For such a provocative headline, it was strange to see the story Thatcher ‘threatened to nuke Argentina’ tucked away on page 17 of the Guardian. Perhaps the Editor’s opinion was that, being in a political biography of Mitterand, it might all be a bit exagerrated to make the book appear more interesting.

I really do hope that it is all made up. I would hate to think it was true for any number of reasons.

For a start, the threat was to nuke Buenos Aries. Not a battlefield nuke in the disputed territories, but an attack on a city hundreds of miles away which would have been on as much of a war footing as London was – i.e. not at all.

You could imagine her doing that as a sort of act of brinkmanship with no intention of carrying out the threat to get codes out of the French, but knowing what we do of the characters of Mitterand and Thatcher, what would have happened if the French had not handed over the codes. Mitterand would have been insufferably smug about facing down Thatcher. Would she have considered the fate of a large city, once one of the world’s top dozen, a small price to pay compared to losing face with the French?

At that time there was a general sense of fear about nuclear weapons. It was the time of When The Wind Blows, Protect & Survive. It would be nice to think that it was all cold war paranoia and that countries were not seriously considering to use nuclear weapons over a rock with some sheep on it in the South Pacific.

Not only that, but it would undermine the sanctimonious foundations of nuclear non-proliferation policies: that we are OK to have them because we are responsible and only keep them as a deterrent in some mutually-assured destruction scenario. If ever our government were thinking about using nuclear warheads against non-nuclear states how is that any worse than what the UK and US say that Iraq or Iran might do if they had such weapons?

And then there are the implications for ethics in the arms trade, if that is not an oxymoron. Did Argentina get their money back from France? The accusation is that France took money off Argentina in exchange for weapons, and then the first time they want to use them France give the potential targets the means to disable them. I think I would feel bilked if someone did that to me.

How many countries around the world who have bought French missiles must be looking at their expensive munitions and wondering if the French kept the codes for them too, and whether they have given them to anyone else. And will everyone else be wondering whether British, American and other arms manufacturers do the same thing?

Maybe that is the future for World peace? If nobody has the confidence that their weapons will actually work when they are needed then they are going to be extremely reluctant to get into a situation where they need to find out the hard way.

It is in turns fun, and frightening, to speculate on all this, so it is just as well that the likelihood of any of it being true is slim. It all hinges on the word of someone who met secretly with Mitterand so there will be no official records, and the other party to the conversations has been dead 10 years.