The ultimate missile defence is that most Russians live in Britain now

HUGO RIFKIND So. Finally, it is all kicking off. In a silo poking somewhere from the Siberian tundra, a line of men (if all those Tom Clancy films are to be believed) are preparing to turn a line of keys.

'Missile retargeting,' growls the Commanding Officer, although, obviously, he growls it in Russian. 'Set co-ordinates for Manchester, England.'

A general hubbub. And then one man, let us call him Georgiy, raises a timid hand. 'Do you mind awfully,' he says, also in Russian, 'if we don't? My niece Anya is there, studying Communications and Mime.'

The Commanding Officer thinks about this. He's a compassionate Russian, blond yes, but more like the one from The Man From UNCLE, say, than the one from A View to a Kill. And actually, now he thinks of it, his wife's sister's husband Dmitry might also be in Manchester, driving a taxi. So he suggests Leeds. Only that makes Georgiy's neighbour Ivan raise his hand, and admit that actually his daughter Olga just moved there, to work as a pole dancer.

'That's disgusting,' says Georgiy.

'No, no,' explains Ivan, hurriedly. 'Don't worry. It's entirely sexual. Nothing to do with actual Poles.'

And on it goes. Viktor's cousin is a fashion journalist in Soho. Sergei's brother is in Leeds, trying his hand at crime. Mikhail's nephew, who had some luck with a gas company, is now in Mayfair, buying a gallery and a block of flats. Anybody who doesn't have family in Britain probably has it in France, or Germany, or Ireland, or even in Poland. So they end up nuking Belgium or somewhere, just for the look of the thing, but their hearts aren't really in it.

Is this not worth thinking about? How seriously can we take Vladimir Putin's new and frosty rhetoric, when his countrymen are walking among us and, in certain parts of London, almost certainly trying to buy our house? As you will know from ogling the spreads of any glossy Sunday style supplement, there are an estimated 300,000 Russians in the capital alone. Their compatriots back home may regard them as feckless, semi-treacherous wastrels, but bombing them would surely still be a vote-loser.

Yet how gleefully, for a short while, we leapt aboard the idea that it might, conceivably, be on the cards. Newspapers gave us exploded diagrams, lovingly picking out the multiple warheads in each missile, with helpful little casualty estimates on each. The Guardian ran a thoughtful piece on the practicalities of nuclear bunkers, the Sun offered one up in a reader competition. The threat of Armageddon had been sorely missed. We were thrilled to have it back.

As a wise man once wrote (well, wise-ish; it may have been Will Self) every generation creates its own spectre of the end of the world. The apocalypse used to be biblical, then it was nuclear, and now it is environmental. Frankly, environmental decay makes for a lousy apocalypse. It just doesn't quite cut the mustard. It is too slow, too gradual. The sky will never fall on our heads. It will just creep ever lower, giving our children's children a badly cricked neck. That is why we aren't doing anything about it. It is hard to summon the requisite fear.

Not so the apocalypses of old. Biblical apocalypse was an apocalypse with balls. Nuclear perhaps even more so. None of this children's children nonsense. Here. Now. The world, in an instant, cracked like a plate. A mere handful of survivors left staggering around a scorched earth, bald and with purple eyes.

For anybody born in the really scarily technological bit of the Cold War (towards the end, the bit when they all just went nuts) this sentiment has leached into the soul. For a time in the 1980s, you couldn't write a British children's book without making it bleak and awful, and setting it in some sort of irradiated, oozing, post-WW3 version of the North-East. And the films: never mind WarGames and Terminator, even Grease 2 had that slightly rapey seduction scene in a nuclear bunker. By a sort of ruthless consensual propaganda, this was the agreed future. It was just a matter of when.

The Russians, of course, didn't get Grease 2. For all his protestations of culture, Vladimir Putin probably still hasn't seen it. So he threatens nuclear war, in a narrow-eyed, muscular sort of way, and he probably expects outrage, or hysteria, or gibbering terror. Instead he gets wry nostalgia, and fun competitions in the tabloids. He's probably wondering how the hell we spend our days. Although these days, obviously, there are plenty of people he can ask.

El or many, of course, the apocalypse is just around the corner, and will happen on 1 July, when England's smoking ban comes in. Speaking as one who has braved many a Scottish pub since the ban came in north of the border, I sense that England is in for a shock.

Not that it is hard to quit smoking in pubs. It isn't. It is easy. It is a joy. Your drinking stamina is improved, the ale flows freely down the throat, without meeting those midnight plugs of tar, oats and sputum on the way. You pop out the door twice, three times in a night at most, where you taste the sweet, fresh night air, and meet all of the other interesting people who haven't properly got around to quitting either. There is a ruddy-faced edge of juvenilia to it. I approve.

No, the problem is inside. The problem is the smell. Pubs smell really, really bad. Sit there, in an old, traditional Edinburgh bar and you are assailed, olfactorily, by the indisputable knowledge that this is a building in which people have been drinking and breathing and sweating for hundreds of years. They have been to the urinals, and their aim has not been true. They have been sick, perhaps after going out to a chippy. Canny establishments are experimenting with fresheners. Others are hoping that they will simply air. As well they might. In 50 years.

Believe me, these pubs, in the Old Town and the Grassmarket, and in the City and the West End, are saturated by generations of the hardest, dirtiest living known to man. It is there, seeped into the stone. In a way, it is almost reassuring. We always thought that cigarettes were the culprit. They are not. They are a shield.