Plastics were not only for industrial use for say the production of cars but synthetic fibres arrived in our clothing and in the case of Lycra, never departed, woven into every product. I remember watching Nasa footage from before Nasa.tv when different forms of protection from the vacuum of space were trialled. There are hilarious clips where people try to wear whole body stockings made from the same kinds of nylons as tights. The idea was that the elasticity of the stocking would create a Other highlights of the Cold War era was an eery reminder of politics of that time with space given to the

Cold War Arms Race strategy called MAD –Mutually Assured Destruction. Opponents to this included JB Priestly who campaigned against British Nuclear Armament in the New Statesman. CND formed the following year in 1957.

I studied the Cold War extensively at University and much of my appreciation of the modern world is born of my reading about the great characters and names of that time; Chancellor Brandt, Adenauer, the 'Wirtschaft Wunder' (economic miracle) which we have seen replicated here in the UK in the last decade and to the people who formed it, incuding Walter Rathenau, the German Finance Minister who held the Weimar together single-handedly it seemed until his until his assassination for being a Jew in pre-Nazi Germany. The Cold War might be seen as frightening to some, a time of impending threat of WMD. To students of that era, there were worse things to fear; halting the sweep of Communist Revolution, Moseley's facism, and the plans of the West, one of which was to divide Germany permenantly between the four Allied Powers; France, USA, Soviet Russia and Britain. Our world has always existed in a fragile state of risk.