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There is, in general, something dissatisfying about counterfactual history. It's too flimsy. Once you have taken more than a single step away from what really happened, the variables make all speculation pointless.

Another speech we have never heard was written for Richard Nixon in case of a Moon landing disaster. "Fate has ordained that the men who went to the Moon to explore in peace will stay on the Moon to rest in peace. These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice." 5.2. _____ The two speeches have something else in common: they both imagine the worst, and leave us relieved that it didn't come about.

Interestingly, when it comes to world-shaking events, we don't do a lot of speculating the other way round. 5.3. _____ They might actually have been written, but once the alternative course of action transpired, it's only natural that their authors would be at pains to make their choices seem inevitable. How much more pleasant it is to creep to the edge of the precipice, and then draw gratefully back, than to look up from the ravine below and know that you are stuck where you are.

You can be sure that all over the planet there are political advisers carrying laptops that bear drafts of speeches written to address the aftermath of the unthinkable. 5.4. _____ It must be an awful duty to have to write that sort of thing – to imagine your way into a catastrophe and to put in so much work on a project that you fervently hope turns out to be redundant. When you read these speeches, part of their creepy power comes from the detail with which they are written. Far more disconcerting than the Queen's line about "the madness of war" is the passage later on in which the safety of her "beloved son Andrew" is called into doubt.

A. Collectively, they might be entitled "In Case of Emergency". This is an unsettling thought, a bit like the idea that newspapers have large files of obituaries for people who aren't yet dead.

B. Since the motives for their existence and their revelation are much less powerful than World War III or extra-terrestrial disaster, their impact on the reader is also much weaker.

C. Just as in the case of the Queen's speech, here the imaginary hardens into something tangible, something that was so nearly the case that it has left its shadow in reality. And so to read it is to feel the thrill of the uncanny, as if you have just received a postcard from an adjacent universe.

D. There is no surviving text for a speech in which Harry Truman explains why the US didn't use the atomic bomb, or one in which Tony Blair explains why another UN resolution would be a prerequisite for invading Iraq.

E. We haven't learned anything substantive from the speech. And yet, when it was released as part of the latest National Archive declassification, most newspapers concluded that this figment of the imagination was more interesting than a number of real events.

5.1. _____

5.2. _____

5.3. _____

5.4. _____