Former Soviet chief Mikhail Gorbachev, we are told by a report in the Guardian, has voiced support for those calling for Berlin to establish Europe's first Cold War museum.

Among the arguments for such a museum, proposed in an open letter signed by former heads of government, foreign ministers and ambassadors and published in the German press, is that a younger generation have scant understanding of the Cold War and few avenues to be able to get a glimpse of what it was like.

This is by no means difficult to believe. On Bulgarian television in recent days, it was said that one school-leaver wrote in his history exam this year that the Cold War was so called because it was fought in winter.

For those not familiar with the fact that such a debate exists, it may surprise you to know that there is considerable strife among historians about when the Cold War started and ended. There is a school of thought that it started with the 19th century contest between Russia and the United States over trade in the Far East.

It may as well be added that while there is much talk of a "new Cold War" with Vladimir Putin and energy interests, among others, on the march against Washington, in some quarters it seems that there is no acceptance of the idea that the Cold War ever ended.

On the same day that I read the Guardian article, I visited Pravda.ru, the online version of the old Kremlin mouthpiece. Sample headlines: "The United States of Torture" and "Nato should collapse the way that the USSR did".

The same Putin, at a news conference in France after a visit in his new guise as prime minister, responded to a question about Nato expansion to include Georgia and Ukraine by saying, "the expansion of Nato is the construction of new Berlin Walls in Europe".

For some time, I have wanted to publish a book entitled "Cold War jokes and why they were funny" but going by the stuff on Pravda and other such tub-thumping Russian media outlets, it seems I can safely keep it on hold to while away my idle time in retirement. I did not bother looking up whether there are neo-McCarthyite websites based in the US, but feel confident that there probably are. If you do not know who McCarthy was, this may be an argument for Berlin to hurry up with that museum project.

Leaving aside historical debates, I can only hope that when a Cold War museum is opened, it has very large space available. It is not just a simple matter of putting a Trabant, some spy stuff and a video of the Berlin Wall coming down (considering that all these are already on display in existing museums in Germany) but also quite a few other items. Velcro, for one, given that it was a by-product of the space race, which was in turn accelerated by the Cold War. A friend suggested communist bloc computers, given that they would not have existed if the Soviets had not been barred from being allowed to buy Western IT. One would need a very large room for medals - Hero of Socialist Labour, and all that, and another for various arms limitation treaties. From the West, there should be an array of bumper stickers: "Better Dead Than Red" and "Hey, Moscow! Up Yours" among them. For that matter, to save costs, an entire wing could be built out of copies of paperback novels and complete disc sets of television series (eg, Amerika) with Cold War themes, with special emphasis on the trashier ones that posited life in the US and in the UK under Soviet rule.

It is no doubt a good idea to put up a Cold War museum in Berlin, at the site of Checkpoint Charlie, as the open letter proposes. But it should be a franchise, and perhaps some enterprising soul could get funding to open the Bulgarian branch, which after all could draw on a great deal of memorabilia from now-closed exhibitions from People's Republic of Bulgaria museums. One need only rewrite the labels. There is, of course, also an ample supply of state security dossiers.

The nice thing about a Cold War museum is, of course, accepting the theory that it has not actually ended allows the opportunity for a succession of new exhibits. As one Bulgarian friend said of the Cold War, "It's like Star Wars. It has several episodes".