshima. "Until then, I had maintained a hope that the thing might not work."
It worked all right, and Harry Truman's decision to use it against Japan set off the arms race that has just taken another twist. The Cold War and atomic fear created all sorts of distortions in the world's political and economic landscape. However, it was with one of the most compelling cultural expressions of life in the shadow of the mushroom cloud that The Sunday Feature (BBC Radio 3) concerned itself.
Jack The Dripper was Tim Marlowe's remarkable documentary about abstract-expressionist painter Jackson Pollock, whose career found its high points in the decade after Hiroshima. Marlowe didn't get caught up in the relationship between the chaos of Pollock's drip paintings and that created by the Bomb; however, standing in front of one of the works Marlowe was moved to cite Yeats: "the centre cannot hold".
Other contributors talked about Pollock's devotion, expressed in his work, to "living in the present", to the idea of spontaneity.
There was another Cold War connection: the interest of the CIA. Some US spooks, apparently, saw Pollock's wildly expressive work and his free-spirit (i.e. alcoholic) personality as the epitome of the robust and virile American. So, while domestic right-wingers denounced abstract art as a commie plot, the CIA was funding exhibitions of Pollock's work in Europe. Virile? Like a tomcat, said one woman critic, who called him "Jack The Pisser". But the tone of the programme was mostly reverential, never more so than when Marlowe was down on his knees feeling the paint splattered on the floor of Pollock's Long Island studio. Atmospheric and sophisticated, accessible and ultimately sad, Jack The Dripper was a model arts documentary, and part of a consistently fascinating Inventing America strand on Radio 3.
Not all post-war US culture fled into abstraction and solipsism. Country Time (RTE Radio 1, Sat- urday) reminded us that country music has been an extraordinary repository for social realism. This week's terrific programme was devoted to songs about coalmining, and Sandy Harsch presented them with the passion of a woman who has heard the sound of the whistle warning of danger or disaster at a mine. The songs were mostly grim and powerful; this is a sub-genre when songs such as Tennessee Ernie Ford's Sixteen Tons and the Judds' version of Workin' In A Coalmine qualify as "humorous". Even the hard-earned sentimentality of Loretta Lynn's Coalminer's Daughter was less typical than more matter-of-fact songs about entrapment, darkness and despair. Harsch didn't tell us that Appalachian mining areas such as the famous Harlan County, Kentucky, are where US socialism is resting up for a new assault on the nation's consciousness, and she might have played more songs of union organisation and solidarity.
However, the one she did play carried 16 tons of weight - a real, Irish-flavoured come-all-ya called, appropriately enough, Come All Ye Coalminers, which finished with a flourish: "I am a coalminer's wife/ I'm sure I wish you well./Let's sink this capitalist system/In the darkest pits of hell."
