“Tanks, jeeps and other test vehicles litter the desert floor milliseconds before the force of the explosion destroys them. Just below the bottom of the fireball, a crescent-shaped shock wave has bounced off the desert floor and is merging into the expanding nuclear fire.” From the New York Times slideshow, Capturing the Atom Bomb on Film. Image taken from Peter Kuran’s book, How to Photograph an Atomic Bomb.

Related: Exposure and Atomica! 

With bonfire night almost upon us – and with it a feeling of crushing ecological terror – let’s turn for reassurance to the pages of a certain newspaper. A troubled Guardian reader asks,

Setting light to bonfires and sending fireworks up into the sky don’t strike me as very environmentally friendly. Is there a better way to mark bonfire night?

Mercifully, Leo Hickman has some thoughts.

Attend an organised public display instead of setting off fireworks yourself in your own backyard. Surely it’s better to contain the noise and pollution in one area than see it dispersed across a wider area?

This fairly innocuous suggestion leads Mr Hickman to more emphatic, and revealing, territory:

Quite why fireworks are not just restricted to organised public events has always been beyond me, given how dangerous they can be to children. Or maybe – as was fiercely debated on this site last year – fireworks should be banned altogether?

An earlier Guardian poll – Should Fireworks be Banned on Environmental Grounds? – was a close-run thing, with a narrow majority willing to permit an evening of explosive hedonism. The Guardian’s Felicity Carus suggested a possible compromise in the form of “green fireworks,” a quieter, less colourful, less explosive alternative made from sawdust and rice chaff.

As regulars will know, Mr Hickman and his colleague Lucy Siegle steer Guardianistas through the labyrinth of modern living with their Ask Leo & Lucy column – “your ethical dilemmas sorted.” Dilemmas that, for Guardian readers, include, Should I Employ a Cleaner? (“If you employ a cleaner, their pay should be fair. Buy some less toxic cleaning products or make them yourself using ingredients such as vinegar, lemon juice or vegetable-based soap.”) Among many other agonies of note are, What’s the Greenest Way to Wrap my Sandwiches? and What Should I Do with the Fur Coats I Inherited from my Mother? (Since you ask, suggestions range from the inventive – “donate them to an animal sanctuary that uses them as bedding for abandoned puppies” – to the slightly surreal – “Turn the central heating down and wear them indoors.” And, “Use them in the home, where everyone understands their history etc.”)

Mr Hickman, whose radical credentials have impressed us previously, is also the author of A Life Stripped Bare: My Year Trying to Live Ethically, the cover of which displays the Guardian’s eco-gnome denuded and brandishing his veg box. Positioned to the right of Mr Hickman’s shirtless torso is an approving comment by Radio 4’s Libby Purves:

Very entertaining.

Full of useful new things to fret about.

The Observer’s Carol McDaid was equally thrilled:

There are plenty of facts – Quaker Oats and Tropicana juices are both owned by George Bush-backing PepsiCo – and a selection of helpful letters, like the inspiring one from a woman who crochets her own dishcloths.

An essential purchase, clearly.

Apparently this is a genuine section header from a Barnes & Noble store.

Via Anna.

A West German government bunker, a Dutch atomic bomb shelter and an abandoned Ukrainian submarine base. Click to enlarge.

From Relics of the Cold War by Martin Roemers.

By the mid-1970s, Britain was widely regarded – choose your favourite cliché – as the Sick Man of Europe, an economic basket case, ungovernable… In [1978] the year before Thatcher came to power, Britain, upon whose empire the sun never set, endured the Winter of Discontent. Labour unrest shut down public services, paralysing the nation for months on end… Rubbish was piled high on the streets of Britain that winter, and so, at one point, were human corpses. The Soviet trade minister told his British counterpart, “We don’t want to increase our trade with you. Your goods are unreliable, you’re always on strike, you never deliver.” This was what had become of the world’s greatest trading power.

From Claire Berlinski’s “There Is No Alternative”: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters, which I’m halfway through reading and enjoying quite a lot. It’s a brisk and witty reminder of what was at stake and how socialism can lead to extraordinary selfishness. It also has plenty of revealing incidental nuggets, as when Berlinski notes the feelings of some of Thatcher’s loftier enemies:

When asked why intellectuals loathed her so, the theatre producer Jonathan Miller replied that it was “self-evident” – they were nauseated by her “odious suburban gentility.” The philosopher Mary Warnock deplored Thatcher’s “neat, well-groomed clothes and hair, packaged together in a way that’s not exactly vulgar, just low,” embodying “the worst of the lower-middle class.” This filled Warnock with “a kind of rage.”

Claire Berlinksi is interviewed by National Review’s Peter Robinson, again in 5 parts:

1. Socialist winter.

2. How she did it.

3. Thatcher and Obama.

4. Turkey and Islam.

5. What’s a radical?

Glenn Reynolds also interviews Berlinksi here. (Registration required.)

Related: Tory! Tory! Tory! An excellent 2006 miniseries tracing the history and context of Thatcherism, the miseries it involved and the much greater miseries it avoided. Well worth viewing in full. The three episodes are embedded below in six parts: