Every time Donald Trump opens his mouth lately, like when he recklessly promised “fire and fury” to North Korea on Tuesday, it serves as an awkward reminder that the United States had some 1,400 nuclear warheads ready to be launched on his authority and a stockpile of thousands more.

Of course, they’ve always been there. Although the stockpiles were whittled down following the end of the cold war, the United States and Russia have each retained an arsenal big enough to destroy human civilisation, if not human life. It’s just that after their 40-year standoff wound down from the late 80s on, nukes seemed a less urgent danger. Over time, they faded as an issue in the news and as a preoccupation in the culture.

By contrast, during my own childhood in the early to mid 1980s, the culture was constantly referencing the looming threat of annihilation. So much so that it made it all seem inevitable.

My primary school years in Australia roughly coincided with the so-called “second cold war”. This was after a newly elected Ronald Reagan began adopting increasingly strident rhetoric about the Soviet Union, stepped up the arms race and initiated the “Star Wars” program, which threw an uneasy detente out of balance. This led to increased tensions, and as it turns out, we all came close to destruction several times in those years.

During this period, pop culture – even the stuff aimed at kids – took a dark turn, and often frankly canvassed the consequences of nuclear war.

Raymond Briggs’s 1982 graphic novel, When the Wind Blows, was one thing I recall reading obsessively then. It tells the story of a lovably drawn elderly British couple, Jim and Hilda Bloggs, who had survived the blitz and take the same dutiful cheer into the lead-up to a nuclear attack.

We witness their pitifully inadequate preparations – like painting the windows – which they glean from government pamphlets. And then we see their heartbreaking, inexorable descent into radiation sickness and death. The comic made it clear, without anything like overt sloganeering, that in the event of a full scale nuclear war, millions of ordinary people – everyone – would die, and anything any government said to the contrary was a lie. (They made a film from the book which I could never bring myself to see).

In the arcades at the time, there was a game that functioned as a kind of embodied parody of Reaganite missile defence. Atari’s Missile Command had the player defending cities against incoming ICBMs whose pixelated vapor trails charted their trajectory.

It’s said that its designer, Dave Theurer, suffered nightmares of nuclear war as he was working on it. Small wonder. The game is unwinnable, and eventually the player, and all that he is defending, will succumb. A lot of golden age games were effectively endless in this manner, but at a time when governments were proposing Missile Command as policy, the game’s minimalism and futility had a special resonance.

There was apocalyptic material for the whole family to enjoy. The Day After, televised in the United States in November 1983, and in Australia a little later, was a telemovie that showed the US devastated by nuclear war and collapsing into anarchy and misery in its wake. Once again, it proceeded by focussing on the suffering (and death) of ordinary people – the group depicted lived in and around Lawrence, Kansas.

It terrified millions, including my eight year old self. 100 million Americans watched it, high level debate ensued, and it arguably changed the whole discourse around nuclear war. For Ronald Reagan, however, it just confirmed everything that he was already doing. As Gizmodo reported earlier in the year, Reagan’s diary records that “My own reaction was one of our having to do all we can to have a deterrent & to see there is never a nuclear war”. In other words: stay the course. Later he called it “‘anti-nuke’ propaganda”.

There was a pervasive post-apocalyptic aesthetic in the cinemas and video stores of early to mid 1980s, many strongly influenced by Mad Max. George Miller’s film, its sequels and knock-offs (like Battle Truck) promised a Hobbesian nightmare of warlords and intense resource competition in a world destroyed by war. Other films explored the same subject matter more obliquely. From New Zealand, The Quiet Earth shows the last survivors of human race destroyed by science run amok.

In music, apocalyptic bangers were almost too numerous to count. They were by no means confined to underground protest music – frequently they were world-conquering monster hits.

Suddenly, we find ourselves in a situation where Australia’s most important ally is led by a man who is threatening another nuclear power, and whose rhetoric on nukes is far more bellicose even than Reagan’s.

We may be due for a revival of this anxious sensibility, but the art that is made may not have the broad effects it once did. In part that is because of the structural changes that put Trump in the White House.

There is far less shared cultural space, and no network broadcast, or film, could hope to reach such a broad demographic chunk as did The Day After. There is no large, united peace movement to amplify its message. And we all know that were it made today, the president would not confine his protest to his diary. More likely he would dismiss it in a mid-broadcast tweet as “fake news”.