Twice a day we are warned of the Russian peril. But three times a day we are told we have no money to spend on extra defences. Whatever shall we do?

No wonder some people, like my colleague Clare Foges, are building survival bunkers, stocked with prunes (ugh!) and kidney beans so that they can at least get through the first few weeks of Armageddon.

But what then? Personally, I am not doing that.

In my young years, which included the fabled Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the idea of stockpiling prunes or anything else never occurred to my parents, who had been through the actual war of 1939-1945.

Their view was closer to that of the great satirist Tom Lehrer, who wrote a song called We’ll All Go Together When We Go, pointing out the benefits of universal simultaneous incineration. But few of us really believed the sirens would ever go off.

That’s the point. Mutually Assured Destruction was good. We didn’t have to commit mass suicide if we kept our head. These days, North Korea, Pakistan and Israel have the bomb, and I’m fairly sure Saudi Arabia will be next. So nothing is assured at all.

How I long for the real Cold War to come back. We in Britain were so safe, so rich and so calm. Now I suspect we never will be any of these things again.

This week it is 40 years since I dashed to Iceland for a strange, sudden and fateful summit, between then US president Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. They were crazy days.

Gorbachev’s giant Zil limousine was too big for the garage of the Soviet embassy in Reykjavik, and stuck out into the road. The two men met, amid incessant howling wind, in a house that looked like the home of Norman Bates in Psycho.

I remember swimming across a volcanically heated pool to get close to Gorbachev’s attractive wife Raisa. She fascinated the world, as she was so unlike the potato-shaped spouses of traditional Kremlin leaders. My mission was to discover if she really spoke English, as claimed. She didn’t.

In those days I was the defence and diplomatic correspondent of another newspaper, and had an enjoyable time flying in Harrier jump-jets, drinking red wine in a Polaris nuclear missile submarine, visiting our tank regiments on the North German plain and being winched on and off anti-submarine Royal Navy frigates.

The country felt well-defended by competent, cheerful men. It seemed reasonably prosperous and very, very free.

Political correctness was virtually unknown. Tyranny was safely contained in the lands to the east of the bitter fences that cut across the middle of Europe. Well, it had to start somewhere.

Then, amid the mighty gales of Reykjavik, rumours began to circulate that the two superpower leaders had come close to getting rid of all nuclear weapons – including ours, whether we liked it or not. I felt a twinge of panic.

Was this pleasant, stable, well-guarded world about to come to an end? And then, phew! – the talks collapsed.

Reagan wanted to go into history as a peacemaker. He looked livid as the meeting ended. Gorbachev was just sunk in gloom.

I was delighted, so much so that the great Jon Snow, then toiling for Independent Television News, snapped at me: ‘Hitchens, why are you such a Hitlerite?’

He, like most Lefties, regarded a belief in strong defence as a form of Nazism.

We were on the plane back from Iceland at the time and almost all the diplomatic correspondents were in the ‘Give Peace a Chance’ camp.

But my solitary joy did not last long. Just before Christmas 1987, I watched the two men sign a treaty in Washington DC which really did finish the Cold War. Lots of countries did well out of that. But Britain was not one of them, and our decline has been accelerating ever since.

In 1986, we were a rich, significant power. Now we are a minor, poor one.

So I understand why some people want a new Cold War. I just don’t think such an arrangement makes sense for us. We can’t afford to be a superpower anymore. And I cannot see why we should pick a fight with Russia.

When I went to live in Moscow in 1990, I rode the train all the way. It took days. It is astonishingly far away. You cross a lot of countries. That is why we have no territorial conflict with Moscow. They have never invaded us. We last invaded them in the Crimean War of 1853-1856, and if you know what that was about, you’re ahead of me.

Sixty years later we offered them Constantinople, now Istanbul, in return for staying on our side in the then war against Germany.

Then, in 1945, we awarded them Eastern Europe for doing most of the spadework in defeating Hitler. Territory is the usual reason for war. But we don’t have any territorial dispute with them. A shooting war between Britain and Russia makes as much sense as a war between Sweden and Fiji.

But what we do have is a lingering Hangover War between their spy services and ours. It is quite savage, as the Skripal episode in Salisbury showed.

The Cold War conflict, in which their mutual loathing was born, long ago evaporated. But spies don’t need solid disputes about real things to maintain enmity. Fantasy and memory will do.

Both countries live in a past when they were great nations. Our Secret Intelligence Service is actually our last major world-class military force.

The James Bond films and John le Carre’s spy fictions have helped to maintain its reputation even as it has grown less important. Partly because it is hidden in secrecy, its ancient reputation survives, and we can still use it to buy intelligence from the USA. Yet if people actually read John le Carre’s books instead of just buying them, they would know that it is in fact a sad remnant.

He thought it was full of illusions. But who’s going to admit that? Instead, its once-anonymous chiefs are now allowed on radio and TV, and treated with absurd reverence as they seek to boost their budgets with tales of terror.

The Armed Services join in. Back in June, the Chief of the Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, said incorrectly that Russian aircraft go ‘well into our airspace’. This isn’t true.

There are similar claims that Russian warships illegally enter our exclusive territorial waters. These, too, are wrong. As for warnings ships may be mapping our undersea cables, of course they are. But so what? I hope we are doing the same to theirs, if we have any ships to spare.

In the Cold War, our submarines probed pretty deep into Russian defences in the Barents Sea. But the boldest action by anyone on the seabed in recent years was the blowing up of the Russian Nord Stream gas pipeline, after which the current Polish foreign minister, Radek Sikorski, tweeted: ‘Thank you, USA!’

Despite all the efforts of Reagan and Gorbachev, 40 years ago, there is once again a major conflict between the USA and Russia.

But, unlike the old one, it will bring us no benefits.