Britain has only a shadow government. Its opposition is the shadow of a shadow, and fading. It is a government made not to shape reality but to conceal it. Yet the uncountenanced reality replicates itself like a compulsive gesture or an obsessive fantasy.
British records and social institutions are shielded by the laws that protect military secrets. There was a government attempt to suppress the 1987 report on inequalities in health that led to its being distributed from behind a guitar store, according to the press. Yet there is a profound respect for the conventions of secretiveness reflected in the willingness of distinguished men to compile and interpret information which conceals the conditions their work purports to describe.
Secrets are not merely kept, I think, but treasured. They give latitude to the old vice of punitive and abusive behavior, which lends piquancy to the great apparent seemliness of the people who preside over these same abuses. I have, over the years, gathered stories about the extraordinary exploitation of a boys’ orphanage in Northern Ireland, and about an elderly woman horribly murdered, apparently by the police, because of her involvement in nuclear issues. Accounts of abusiveness and, especially, filth, in hospitals, prisons, insane asylums, and military training camps are very common, and simply too disgraceful to repeat. Anyone who is curious can go to the library.
In the nineteenth century the uncountenanced poor were called the “residuum.” The same word was used to mean sewage. Scholars will note the powerful association of the socially rejected with filth. For example, British prisons have no toilets. Prisoners share densely crowded cells with a plastic bucket, which is emptied by them once each day. Some of these prisoners are debtors, of course, who have lived with such insult and nastiness since Britain first began its half millennium of misericordia.
That there should be a great secret, and a great denial; that the secret should involve filth and violence, in forms that are rarefied but at the same time quintessential; that there should be manufacture and world commerce and enormous profits involved, and a work force disciplined by poverty; all these things make Sellafield seem of a piece with its cultural setting. Finally, however, I am at a loss to describe the place it occupies in reality, wreathed as it is with distorted perceptions, with information pulled out of shape by the strategies of denial. I do not know the meaning of the violence the British government has done to its country and the world. I am sure no one could explain it to me. I think I am describing pathology.
In 1909 the quondam Fabian H. G. Wells published a novel titled Tono-Bungay, which anticipates the British nuclear enterprise in its most extraordinary aspect, the commercial importation of radioactive waste. Wells introduces the subject almost as an aside, yet with an eerie precision of detail. The stuff is called quap, “ … the most radioactive stuff in the world. That’s quap! It’s a festering mass of earths and heavy metals, polonium, radium, ythorium, thorium, curium and new things, too … There they are, mucked up together in a sort of rotting sand. What it is, how it got made, I don’t know … There it lies in two heaps, one small, one great, and the world for miles about it is blasted and scorched and dead. You can have it for the getting.”
The quap lies along the coast, “an arena fringed with bone-white dead trees, a sight of the hard-blue sea line beyond the dazzling surf and a wide desolation of dirty shingle and mud, bleached and scarred.” It is to be imported into England to make light-bulb filaments and gas mantles. These futurists should be listed too: British Nuclear Fuels now uses the radioactivity of gas mantles to make the point that radioactivity is a homely and familiar phenomenon. On two occasions British Telecom has disposed of tens of thousands of tritium-filled (therefore luminous) telephone dials as radioactive waste, and there are plans to bury a million more. False teeth and exit signs contain radioactive materials.14 Since no law controls the use of radioactive materials in British products, no doubt other ingenious applications have been found for them. In Wells’s fiction, the quap, which sickens the crew of the ship used to transport it, eats its way through the bottom and is lost in the sea.
Tono-Bungay is about British enterprise, a raw novelty in the early twentieth century, as it had been through the three or four centuries preceding. It eludes description in the terms of traditional moral understanding, being, therefore, a vast field for opportunism and improvisation, as it had been for three or four centuries and as it is now. The obsessive bringing to bear of disapprobation upon “unprofitable” elements of the population has always implied an enormous freedom for those who float in the ether of profit.
The key to interpreting British behavior is always economic. Clearly H. G. Wells knew eighty years ago what consequences would follow from the accumulation of nuclear detritus along a coast. He wrote: “There is something — the only word that comes near it is cancerous—and that is not very near, about the whole of quap, something that creeps and lives as a disease lives by destroying … To my mind radioactivity is a real disease of matter. Moreover, it is a contagious disease. It spreads.” Despite all that has happened since to confirm Wells’s view of radioactivity, nevertheless “quap” has indeed been imported into England as part of a commercial venture.
Wells’s anticipation simply demonstrates the fact that the British nuclear enterprise has never been innocent; that is, naïve. It is no more than a reprise of the sad old compulsions around which British social order has always turned. Such behavior would be modified, if not forbidden, if questions as to its wisdom or decency were ever raised in good faith. It is neither modified nor forbidden.
It is almost unimaginable that this industry could coexist with any lucid awareness of its implications, but this only means that our models for describing human behavior are fundamentally wrong. I suspect a better grasp of it awaits our recognition of major anomalies, that our conception of the fabric of motivation and causality must be warped into shapes that accommodate observable phenomena, with denial, dissociation, and atavism acknowledged as potent entities, like quarks and black holes. We should know by now the inadvisability of constructing a universe around local notions of reasonableness and plausibility.
Part Two
Having come finally to my subject, Sellafield, I am forced to confront the epic scale of my narrative. My inability to invoke a suitable muse is really my only deficiency in treating this great subject. To the objection that I know very little about plutonium, I can reply that I know better than to pour it into the environment. On these grounds alone I can hope the British nuclear establishment will learn something from my work, so that I may repay them for the insights they have given me into the nature and prospects of humankind.
To the objection that I work largely from newspaper articles, I can reply that by the same means we learn most of what we take to be true; for example, that Margaret Thatcher is Prime Minister of Great Britain, and that her status has been arrived at by orderly means and carries with it significant prerogatives. It may well be that the moon landings were filmed in Arizona, and that the world’s affairs are presided over by Freemasons, who stage elections and inaugurations only to mislead the rest of us. For all we really know, there is peace in Afghanistan and plenty in Ethiopia, and the Irish Sea and the North Sea are of a most Edenlike purity.
Yet, granting the problems of knowledge, which are imposing, it is not generally considered prudent to discount entirely the information one finds in the press. Antinomians will wade into the sea I describe and delight as the warm ooze rises between their toes, and report that they have never been so refreshed. And any neoplasm that may afterward obtrude will be laid to a chemical additive in cereal packaging, or to the aftereffects of Chernobyl, with perfect plausibility, though the only acquaintance most of us have with either of these phenomena is through articles in the newspapers. People believe selectively, and they are outraged selectively, so that any little area of informed or moral thinking tends to become a dot in a grand mosaic of pernicious nonsense.