New Delhi, Sept. 9 -- FEAR CAN paralyse, but sometimes it saves the world. More than once in the cold war a shared dread of nuclear annihilation led American and Soviet leaders to pause and seek better ways to manage arsenals whose power defied decency and reason. Sometimes the terror felt by superpower rivals averted imminent disaster, as when John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev overruled their hardline counsellors to end the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. On other occasions the salutary effects of fear took longer to show themselves. A film, "The Brink of War", has just been released to mark the 40th anniversary of a meeting between Ronald Reagan and his Soviet counterpart, Mikhail Gorbachev, in Reykjavik. Held in a cramped, reputedly ...