Trump's Cold War bid for peace...back in '85!

IT IS 1985, Thatcher's Britain is booming, car phones are as big as your head, Back to the Future had just been released and across the pond a 39-year-old Donald Trump is New York's real estate king.

- By Richard Ashmore

Madonna's hit Material Girl stormed the charts this year, summing up a time of excess when the word "yuppie", young upwardly-mobile professional, was used in the Wall Street Journal to describe cash-hungry city workers.

But away from brazen Western capitalism, the Cold War and the looming spectre of a nuclear war which could annihilate everything was still a reality.

In Moscow, Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev had the ability to press the button on more than 30,000 atomic warheads. His counterpart, US President Ronald Reagan, had around 23,000 of the doomsday weapons.

The horror of the use of these apocalyptic devices was something close to the heart of future President Trump at this time, and still is today.

In February 1985, Trump lost his beloved uncle John G Trump, a renowned physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Speaking about his uncle during a campaign speech in 2016, Trump said he was "a great professor and scientist and engineer", adding: "Nuclear is powerful. My uncle explained that to me many years ago."

In 1985, soon after the death of his uncle, a younger Trump contacted the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War for what perhaps might seem a surprising reason.

Speaking to the Sunday Express, Dr Jim Muller, a cardiologist at Boston's Peter Bent Brigham Hospital and co-founder of IPPNW, revealed Trump contacted the organisation asking for help to speak to Gorbachev.