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A dark dawn: the nuclear age is with us

By Jake Lynch - posted Monday, 27 July 2009


The problem is, how to get rid of it, and this is where the apostates, such as Peter Garrett and Friends of the Earth, might be urged to consult their memory banks. Britain, for instance, still has not settled on one site for the long-term disposal of waste from its existing nuclear plants. The cost, now estimated at well over £70 billion, or about US$120 billion, has been palmed off on the government, while the attractive new-build opportunities, with their guaranteed revenue streams, are handed out to the private sector as a form of corporate welfare.

The trouble is, no one wants nuclear waste on their doorstep. To resist, with Professor Zelizer, the cannibalisation of my own memory, I recall attending, as a mouthy teenager, the inaugural meeting of HAND, Humberside Against Nuclear Dumping, which successfully saw off plans for a “repository” at South Killingholme, a village on the south bank of the Humber estuary. Later, the Blair government, at the height of its popularity in the early 2000s, raised, then had to drop, proposals in a “green paper” to exempt such strategic siting decisions from having to negotiate local planning procedures.

Across the Atlantic, the Hanford reactor that produced plutonium for Los Alamos was mothballed long ago, Bernstein notes. The risk from leaks to swimmers and anglers downstream on the Columbia River was hushed up when it was operational, but it now represents a US$10 billion time bomb which might - just might - be made relatively safe within six years or so.

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Bernstein stops short of the deeper philosophical questions raised by this sequence of events. Instead he contents himself with quoting an assessment by one of the scientists involved, that the war was costing half a million lives a month, and had to be decisively stopped.

There is more to it than that, of course, and for further exploration, we must turn to Stephanie Cooke’s “cautionary history of the nuclear age”. She accepts that one bomb could have been rationalised as necessary to end hostilities, but two? The real reason for the second, she says, was to demonstrate power, and the willingness to use it, since “the first nation to detonate a weapon based on the energy inside an atom would control the world”. Moreover, the openness that had enabled liberal democracy to flourish was now consigned to the past: “for the new order, security and secrecy were essential. America became a classified nation, at once fearsome and fearful”.

Her book therefore attempts to lift the lid on the political calculations, and human motivations and doubts, behind the official version of nuclear age nostrums. Atomic power stations were supposed to produce electricity “too cheap to meter”, and Cooke makes what is, surely, the essential point: their real purpose was to win public acceptance, as a fortuitous “fringe benefit”, of an arsenal rapidly expanding in size and destructive potential.

Today, Britain and Australia are both members of the Nuclear Suppliers Group, which the Bush Administration exploited to undermine the Non-Proliferation Treaty by passing nuclear fuel to India, simultaneously attempting to thwart any nuclear “ambitions” on the part of Iran. The UK, meanwhile, is set on replacing its Trident submarine-based missiles - an opportune moment, perhaps, for fissile energy to get a new smiley face.

Cooke meets Joseph Rotblat, the physicist who left the Manhattan Project and founded the Pugwash group, dedicated to promoting understanding between the superpowers: proof, in his own trajectory, that there was nothing inevitable in scientists consenting to their expertise being harnessed for martial ends. And she recounts the doomed diplomatic effort, led by Henry Kissinger, to prevent Israel from acquiring nuclear capabilities, because, in his words, it was “more likely than almost any other country” to use them.

Kissinger’s sworn Washington foes, the neo-conservatives, eventually had their moment in the sun, of course, and Cooke ends by considering the slippage, under the Bush Administration, in thresholds for the first use of nuclear weapons by the US itself. In the civil domain, the “nuclear renaissance” now underway creates a lucrative market for uranium suppliers like Australia, but, she observes, also multiplies the risk, of both accidents and proliferation.

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We need a network of internationally controlled depositories, Cooke argues, where countries could send their weapons systems for dismantling. And we need “an aggressive, solution-seeking program to meet future energy demand”, investigating viable alternative sources to nuclear power and characterised by the “brilliance” on display in the creation of nuclear weapons in the first place.

Nuclear fission, an artefact of modernity, represents a great achievement of progress, but it could end all human life. That paradox has done as much as anything to propel us, arguably, into a postmodern condition, one in which we are now more pessimistic about human agency in its ability to shape the world around us. Can we come through the nuclear age to create a safer shared future? I would venture yes, we can, perhaps on no better grounds, ultimately, than the words of Sir Ernest Rutherford, quoted by Bernstein, when asked to justify his assessment of a new experiment: “I feel it in my water!” On present trends, however, the precise chemical composition of that water, here in Australia, might be harder to predict.

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This column is adapted from a book review that originally appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald on Saturday July 18, 2009. Also published by Trend Media Service.



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About the Author

Associate Professor Jake Lynch divides his time between Australia, where he teaches at the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies of Sydney University, and Oxford, where he writes historical mystery thrillers. His debut novel, Blood on the Stone, is published by Unbound Books. He has spent the past 20 years developing, researching, teaching and training in Peace Journalism: work for which he was honoured with the 2017 Luxembourg Peace Prize, awarded by the Schengen Peace Foundation.

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