When it happened, of course, there was none of the shouting, none of the panic, none of the breaking of windows or looting or even the soft despair of mortality as the world rolled to its dead end. Some things stopped: there was no more bingo in the suddenly tasteful Sun, there were few arrests, there were no tourists in Washington.

But Washington was a perfect microcosm of the world it had created, now so close to destruction by the maturation of its own technology. And on this bright Sunday, Capitol Hill shone scrubbed in its untarnished power as the President brought together his roles — family man, leader of men, commander-in-chief, accepter of defeat — in the final broadcast.

‘Final’? No-one there would have thought of it as final; perhaps there was more slovenliness than usual in the CBS crew, perhaps the old President’s own face was showing fewer than normal of the smile lines he had so often paraded on the hustings beside his perfect life.

Yet the Potomac rolled undisturbed and there was still the odd protestor bothering to pace outside the White House; all crises were equal in PR terms.

The President began, conscious for the first time of his own corniness. ‘My fellow Americans’ — he wondered how many were out there, at the end of cables and aerials, how many were really honest Iowa farm stock with a kitchen radio and how many were Wall Street slickers with five screens running at once — ‘you know as much as I do about the coming days which face our country’ — who had written this?

Ingham — it was Ingham who wrote it, grey Ingham, once the keen Washington journalist fantasising his own Watergate, now a sour and doubtful aide — Ingham, tapping on the President’s shoulder now.

The CBS men woke up. Outside there was an aeroplane and a bird: symbols of this watershed the cameraman would never touch.

Ingham was still tapping on the President’s shoulder when he started reading the telex, and he had to jerk irritably away, cursing the cameras as he did so.

Then the old actor’s sense took over. ‘Yes, in hours we will meet the greatest trial we have faced since our nation’s birth. But now there is good news.’ A pause — melodramatise? Or speak strongly, go straight ahead?

Go straight ahead. ‘The next issue of CRASH will be on sale March 31.’