ANYONE who reads this column regularly will know I’m quite obsessed with nuclear war. Actually, I can’t understand how others live their lives untroubled by the topic. Since 1945, how have we been able to think about anything else?

It used to be said that war was the epic subject and that the greatest novels and art sprang from it.

Every now and then there’ll be a fashion for books which deal with domestic issues and the authors ask why the tough, gutsy war books should hog all the attention. It’s because war is the biggest, all-encompassing thing. How can it be otherwise? War was never just about men marching off to fight in a field. Society is changed by it; families are bereaved; famines, massacres, epidemics and genocide often come with it; revolutions rise up and governments fall. So blog about the school run if you like, but war is epic.

Nothing can surpass war in terms of scope and horror – until the summer of 1945 when the first atomic bomb exploded in the New Mexico desert. With one appalling flash, war as mankind knew it was over. Battles, tanks and planes were suddenly puny. All the horrific weapons and armour counted for nothing because war could be fought and won in a matter of minutes. Amass all the soldiers and tanks and guns you like. Amass the greatest army the world has seen. It doesn’t matter. It can all be vaporised in a flash.

So even war, the great epic theme, was made somehow small. A nuke can knock you out in seconds and all your military force and skill counts for nothing unless, of course, you have nuclear weapons of your own to “deter” the enemy. In those cases, war ceases to be the issue and instead the central theme is the agony, tension and diplomacy of avoiding war, of skirting the topic while always skilfully dangling it in the background like a hideous black puppet.

That was John Pilger’s theory in The Coming War On China (STV, Tuesday) where he argued that the USA is constantly seeking war to feed its enormous arms industry. On the surface, the country is part of the global economy and therefore must make deals and forge relationships with other industrial powers but it is nonetheless seeking “perpetual war” as that is how it keeps its mightiest industry ticking over. The massive amount of weapons it produces must find enemies to fight or the whole thing collapses. Benevolent on the surface, it is hungry for war and the latest country it has in its sights is China.

So says Pilger, but the viewer must bear in mind that John Pilger is obviously anti-American and, while this is not necessarily a bad thing, it will naturally colour this film and colour it in bold shades of red and yellow.

We’re told that the USA is encircling China with its warships, trying to contain the country’s growing economic and military clout, and it’s using Japan in the region as “a glove over the American fist”. There is a huge and troubling military build-up in the South China Sea as the American warships gather and as China asserts its authority by building airstrips. A conflict seems inevitable, Pilger suggests.

A Chinese commentator proposes that it is in the nature of the West, specifically America, to seek to convert others. Never satisfied with their own little corner of the planet, they need to strike out and try to press others into their way of life, as it was with Christianity and the crusades. They want to convert people. “The Chinese are not that stupid!” he says. The implication is that the Americans are, and that any war which arises will be the fault of the USA.

The film is so utterly anti-American that it’s often hard to take it seriously and instead of being receptive the viewer is put on their guard, wondering instead: “What am I being sold here?”

It’s a pity that the second half of the film is so fiercely devoted to portraying America as bloodthirsty, and the Chinese as decent sorts who might just have a teensy little problem with human rights, because if Pilger wanted to land some punches on the USA the first half of his film does it brilliantly.

The first section is about America’s nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands. Once a paradise of white beaches and palm trees, the blue sea now contains the “deathly void” of a huge black crater made by a hydrogen bomb, and these repeated bomb tests showered the islands and their people with radiation.

“The sun rose one morning then rose again as Apocalypse,” says Pilger and you wish he’d tone down the melodramatic language as there’s no need here for exaggeration. All he needs to do is let the islanders speak as they tell us of the deaths, deformities and thyroid cancers which struck their communities.

Pilger says they were used as guinea pigs so the Americans could test the effects of fallout on the human body. And yet, so soon he swerves away from this appalling topic and starts preaching about China. All the fury he feels towards the US was being expertly directed in this first half, then it dissipates in the second and just becomes tedious anti-American lecturing.

I’d recommend you watch the first half of this film, but feel free to ignore the rest.