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You may wonder why there should ever be a problem about this. Well, the problem haunts the broadcaster every time he sits before a microphone and yet is something that probably never even occurs to most listeners.

The fact is that the spoken word is so topical everybody believes it's being spoken at the moment of hearing even if you know if you've noticed the fine print which says "recorded".

Even veteran radio critics are as hypnotised by the medium as five-year-olds - what they hear is being spoken now as witness this sad story which was bound to happen sometime and, one weekend in the spring of 1961, did.

It was a slack weekend. In those days I recorded the talk on Friday. I could see nothing earth shaking. Anyway I'm not a pundit. There's always something going on round the corner at the grocer's or the lunch counter likely to interest more people than, for instance, this weekend a pronouncement by Mr Kenneth Starr that "some of the things that a co-operating witness can do is assist us in consensual monitoring which we described at a high level of generality". Ah so.

So though, of course, I have no idea now what I decided to talk about, that dull weekend, except a hope that it was some quirky or odd or funny thing that would touch some human beings come Sunday morning.

The talk was, as usual, recorded, timed, packaged and flown overnight and passed by British Customs as non-contraband and non-inflammable. It was played, as usual in those days, first on Sunday evening and then - for the larger motor car audience - on Monday morning.

It just so happened that for the first time in ages a prominent English radio critic had chosen to review that talk.

Came Sunday morning and by dawn's early light he knew - all the world knew - that the Russians had, overnight, pulled a fast one on the United States - they had rocketed Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin around the Earth, the first human to travel in space.

Of course I knew it as soon as the critic did. Did he stop to say: "Of course, he must have recorded this a day or so ago"?

No, he sat down and wrote, with relish: "One thing you must say for Cooke, when the last - the final bomb - has dropped on us all, he'll still be there in New York waffling away as usual."

This reminiscence is by way of a protective shield against the chance that by the time these words are, as we say, aired Iraq may be thundering with exploding American and British missiles. If you know, I'll know. Though I ought to say that this time, as I talk, there's every sign that Saddam Hussein may have had a point in having his prime minister say in, I must say, more pungent English than Mr Kenneth Starr uses: "All the documents we have we have shown you, all that we don't have we don't have, all the documents that don't exist, don't exist."

The surrender treaty agreement mentions the right to inspect "arms-related evidence", a phrase which Mr Starr, I'm sure, would gladly spend several months explicating - if that's the word he'd have in mind, which I think it is - if he were ever hired by Saddam Hussein.

But there are two other nasty reasons for withholding the missiles which give us pause and which, I'm sure, Saddam always has in mind.

One is we know what the Iraqi people would be seeing on their television sets the first evening after an air strike. The veteran Washington commentator Meg Greenfield has put this better than anyone:

"There are plenty of critics of the American military who will scoff at the very idea of such squeamishness, citing our introduction of atomic weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II, our saturation bombing of Dresden and a range of brutal actions in Vietnam.

"But all that took place a long time ago as these things are measured and the context of our lives is different now. We were actively and continuously engaged in combat then, for one thing, and for another everything was not, as now, visible instantaneously - the deaths and the maimings and above all the dying infants and their wailing desolate parents.

"Many such pictures have been imprinted on the national consciousness and tug us back from our fighting resolve."

This, I believe, is very true. The second, more hard-hearted misgiving, is one the White House and the Pentagon have been wrestling with, literally, for years. When a poll is taken and people are asked: "If Saddam doesn't allow full inspection, should we bomb the forbidden sites or not?" the question is meaningless and so, therefore, is the answer because part of the national consciousness too is a picture of the bombing targets, like something as solid and visible as an ammunition dump or a presidential palace.

A truer question would be: 'How do you attack a test tube or a file of papers describing a poison, both of which are buried somewhere underground in a desert larger than California?'

It has already been calculated that to have the luck of destroying even a quarter of the relevant evidence - weapons, research tools, gas tubes, chemicals - the aerial bombing would have to be so abominably widespread as to cause the massacre of many thousands of children and those despairing mothers. All seen at once tonight and every night throughout the world leaving, whatever other impression, a guilty impression of the United States as a heartless monster.

Since the invention of television I don't know what the answer to this is.

So finally and now surprisingly being talked openly about by the president, secretary of defence and some of the Congress is the thought, the longed for possibility, of overthrowing Saddam and his regime and that has brought up a subject that has long been a forbidden phrase in Congress - ground troops. Desert Storm number two, with certainly no sanction from the United Nations.

Well whatever has happened, missiles or no missiles, these things will be on the minds of the administration and, if it has happened, on everybody's mind.

In the meantime, if we've threatened yet another final ultimatum what is on the minds of at least half the American population - and that's about the number of Americans who own stocks - is how to explain the all-time record closing figure of the New York Stock Exchange, of the Dow Industrials that is, last Monday.

In July, it seems more like a year ago, we were revelling in the euphoria of a never ending Clinton prosperity, matching the Coolidge prosperity of the 1920s, practically zero inflation, lowest unemployment rate in, how many years? - 20, 30 - and four times as many people in the stock market as in the joyous days of Coolidge. And the market expanding and expanding or was it just a swelling bubble ready to burst.

And then dark clouds to spoil our blue skies came drifting in quickly from Japan. So Japan was not the brilliant dream economy after all. Worse was to follow: the collapse of the economies of other South East Asian countries.

Then we had the first warnings that Brazil - the bell-wether of the South American economies - was in grave trouble and that gave the first prod to the North American optimists.

By last week all the talking heads on the financial channel - experts of all kinds - would tell us why and what for most of 24 hours a day. They were beginning, for the first time, to argue, after several hundred point drops and the market going down from its 9,000 peak into the 7,000s, were we or were we not sliding down the Gadarene slope into at least a valley if not the pits?

And then came the soaring Roman candle of last Monday, like a dazzling sentence out of Tom Wolfe - bang, flash, whoosh - up 214, a record close.

Next morning, no later, we had definitive explanations of where the United States now stands - of its prosperity, better its economy. I will give you briefly the two extreme views from Mr Optimist and Mr Pessimist though I hope you understand both of them would claim to be objective, scientific analysts.

The Optimist: 'Wall Street panicked this summer but the sky did not fall. This week the big stocks hit record highs, even junk bonds show new life. There is new confidence in corporate takeovers.

'Brazil has been bailed out, Japan is taking promising steps to recovery, the International Monetary Fund is saving Russia. These moves and the Federal Reserve's three cuts in interest rates have done the trick.'

The Pessimist: 'Well has it? The whole preceding argument is wishful thinking. Huge stock increases with no matching earnings make the United States stock market a very risky place indeed.

'Consumer credit is at an all time high and worse, household savings have dropped for the first time in 60 years.

'In short the American people cannot go on forever spending more than they earn. That is the frightening nub of it.'

These are very brief drastic summaries of arguments spun out with much impressive if incomprehensible jargon. It's a happy surprise, therefore, that the more persuasive pessimist's view comes right down to what Mr Micawber told young David Copperfield:

"Annual income of £20, annual expenditure £19 9s 6d, result happiness. Annual income of £20, annual expenditure £20 0s 6d, result misery - the blossom is blighted."