Fear of a mushroom cloud

There is this typical Judge Dredd story, less than five years into its run, where a pirate with robot dreadlocks takes the Mega-City One hostage, until Dredd has to go and kick his drokking head in. It's a fairly standard Dredd of its time, and in the middle of it, a nuclear bomb was actually set off in the city, and everything suddenly became incredibly horrific:

Nukes were a constant fear in early 2000ad, because Wagner and Grant and Mills and co were always riffing on current affairs, and there was a very particular dread of nuclear weapons in the early 1980s, and that seeped through to the galaxy's greatest comic and directly into the brains of the nine years olds that were reading it.

Soon after Captain Skank got fed to his own mutated giant squid, hundreds of millions of citizens were killed in the Apocalypse War. In the very first prog, a nuclear bomb destroys a major British city, just to show the Volgs aren't fucking around; and Strontium Dog starred characters mutated by fallout who were forced to fight for their right to exist.

Somehow, this intense megadeath was occasionally used for laughs, as one last awful punchline before annihilation, but the stories also never flinched away from the awfulness of these weapons.

I was reading this when I was 9 or 10 and it was giving me the proper shits, even though we lived on the arse end of the world. When I'd travel to the great cities of the world as an adult, I was always acutely aware of the missiles aimed directly at my head, and I don't know how so many millions deal like that every day.

While I was reading the nukes flying in from the East Megs and liquifying human beings, there was also The Day After on TV, and a school showing of Threads at a much too young age, and I've never been prouder of being a New Zealander than we told the world to fuck off with its nukes.

I think everybody should read Barefoot Gen to see how absolutely fucking terrible the nuclear flash is.

I am physically and morally repulsed by people who say nukes should ever be deployed, thinking they are going to instantly vaporise the unwanted masses, and not melt the skins off babies. I've heard all the arguments that nuclear deterrents have helped keep the peace for decades, but I've also heard the stories about flocks of seagulls and weather satellite rockets that have almost triggered Armageddon. 

No nuclear weapon has been used since 1945, and thank fucking god for that. The horror of the bomb falling on Sector 403 and the poor people of Bob Oppenheimer Block was enough.