I’m going through some old notes and came across an interesting tidbit about Graham Greene and the Victorians.
The context, briefly: A 1966 review in the Times Literary Supplement tackled a new biography of a Victorian general, and the reviewer questioned the biography author’s belief in the general’s “death wish.” Graham Greene wrote a Letter to the Editor in response, and here’s the relevant bit:
The popular writer does not describe a new obsession – he is quick to describe one which had already been obvious for a long time. Men and women did go to Africa to die… In our age – perhaps because of that boring bomb – the will to survive has become the main obsession, and critics demand more objective evidence of the death wish than they demand of the survival wish.
I have only the briefest memories of the late stages of the Cold War, and none of the years when nuclear warfare seemed like a real threat, so I find this idea – that the atom bomb could radically alter our relationship to our own mortality – seriously interesting.
Plus, how great is the phrase “that boring bomb”?
Eva Holland 
The bomb always hung over our heads; we dealt with it in stupid ways-duck and cover,that sort of thing and we lied about it constantly, but it was always there, and is still there for me as a lurking memory eyeballing me from the shadows. Those memories of our intense stupidity remind me that Greene was right. Do it now, whether it was sex or drugs or rock and roll makes perfect sense if you lived, as I did within, within a hundred mile circle filled with missles and their warheads. Remember the fifty million or more who died in the war and consider what sort of lies a person has to tell to make it the Good War.
I remember it, just about. Had the wits scared off me by a TV drama called Threads about nuclear bomb dropping on Sheffield, a sizeable industrial city here. It was horribly realistic and I was 10 at the time. Love Graham Greene, he had a great way with words. Heart of the matter one of my fave novels definitely.