“First we got the bomb and that was good/’Cause we love peace and motherhood/Then Russia got the bomb, but that’s OK/’Cause the balance of power’s maintained that way!/Who’s next?”

So begins an immortal song about nuclear proliferation written in the early 1960s by the now 90-year-old American satirist and mathematician Tom Lehrer. Answering his own question, he ticked off France, China, Indonesia, South Africa, Egypt and Israel, ending with the happy warble: “We’ll try to stay serene and calm/When Alabama gets the bomb!” The Deep South never did get the bomb, as far as we know. But could the next candidate be?Germany?

You might think so, given the excitement triggered by a recent front-page essay in a German weekend paper, headlined “Do We Need the Bomb?” and accompanied by an image of the US Fat Man bomb, which destroyed Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, overlaid with the colours of the German flag.