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WHEN I was a teenager, I went to bed every night convinced men were trying to kill me.

This was the early to mid 1980s, the height of the Cold War when, at any given moment, half a dozen nuclear submarines (American, British and Russian) were prowling the planet – each one containing the means to end the world, each one containing a hundred Hiroshimas.

We had terrible nightmares, us children of the Cold War. The mushroom cloud on the horizon and everyone and everything you ever knew gone in a heartbeat.

Sifting through the rubble of cities, the rubble stretching to infinity. Breathing in black clouds of fallout, seeing the cancerous spores erupting on your skin.

Like every other teenager I knew, I was a member of CND. Protest And Survive, as we said then.

Two things happened last week to make me forcefully recall those terrifying bed times. The first was the latest austerity budget from the hideous Osborne and the second was some facts and figures released by British CND, beloved organisation of my youth.

Because, even though the Cold War is as distant and gone now as Sinclair C5s, hit singles from EMF and Scotland qualifying for a World Cup, we are still renewing Trident, Britain’s nuclear weapons programme, at an estimated cost over its 30-year lifetime of £100billion.

Around the same time as little George was braying about how we have no money, CND released

figures showing what that hundred billion we’re about to spend on Trident would get us.

Ready? (I mean, get ready to become very, very angry.)

We could scrap tuition fees for 30 years. An entire generation of children entitled to a university

education without accruing thousands of pounds of debt.

We could employ 150,000 new teachers and nurses every single year for 30 years. Class sizes reduced, the quality of patient care increased many times over.

We could fully fund the A&E departments of every hospital in Britain for more than 40 years. No more three-hour waits with your crying children or elderly relative.

We could build 30,000 homes every year, creating 60,000 jobs in the construction industry. All those unemployed builders and joiners back into work, all those people sleeping in homeless shelters or on cold pavements with a roof over their heads.

We could quadruple investment in renewable energy, safeguarding clean, safe power for generations.

Then you think about this list and realise why none of it would be of any use to the Chancellor.

Tuition fees? Like every other member of the Cabinet, these are no problem for millionaire George. Ditto teachers, nurses, class sizes and A&E – everything is private.

As for housing and renewable energy, I imagine Osborne has custom-made toilet paper featuring pictures of the faces of the homeless and wind farms so he can wipe his pampered bottom with hem.

The Tories cannot be completely blamed, of course. The decision to renew Trident was taken in 2006 by that loveable warmonger Tony Blair.

It was one of the greatest betrayals of my youth when the Labour Party abandoned their commitment to CND and unilateral nuclear disarmament in the late 80s.

CND’s case for unilateral disarmament was watertight even in the 80s – nuclear weapons cost us everything while gaining nothing as they can never be used.

Today, it is even more compelling. There are no fleets of Russian submarines slinking under the ice caps. The threats are all low tech, low cost – a dirty bomb in the suitcase or the fundamentalist boarding a commercial flight with boltcutters and a knife.

America has the largest nuclear capability in the world. All this power neither prevented 9/11 nor helped to avenge it. How could it? Who would America have attacked?

The hijackers and their paymasters were a loose affiliation of Saudis, Pakistanis, Egyptians and Lebanese. What could the US have done with its huge arsenal? Nuked half the Arab world back to the Stone Age?

But don’t take my word for it. How about this? “Nuclear weapons are completely useless as a deterrent to the threats or scale of violence we currently, or are likely, to face.”

What crazed leftie said this? Ken Livingstone? Billy Bragg? No, they are the words of 89-year-old Field Marshall Lord Bramall.

This is a man who used to be head of the British Army. He served in World War II, Malaysia and the Falklands. A man who landed on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day. Cameron and Osborne look like they’d wet their pants if a fight broke out in the pub.

I know whose advice I’m inclined to follow when it comes to the realities of combat.

You can sign the petition to scrap Trident at www.cnduk.org/scraptrident . Your kids will thank you. As will your bank manager, your unemployed friends, the planet, the NHS and just about everyone outside the Cabinet.

Michael Winner said I was an idiot. I saw his point

SAD news. I’ve been blocked by someone on Twitter for only the second time ever.

For those who don’t do the Twitter, blocking is when you banish someone from your account so they can no longer read your tweets or respond to anything you say.

The first time I was blocked was a little over a year ago by the late film director, restaurant critic and “Calm down, dear!” maestro Michael Winner. He was being needlessly cruel about a low-budget British movie he’d seen.

I reminded him of the turkeys he directed, like his version of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, a movie so bad you can’t quite believe it’s happening. Winner didn’t take it too well and blocked me with the words: “John Niven is a f***ing idiot. Who needs him?”

I totally saw his point but I missed Winner’s banter and then, soon after, he was dead.

The identity of my second blocker? Former Tory MP, bonkbuster author and self-publicist Louise Mensch.

Decency prevents me from reprinting our exchange. But, fair to say, I won’t miss her banter as much as Michael’s.