APPROPRIATELY enough, the evening before the world was supposed to end last Sunday, I was watching a play about the development of the atom bomb. Called 'Copenhagen' and set in 1941, this seems a bizarre theme for a play, but it works well through its sparkling interplay of ideas and personalities.

Although I am no believer in Nostradamus's famous prophecies, my superstitious side does play 'what if' games with my rational half. Most of the French monk's gloomy forecasts are so ambiguously worded that you can read whatever you wish into them. But the one about terrible destruction foretold for this month was clearer than most; nevertheless, apart from the buzz on the internet about a 'psychic cloud' over China, nothing out of the way seems to have occurred. So far, anyway.

Despite my scepticism, I must confess my thoughts turned towards South Asia whenever there was a discussion about the possible source of the disaster last week. Since the 'war' in Kosovo has ended, there seemed to be no other major conflict on the horizon with the potential of widespread destruction except the ongoing conflict between India and Pakistan over Kashmir. Here are two nuclear powers who are eyeball to eyeball over an explosive border clash, and in this very month, the world is supposed to face great destruction caused by 'fire from the sky'.

Fortunately, better sense seems to have prevailed when Nawaz Sharif met Clinton, and the threat of 'fire from the sky' seems to have receded. Until the next time, that is. The grim fact is that now both nations have nuclear capability, there will be a strong temptation to use it to threaten and browbeat each other, and there is no telling which nervous finger will pull the trigger when the game of nuclear bluff goes out of control. When the United States and the Soviet Union confronted each other for decades, they were fortunate in being separated by the Atlantic Ocean. So in theory, the leaders had around 20 minutes to abort a missile or defuse a crisis in case of a miscalculation or the irresponsible act of a rogue missile battery commander. The leaders sitting in New Delhi and Islamabad enjoy no such luxury.

In addition to these worrying factors are the uncertainties introduced by an upcoming election in India and the question of who is in charge in Pakistan. Given all these frightening imponderables, it is not surprising that our thoughts should turn towards South Asia when there is talk of mass destruction.

Returning to 'Copenhagen', although the debate at the heart of the play may seem dated, it is still valid to enquire into the social and political role of scientists: should they design weapons of mass destruction for their respective nations? This is the dilemma explored at length by Michael Frayn in his brilliant play. The cast consists of three people: Niels Bohr, his wife Sara and Werner Heisenberg. The two men were at the cutting edge of quantum mechanics and particle physics before the Second World War, and contributed enormously to our understanding of the true nature of matter and energy.

Heisenberg, a German, was Bohr's student in Denmark in the early twenties, and soon acquired fame with his 'Uncertainty Principle'. The rise of anti-Semitism in Germany in the thirties drove away the cream of physicists, most of whom were Jews. Warmly welcomed in the United States, they launched the Manhattan Project to manufacture atom bombs. Isolated from the latest research, Heisenberg headed the German programme that did not really achieve very much.

The playwright focuses on a moment of time in 1941 when the German scientist visited Copenhagen and speculates on what happened in his meeting with Bohr. In a literary sense, Frayn applies Heisenberg's 'Uncertainty Principle' in his attempt to establish what the two talked about: the play offers three different scenarios, with Bohr's wife defending her husband's role and finally accusing his ex-pupil of the worst possible motive in approaching the idealistic Bohr.

Heisenberg vacillates between two positions. The first is that he took a humanitarian stance in not making an atom bomb for his Nazi masters; but he also admits that he had failed to carry out a crucial set of calculations that would have confirmed that a chain reaction was very possible to achieve. The audience is asked to decide if Germany failed in its nuclear ambitions because of Heisenberg's idealism or incompetence. These ambiguities and ambitions make for riveting theatre, but at the end, I was left asking myself whether Dr A. Q. Khan and his other colleagues in charge of Pakistan's nuclear programme (or indeed their Indian counterparts) have ever been troubled by such moral issues.

Of course a fundamental difference is that Dr Khan and his team are functioning as engineers manufacturing nuclear devices on the basis of the principles discovered earlier in this century by Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Fermi and others. They are not breaking any fresh ground; indeed, Dr Khan is himself a metallurgist and not a nuclear physicist at all. But nevertheless, I wonder if any of them engage in any introspection, asking themselves if their work is morally justified. After all, if one's research (or even application of existing theoretical work) results in a device that can kill millions, surely such activity should result in sleepless nights for anybody who accepts responsibility for his actions.

The Nuremburg trials at the end of the Second World War established the principle that to act according to orders from a superior authority did not absolve a person of his responsibility. Consequently, those engaged in research and development of weapons of mass destruction cannot hide behind the defence that they are just doing what they are paid and told to do. What distinguishes humans from animals is free will: the former can distinguish between right and wrong, and act on this basis; the latter act on instinct.

But these are issues best discussed far from the smoke and din of battle: once a nation is at war, many of these moral distinctions are lost sight of. The war casts a long shadow over the cerebral and passionate conversations between the protagonists of 'Copenhagen'. Even Bohr, a half Jew, admits that he helped in the development of the atom bomb after he fled to the United States to escape Nazi persecution.

Today, such existential debates seem almost irrelevant. Shorn of moral moorings, we drift in a sea of convenience and compromise, seeking only the shore of material plenty. Perhaps when Nostradamus warned us of the destruction of the world at the end of the millennium, he was referring to the end of morality.