Britain has never had to justify to its people the possession of nuclear weapons on any grounds other than their assuring that the country would continue to cut an impressive figure on the world stage. It has never had to excuse the slovenliness with which the great enterprise was gone about on any grounds other than Britain’s littleness and poverty. Presumably it is the country’s exceptional depth of civilization, or its gift for taking the long view, that elevates it above the level of poseur in the minds of its people. In any case, it is assumed that Britain should be a world power, that extraordinary methods are necessary to make it one, that developing nuclear weapons was an appropriate course to take in assuring Britain’s place among nations. While we and the Russians pardoned ourselves as the defenders of opposed systems which we were persuaded could bring justice and the alleviation of suffering to other societies and generations, Britain, typically, scrabbled to shore up its own interests, narrowly defined. Seldom departing in public from the values with which Americans identify themselves, except to add emphasis in one instance, urge temperance in another, and imply, through a certain fretfulness, that the whole thing would be better if it were not so crudely managed, the British nevertheless acquired nuclear weapons to establish their independence from the United States, in heat and haste that look like desperation. Denied the use of testing sites in America, they considered exploding atomic bombs in Scotland and Yorkshire, and finally arranged to use Maralinga in the Australian interior, which they left severely contaminated with plutonium, as it remains to this day, as well as islands off the Australian coast, sending one especially notorious cloud drifting across the mainland from Monte Bello. Now, of course, the British test in Nevada.
The materials for these handsome acts of national self-assertion have come from Windscale/Sellafield and from Calder Hall, the plutonium-producing, gas-cooled, graphite-moderated reactor at the same site. As a plant primarily designed for the production of plutonium, with electricity generation as an ancillary function, Calder Hall served as prototype for the first generation of nuclear reactors in Britain. There has never really been a second generation. Not only were military and civilian uses not distinct, the former took priority over the latter in determining reactor design for both uses, since the reactors are not especially efficient as producers of electricity. Dounreay, in Scotland, was launched very early, in 1959—a breeder reactor, the wave of the future, or so it was thought at the dawn of the nuclear age, and so it may prove to be, insofar as these developments have not precluded a future. Plutonium would be needed to fuel such plants when the technology was perfected. Perhaps the British decision makers hoped to be the first into the field, with a prototype for the breeder and a supply of the material to run it. Export sales have always been a consideration of the first importance in the development of nuclear power.
Britain’s history especially predisposes it to keeping a world market in view, so perhaps such an explanation would account for the otherwise strange decision to build so many plutonium-producing plants, more than have ever been required to supply the fantastic demands of nuclear weapons development in the United States, for example. British strategic nuclear weapons seem to be numbered, for the purposes of international reckoning. Since even the British Parliament has no access to defense information, and since governments can conceal nuclear capabilities as they choose, the seeming disproportion between the scale of Britain’s plutonium production and its apparently modest defense needs is not based on information of sufficient quality to merit brooding over. Understating numbers of warheads would reduce pressure on Britain to enter into arms control negotiations, while overstating them would enhance national prestige at little cost and little risk, the force being meant to trigger grander events, not to sustain an exchange on its own.
The relation between British plutonium production and weapons production is asserted as often as it is convenient to invoke security and the national interest in behalf of Sellafield, though the plant has for a long time functioned mainly as a repository for foreign waste. A Martian, watching Germany and Japan ship toxins into Britain to be poured into its environment, might wonder why so much blood and sweat should have been expended in the defense of this same island. An occupying army is after all a survivable problem, and democracy a nostalgia where a government can, in secret, put an ax to the root of the culture that supposedly sustains it.
Be that as it may, Sellafield is a significant part of British national defense, as press and government reckon these things. Sellafield may indeed epitomize the phenomenon of national defense in the nuclear age, being a vulnerability not to be dreamed of in any country less well defended, a vast bull’s-eye for enemies or terrorists or plain misfortune.
Affronted by the American attempt to keep a monopoly on nuclear technology, the British set out to build bombs. That is how they tell the story. But if the technology had been handed to them, presumably they would have used it to build bombs. Why else should their exclusion have aroused such shock and frustration? In any case, they put a complex together to produce plutonium, tested ferociously where the locals permitted, built an entire series of plutonium-producing reactors with electricity production as a secondary feature, reprocessed and stocked plutonium, and built Dounreay, which has not functioned properly since it was switched on; which has a reprocessing plant of its own, sending radioactive effluents into Scandinavia; and which nevertheless sends wastes to Sellafield to be reprocessed, by stormy sea.