Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution

Introduction

Perhaps the real subject of this book is the fact that the largest commercial producer of plutonium in the world, and the largest source, by far, of radioactive contamination of the world’s environment, is Great Britain — and that Americans know virtually nothing about a phenomenon that occurs, culturally speaking, so very close at hand. The primary producer of plutonium and pollution is a complex called Sellafield, on the Irish Sea in Cumbria, not far from William and Dorothy Wordsworth’s Dove Cottage. The variety of sheep raised in that picturesque region still reflects the preference of Beatrix Potter, miniaturist of a sweetly domesticated rural landscape. The lambs born in Cumbria are radioactive. This fact is ascribed to the effects of the Russian nuclear accident at Chernobyl, but Sellafield is so productive of contamination that there is no reason to look elsewhere for a source. Testing of lamb and mutton was only undertaken some months after Chernobyl, though the plant at Sellafield routinely releases plutonium, ruthenium, americium, cesium 137, radioactive iodine, and other toxins into the environment as part of its daily functioning. The fact that food had not been tested systematically in an area whose economy is based on the production of food as well as the production of plutonium is characteristic of British policy, wherever there is a potential impact of industrial practice on public health.

It should be noted that the plant at Sellafield was built by the British government. It was developed and operated by the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority, and then given over to British Nuclear Fuels Limited, a company wholly owned by the British government. It should be borne in mind that the plant receives waste and reprocesses plutonium for profit, to earn foreign money. Sellafield is at the center of an economic configuration of a kind as yet unfamiliar to Americans. It is a part of the electrical-generating industry because it absorbs the wastes produced in British reactors, transforming them, in part, into salable materials through reprocessing. It expedites the sale of British nuclear technology abroad by accepting wastes generated in other countries, the costs of engineering services and waste disposal lowered by the value of these reprocessed materials. It is a closed cycle (putting aside the fact that the public subsidizes it once in the price they pay for electricity and again because of its military role as supplier of plutonium for British bombs) in which each stage stimulates profitability in the others. To call a government-run industry highly profitable, when on the one hand it is the monopoly supplier of a very costly product, as electricity is in Britain, and on the other hand it is incalculably destructive of the public health, seems to cause no embarrassment to the plant’s defenders. The British nuclear industry creates leukemia in the young and hypothermia in the old, and yet it is profitable. Clearly bookkeeping is as expressive of cultural values as any other science.

Sellafield has flourished in the care of Labour and Conservative governments alike for thirty-five years, during which time it has poured radioactive wastes into the sea through a pipeline specially constructed for that purpose, creating an underwater “lake” of wastes, including, according to the British government, one quarter ton of plutonium, which returns to shore in windborne spray and spume, and in the tides, and in fish and seaweed and flotsam, and which concentrates in inlets and estuaries.

The plant is expanding. Wastes from European countries, notably West Germany, and from Japan, are accumulating there, while the British develop means of accommodating the pressing world need for nuclear waste disposal. Their solution to the problem amounts to extracting as much usable plutonium and uranium from the waste as they find practicable and flushing the rest into the sea or venting it through smokestacks into the air. There are waste silos, some of which leak uncontrollably. In an area called Driggs, near Sellafield, wastes are buried in shallow earth trenches. Until the practice was supposedly ended in 1983 by the refusal of the National Union of Seamen to man the ships, barrels of nuclear waste were dropped routinely into the Atlantic. In other words, Britain has not solved the problem of nuclear waste, has in fact greatly compounded it, in the course of producing plutonium in undivulged quantities.

What happens to this plutonium once it is extracted no one says. We must depend on the wisdom and restraint of the British government to keep it from falling into the wrong hands. Yet one arrives fairly promptly at the realization that the only prospect as alarming as that all this plutonium should fall into the hands of irresponsible or malicious people is that it should remain in British hands. The essential act of irresponsibility is, after all, to have produced it in the first place. And then the British are not especially fortunate. Sellafield itself has had about three hundred accidents, including a core fire in 1957 which was, before Chernobyl, the most serious accident to occur in a nuclear reactor. Sellafield was called Windscale originally, until so much notoriety attached itself to that name that it had to be jettisoned. That an accident-prone complex like this one should be the storage site for plutonium in quantity is blankly alarming.

There are many useful lessons to be learned about the nature of contemporary history from the study of Sellafield. Most informed Americans believe that the release of plutonium on an important scale into the environment would entail disaster of world historical proportions. Yet every account of our present situation sees grand-scale plutonium contamination as a threatened consequence of the competition of the so-called superpowers. In other words, the account we make of present history is radically in error, not least in the matter of the importance of the United States and the Soviet Union in determining the fate of the earth. If plutonium deserves its reputation, then a nuclear war will simply accelerate the inevitable. Statesmanship in Moscow and Washington will merely postpone the inevitable. This is to say that decisions of the greatest consequence have been taken, while our savants and moralists looked resolutely in the wrong direction. We have pondered the Russian soul, and our own, and we have seen the darkness in them both as deviation from the human norm. Western Europe and especially Britain we have assumed to be mild with age, peripheralized by the drift of history. Yet any final reckoning would probably find Britain’s impact on the postwar world greatest of all nations. Fleets sail away, ideologies talk themselves to death, empires yield to cultural tectonics. But plutonium is everlasting, for human purposes, and it is irretrievably a part of the world environment, because the British have made a business of pumping it into a shallow sea through a pipeline a mile and a half long, and have prevented no one from fishing in the area, though the fish are radioactive, five thousand times more so than fish caught in the North Sea, though that is also contaminated. They have prevented no one from living or vacationing there, or growing and marketing food in a countryside affected by radioactive wind and rain. Plutonium from the plant carried by the sea has already been found in Ireland, Iceland, Sweden, Denmark, and Belgium.

I am aware that the situation at Sellafield raises a great many questions as to how and why such a thing should have come about. But the fact of the plant’s existence and operation is not disputed — it can be confirmed by anyone in America who cares to spend a few hours in a fairly good library looking at British publications. The mystery is not how a phenomenon of this importance can be concealed but how, being, as it were, a city on a hill, it has remained unknown to us for so many years.

There are certain questions I have not attempted to answer. The first of these concerns the role of the American government in this enterprise. If it has no role, then it is virtually alone among the major Western governments, most of whom use the plant’s services. There is mention in some British sources of a barter arrangement in which between 1964 and 1971 the United States received Sellafield plutonium in exchange for nuclear materials produced in America. This in itself means little. The fact that Britain produces plutonium as part of its role as a nuclear weapons state is no secret, nor is it ever surprising to find ourselves and the British tinkering at these projects together. The question is whether the American government has encouraged the operation of Sellafield, an unaccountably foul enterprise, even by the debased standards by which such things are judged. I am troubled by the thought that the United States must have a satellite or two sensitive to concentrations of radioactivity, and that the contamination of the world’s hottest sea cannot have gone unremarked. The Soviet Union must also have means to detect radioactivity in significant quantity. And presumably it would be to their advantage in the battle for hearts and minds to point out to the people of Europe how they are being poisoned, especially if there is a significant American involvement. The silence in which Sellafield prospers is a little uncanny. It suggests interests are being served that are neither ideological nor national.

The most plausible hypothesis, I suppose, is that individuals who do not feel any kind of loyalty to the future have been corrupted by the quantities of money involved. This is only speculation. But the currency that passes in nuclear transactions tends to be denominated in millions and billions, and the industry worldwide is protected by secrecy and by its significance in maintaining the prestige of governments and by its military significance, whether as licit or illicit supplier of fissile materials or as potential target. Only assume the usual human slovenliness and venality and an important degree of corruption will seem quite probable.

The nuclear industry enjoys the respect generally accorded to science, because its workings are abstruse. Everyone knows that it is impossible to predict or to describe the impact of this industry on the planet, that it is persisted in despite its demonstrated potential for disaster, and that, if it were closed down tomorrow, even assuming everything goes well for the next score thousand years in controlling the virulent materials it will leave behind, its economic cost to future generations will utterly dwarf whatever value it has had for our own. Yet despite all this the nuclear enterprise is accorded sufficient respect to make the suggestion that its development might to some degree reflect ordinary corruption seem a little impolite. It is as if money and secrecy brought out the best in human nature, changing politicians and technicians into Carmelites.

But Sellafield, if it existed in isolation, would be sufficient proof that the world’s interests have not been properly respected. As evidence of culpability, it is not a smoking gun so much as a hail of bullets.

Objections are made to Sellafield’s operation by governments within Europe. Denmark and Ireland, whose small terrains are increasingly affected, protest vehemently in the European Parliament. Other countries join with them. But this is disingenuous, since these other countries — unlike Ireland and Denmark, who have no nuclear power plants — patronize Sellafield. They pay Britain to take on their waste disposal problems. Their indignation tends to obscure the simple fact that European wastes are poured into the European environment, day after day, as the result of those same methods they deplore, and that the operation of the plant is profitable because they pay Britain to transform wastes from these countries into reprocessed plutonium, and uranium, and all the varieties of contamination for which Sellafield is renowned. And they pay Britain to store wastes while new reprocessing facilities are built at the site, or until sea dumping, if it has been stopped, is resumed. Circumstances demonstrate that it is politically possible in Britain to do these things, flagrantly damaging as they are to the national and the world environment. Circumstances prove also that the superior environmental standards of other countries are shadow play, since toxins are turned over to Britain to be dispensed with by methods these same countries deplore so loudly, the consequences of which are already being felt by their own populations. The efficacy of respective European environmental movements can be established from the fact that Sellafield is in Britain, and that German, Italian, and Scandinavian wastes are at Sellafield and in the waters off the European coast.

There is an analogue for Sellafield in the disposal industry that has developed in Britain for non-nuclear toxic wastes, which are shipped into the country and then disposed of in the variety of ways the laxity of law makes possible — left in municipal dumps or poured into the North Sea or buried on derelict land in poverty-stricken northern regions—40,000 tons of lethal waste being imported in 1986.¹ What little fastidiousness is reflected in other countries’ hiring these services merely makes it profitable to the British government to leave its environment undefended. The arrangement creates an incentive for employing the crudest means of disposal — for which Europe and the world will suffer in due course.

All this raises the question of the role of environmental groups. People in this country have felt for some time that Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and the Sierra Club, as well as scientists’ organizations, were keeping watch over the greater environmental issues, at least to the extent of making them known to us. Sellafield is the world’s largest source of radioactive contamination. It is also the greatest commercial producer of plutonium in the world — a role disturbingly at odds with any notion of non-proliferation. It is the center of a worldwide traffic in toxic and explosive materials. And it is the site of the largest construction project in Europe, because it is expanding. The release of radiation from Three Mile Island is usually estimated at between fifteen and twenty-five curies of radioactive iodine. Many hundreds of thousands of curies of radioactivity have entered the environment each year through Sellafield’s pipeline and its stacks, in the course of the plant’s routine functioning. In other words, Three Mile Island was a modest event by the standards of Sellafield and, even if disaster had not been averted, would have made no comparable impact on the earth’s habitability.

Yet, though Greenpeace is deeply involved with Sellafield in Britain, even to the extent of having supposedly placed a mole inside the plant, information about it in the United States is extremely limited and of poor quality. The plant is located in England’s largest national park, which includes the Lake District. Tourism is an enormous industry there. It seems to me indecent that people are not warned away from this uniquely contaminated environment.

The British government cannot be expected to show foreigners a solicitude it does not show its own people. But the American government cannot be excused for allowing its nationals to be unknowingly exposed to pervasive contamination — for example, to breathe air in which concentrations of plutonium are sometimes higher than they are within this old, disreputable plutonium factory itself.

Greenpeace, since it enjoys the goodwill and the financial support of a great many people in this country, surely owes them a reasonably accurate description of the state of the world, as well as information which could directly affect their own and their families’ well-being. If Greenpeace takes exception to the usual accounts of the lethal properties of plutonium — for example, that a particle invisible to the naked eye, if inhaled into the lung, will ultimately cause a cancer — then they should tell us so. If they adhere to the common view, then they should explain why they allow tourists to wander into an area where this misfortune is so liable to befall them.

It seems to be the policy of Greenpeace to compartmentalize its activities, at least to the extent of keeping Americans preoccupied with issues that arise within our borders — and with aquatic fauna, whose trials and troubles seem never to include ingestion of radioactive fish in the Irish Sea or the North Sea.

If the decision to publicize environmental problems selectively is tactical, then it is past time for Greenpeace to admit that the approach has failed. The greatest source of radioactive pollution in the world is growing exuberantly, fed by an influx of yen that makes it Britain’s greatest earner of that potent currency.

It is in fact difficult to imagine any strategy that could have produced a less desirable result. While the effect of relatively stringent environmental laws in Europe has been to siphon waste into Britain, Greenpeace chalks up triumphs of environmental consciousness without reference to the fact that the scene of contamination has merely shifted, not very far, and that a powerful economic reward has been provided for the recalcitrance of the British government in environmental matters. These tactics make it difficult for Sellafield’s foreign clients to use crude disposal methods at home, but do not put pressure on them to develop responsible methods, or indeed to accept responsibility for the environmental consequences of their own industries. Britain can bear the opprobrium of Europe and Europe can endure the malfeasances of Britain. The nuclear industry can enjoy the cheapest possible solution to the problems of waste — the costs of dumping are, you will recall, indemnified by the production of uranium and plutonium, the latter a valuable commodity for reasons that are never quite made clear.

If information published by Greenpeace in Britain were published by Greenpeace in America, the system might not work so smoothly. It would be highly sensitive to reaction in this country manifested in reduced investment and tourism, a reduced enthusiasm for European products, an increased skepticism as to the disinterested wisdom of European governments, and perhaps a less reflexive confidence in the community of values which is always adduced to persuade us that in defending Europe — and especially Britain — we are only defending ourselves.

If it is a tactic or strategy to select and ration the truth, in order to direct public reaction toward ends the organization considers desirable, then they have violated the most basic tenets of democracy, even while producing a spectacular vindication of the wisdom of these tenets. Sellafield is a disaster. It violates common decency and common sense. It is the sort of thing that withers under informed public scrutiny — from which, to the misfortune of this beleaguered planet, it has been sheltered in America. The regularity with which foolish and destructive policies are concealed from the public is the most powerful statement possible of what democracy could have meant to the world, if there had been the courage and patience to sustain it.

The considerable involvement of Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, which is associated with the Sierra Club, should mean a flow of exact and urgent information about Sellafield into the American environmental movement and its publications. Something else has happened. In 1984, the Sierra Club published a book by Walter Patterson, called The Plutonium Business, which drops its tone of objective description of nuclear facilities in other parts of the world to attack a headline in the London Daily Mirror (October 1975) which said Britain was to become the world’s “Nuclear Dustbin.” This characterization is in fact commonplace and fairly precise, considering the service Sellafield performs for Britain and the world at large. Reading The Plutonium Business, one would never guess that Britain is the center of the world plutonium business. Walter Patterson is active as a writer on nuclear questions in the British press. His omissions cannot reflect ignorance. The Sierra Club should also be aware of Sellafield in some detail, if they are in communication with Friends of the Earth in Britain, since this has been an issue of overwhelming importance in Britain and Europe for a number of years, highlighted by the leukemia deaths of children on the English and Irish coasts. Friends of the Earth figures in many inquiries and demonstrations. While it is possible to imagine that these organizations do not communicate with their associates, or pool information, and that they are by intention parochial and intramural, it behooves them to make this clear, and to abstain from publishing books like Mr. Patterson’s which mislead by seeming to deal in an authoritative way with international phenomena.

The silence of the American press (there was an excellent article in Newsday by Patrick J. Sloyan, May 20, 1986) is consistent with a more general failure to report news of substance from abroad. Nothing is stranger than to live in Britain and read what American newspapers and magazines print about it. If it were the sworn duty of the American press to render the United States incompetent in every aspect of foreign affairs, our journalism would be very little different from what we have at present. The hundreds of reports about Sellafield in major British newspapers and on television yielded slight, late, perfunctory articles by Joseph Lelyveld in The New York Times and Karen DeYoung in The Washington Post, both of which concluded that it was all a tempest in a teapot, more or less. The locals (those people whose children tend to die in disturbing numbers) felt no concern about the plant, according to these articles. DeYoung notes that the many tourists “never seem to mind the site.” Times and Post readers no doubt. The anxiety, these articles agree, is all in London.

People from the area have in fact flung Cumbrian silt through the door of 10 Downing Street, and seen it cleaned away by men in radiation gear. People from the area have raised money to buy Geiger counters, so that they will not have to depend on the government for information about their circumstances. There have been demonstrations, strikes, and votes of no confidence in the management at intervals over thirty years.

Neither the Times nor the Post mentions the lake of plutonium and other radioactive substances which lies off the Cumbrian coast. Both mention alarm caused by leukemia cases too few to be statistically reliable, repeating a bitterly disputed claim by the British government; that is, by the plant’s owners and operators. In fact, one child in sixty dies of cancer in the village nearest the plant, and rates in other villages in the region are comparable. To find ambiguous these high rates of a radiation-induced illness in a radioactive environment seems to me willful at best. But the American press has a tourist-bus mentality, a keen and persisting interest in pubs and arts festivals, and will seek out what it considers “typical” and “authentic” while one example of either remains on earth, at the same time ignoring whatever fails to confirm its very banal expectations. There is nothing sinister in any single instance of failure in an institution which fails routinely.

The problem of how an enterprise can prosper, pouring plutonium into the world environment, when contamination of this kind is held to be among the worst potential consequences of a nuclear war, perplexes me deeply. I experience resistance from my hearers, as often as I raise the subject of Sellafield, even though I can document what I say from the most reputable British sources. An American marine biologist assures me that Britain has more naturalists per capita than any other country in the world. I am sure he is correct. This does not mean the British landscape or population enjoys an abundance of informed solicitude. It means that two apparently incompatible tendencies exist side by side. The character of Sellafield is not in dispute. And since Britain is distinguished among European nations for the degree of its contamination, both radioactive and chemical, it is perhaps appropriate to ponder the attributes of British naturalist enthusiams which permit, and disguise, an unaccountably brutal indifference to nature. This nation of birdwatchers and dahlia fanciers uses 2,4,5 T, the dioxin-contaminated defoliant banned in every other Western country because dioxin is, like plutonium, often called the most potent man-made toxin. Why should Britain go to the lengths it does to keep rabies out of the country, bothering over lap dogs, while importing chemical wastes? To the extent that dramatizing one highly controllable problem creates an impression of caution and fastidiousness in matters of public health, the illusion is dangerous. For just the same reason, those famous naturalists constitute the opposite of a defense of nature. Britain is a country where information about industrial pollution in drinking water is kept from the public on the grounds that divulging its composition might reveal a trade secret important to the polluting firm’s competitive success.

The reader will object that such a policy is not consistent with any reasonable conception of public interest, or even of profit. However, it is typical and pervasive. Beside Sellafield itself, I can adduce the intractable torpor of the British economy as evidence that Britain pursues a miscalculated industrial policy. Since it is no departure from the norms of Britain’s endless industrial past, there is every reason to look to its progressive effects on the public health and spirit for a cause of low worker productivity, before blaming excessive security supposedly induced by Britain’s so-called socialism, as it is conventional to do.

How and why do the British people accept this monstrosity in their midst? It is they who bear the brunt of it, after all. And they are very fluent in the language of decency, and should notice these trespasses against the sum of things to be valued in this world, from organic life to the health of children to the survival and genetic integrity of species, which include themselves and their descendants.

I have before me a “personal message” from HRH the Duke of Edinburgh, on behalf of the World Wildlife Fund, an organization presently harvesting the largesse of our wealthy country to support exotica abroad. It is part of an advertisement from Time magazine, more than half taken up by a bust of the Duke, looking the spirit of patrician high-mindedness. The text is an appeal for support in protecting the planet, on the grounds that “all life on earth is inter-connected, dependent upon the physical processes taking place in the atmosphere and the oceans,” and that “if we damage any part of it we are putting our own survival at risk.” The Duke’s reasoning is as impeccable as the knot of his tie. But he carries understatement to a wild extreme when he adds, “We need people in positions of political power to take into account the needs of nature in their decisions.” If His Highness were to point out to Her Majesty that Her Majesty’s plutonium factory and radioactive waste dump is the biosphere’s single greatest affliction, then she might be able to pull a few strings, say a word. Who knows? A modest beginning could be made. Even a quiet elderly couple can contribute something. The Queen might refrain a little from knighting people who have distinguished themselves in the waste-dumping line, for example.

But for the British, charity never does begin at home. The logo of the World Wildlife Fund is a panda. Beguiling, and remote, and somebody else’s business. It would be more to the point if the logo were a beguiling Cumbrian child. They are the ones in need of looking after.

This advertisement is an instance of the image of reasonableness English people project very successfully. I believe they induce in themselves an enormous moral security, which always prevents them from faulting themselves for anything worse than stodginess or ineptitude or excessive vulnerability to foreign influences. Hearing themselves expound as slick as you please on every great question of the age, abhorring racism, despising the thought of nuclear deterrence, scorning nationalism and militarism, appalled at the spectacle of poverty, they must feel that their gift to the world of moral enlightenment exculpates the racism, poverty, nationalism, and so on with which their own country is grievously afflicted.

People are always inclined to accept an idealized version of their country as its soul and essence, and in cases where this encourages a correcting of institutions toward a higher standard the impulse is valuable. But it is clear that something else has happened in the case of England, because articulated values are so often diametrically at odds with practice. As in the matter of the huge population of naturalists in the most abused landscape in the industrial world, the appearance of enlightenment and benign engagement is the protective coloration for behavior that is marked in an extraordinary degree by the absence of both.

It is not fair to blame the British for deception, when our own press and environmentalists have simply failed to make use of readily available information. Neither does it seem fair to speak of British hypocrisy, since the virtuous utterances with which they chasten and adjure us all are the speech of a people who believe most sincerely in their own decency, from which they do not seem to feel they have departed when they pour a little more plutonium into the environment. They interpret their problems always as arising from an excess of virtue. They are too mild, too courteous, too cautious, too respectful of tradition, too imbued with non-materialist values, too offended by the spirit of competition. Burdened as they are by all this decency, they must cut a few corners to hold their own against other nations not similarly handicapped. In 1976, after extensive discussion of the threat commercial plutonium production would pose to the environment, national security, global stability, and democratic institutions, the Times observed editorially that if a plutonium economy developed, no country would be immune to its effects. In other words, the dangers of the trade were too great to act as a deterrent, since for Britain to abstain from it would supposedly not reduce them.² This is typical. Imagining the worst of others, Britain can be the first into the field in the darkest endeavor, confident that the harm it does is excused by being inevitable in any case.

Poisoning the well might seem a radical step, but it is really an established practice never departed from, a bit of nineteenth-century tradition. Industrial poisoning is much older than any concern about it, after all. And the Victorian period, the height against which the British measure themselves and their decline, was a period of utter rapacity. It was during those same brutal decades that the arts of moral refinement were brought to an exquisite polish in the drawing room and the novel. People now regard those days with nostalgia of an especially urgent kind, Americans as well as British, and they forgive eagerly all the wretchedness that consumed the lives of most people, in admiration of the sonorities, the niceties, the modest elegances developed over against the misery out of which these rarefied experiences were created. It sounds churlish to point out that Jane Austen’s landscape teemed with starveling agricultural laborers, whose misery seems to have been complete, just as it does to note the discrepancies between the wise and gentle urgings of the Duke of Edinburgh and the profit-motivated violence toward the earth committed by his own government. There is a prettiness that takes precedence over reality, that commands a higher loyalty, that readily takes on attributes of moral normativeness even while the conditions of its existence are peculiar and exclusive, violent and corrupt.

If the spectacle of high-mindedness did in fact create norms and refine standards of behavior, Britain, so replete with high-mindedness, would not be profiting from a special willingness to dump toxins over its landscape. Presumably Japan ships its detritus from the other side of the world because no one nearer home can be found who is willing to accommodate it. So Britain’s position in the world is apparently rather singular. Its exceptional moral facility actually corresponds to an exceptional willingness to expose its population to harm and hazard others will not bear. (The British government would argue that these wastes pose little risk — that is inevitably the defense — but then the preference of sophisticated nations for dumping them abroad is hard to account for, as is their willingness to pay generously to be rid of them, the source of the very profitability by which, in the mind of the British government, this industry is justified.)

I suppose our situation in America is essentially colonial. As colonists we were the groundlings of other societies, and we are still overawed by the squire, gawkishly eager for a nod or a word. At one time enthusiasm for the common man seemed to be abroad in this land, although we have never been the democrats we claim to be. Now, increasingly, ordinary people, those who are not educated or highly skilled or affluent, are represented as a great reservoir of pathology, crudeness, belligerency, vice, and malice. Everything disturbing in modern culture has been ascribed by the people who deal in such great questions to this hopelessly corrupted mass — one of the great events in the history of intellectual dishonesty.

The cultural origins of our problems are not to be found in the folkways of the powerless, dire as these are at worst. They are not to be found in criminality of the kind that makes us fear dark streets. Young men who yield to the furies and are hostile and violent are no problem beside the phalanxes of diligent operatives too well paid and respected to imagine themselves capable of any antisocial act.

It is clear that American scientists and journalists are aware of Sellafield. Academic specialists from this country have testified at inquiries in Britain into the effects of radiation from the plant. These experts reliably assure the British that radiation is deleterious, and afterward seem to feel that their obligation has been discharged. But the tacit connivance of their silence is simply typical of the response of the thousands of Americans who must by this time know about the plutonium dump off England’s coast.

So very much misfeasance is not compatible with the idea of actual conspiracy. I incline to ascribe it to a flaw in our national character. Americans abroad hope so wistfully for approval that they are in effect seduced by the least acceptance, and dashed by the slightest rejection, a weightless people incapable of seeing and judging, as if stuck forever in the most desolate straits of adolescence, merely wishing to be liked and accepted, considering the world well lost if, before the lights go out, they can have a murmur of approval from some foreign person.

This nullity is more contemptible than honest crime, not only because it is a greater falling off from standards of personal dignity, but also because its consequences are more disastrous by any mode of reckoning. The young men who crack heads and strip cars in our dark streets make no claim for themselves as moralists. Atlanticists, on the other hand, make very great claims in that line, taking themselves to be enlightened precisely by exposure to a gentler, worldlier, and less materialist value system. They presume to pity those bad young men who are not, like themselves, refined by experience and civilized by education. They fret because at random babies are fathered and neglected and become in their turn bad young men. They do not fret that babies are poisoned in the womb. That is the work of fine old men, in a land of naturalists and dahlia fanciers — gentlemen who never raise their voices, and whose dress is as reserved as their manner. To call what such men do violent, or corrupt, or degraded, involves a great wrench. The difficulty is merely a measure of our error in fixing our fears on the crimes of the powerless, while grave public men poison the cup we all must drink from sooner or later. In America, we consider it a crime to contaminate the environment for profit. In Britain, profit is considered a public benefit that justifies any means by which it may be realized, every industry being defensible in the degree that it is profitable. Americans in Britain apply British standards, without reluctance and without cynicism, at the same time heartily glad to have shaken the dust of capitalism from their feet, to have come to a place finally where profit is no god, to a non-violent society, a community of goodwill and mutual obligation. For this is, despite all, how Americans persist in viewing England.

The same Observer article that describes the flood of toxic chemical wastes from the rest of Europe into Britain ascribes to the government two defenses of this flourishing industry. The first, inevitably, is that to curtail it would cause unemployment and economic dislocation. There is a company in Liverpool with ships built for the job of dumping toxins into the North Sea — a British specialty. To disrupt this enterprise would be a great loss.

The second defense is that if waste dumping were banned, the dumping would only be done secretly, depriving the government of tax revenues, I suppose, since legal and illegal dumping of toxins can hardly differ greatly in any other way. If organized crime were to take on this profitable service to the industrial economies of Europe, what would it do differently? The government is in effect giving notice that it will not effectively enforce any ban on the dumping of toxins — reasonably enough, since it is willing to tolerate and defend the practice. In other words, government policy will prevail through act or omission. A laissez-faire government can practice tyranny by default. This theme will recur.

To appreciate the elegance of all this, the reader must be aware that in Britain there is still no legal obligation to inform a future developer that a site has been used as a waste dump.³ So if the bleak cities of the North enjoy some reversal of their economic situation, they may look forward to excavations into pockets of undescribed contamination. The dumping industry adopts the genial theory that a maximum of dispersion through the environment is to be hoped for, reasoning that dilution will attenuate the toxicity of these poisons. This practice has been a boon to the bottled drinking water industry.

Next to the article about importing toxins is another, beneath a picture of a swan on the river Tees.⁴ Somewhere behind the swan are two enormous open concrete vats. These vats contain toxic chemicals contaminated with uranium, and they are “weeping.” No one can decide what to do with them. The German owners proposed emptying them gradually into the river, another instance of the notion that toxins are controlled by dispersion. This plan met local resistance. Between the wind and the weeping, however, the dispersion of toxins into the environment will surely go forward on its own. All these strategies of dilution, undertaken in one little island which has gallantly assumed the burden of the most noxious wastes of huge industrial economies, cannot finally be considered dilution at all but, instead, commingling and compounding.

The British government must know why other countries will pay good money to be rid of the wastes Britain imports. So the question arises — do they imagine no future for their own country? Is it simply to be exploited to death? Britain is the greatest source of acid rain in Europe. The government does not put filters on its coal-fired electrical plants because no economic use has been found for the filth they would trap, which it would then be an expense to dispose of. So forests die, and stone decays, and the damage to the landscape and public health entails little expense in money because little is done to defend against such damage. Would these policies be acceptable to any government that looked forward even twenty years?

I know I will shock my readers with my speculations. But more is at stake than their goodwill, though I value approval as heartily as anyone. The fact is that the role the British government has imposed on the country is not finally compatible with its survival. The functions the other Europeans have allowed it to assume are not compatible with their own survival, ultimately. And in the long term, the health of the planet is severely compromised, at very best.

Is there any reason to believe the British are entirely exceptional in adopting such strategies of self-destruction? None that I know of. It seems probable to me that other methods, just as outlandish and unthinkable, for scraping together a few billion dollars in contempt of everything we take to be of value are flourishing in other regions, eluding our notice because the world’s calamitous history has not alerted us yet to the profoundly destructive tendencies of this sad species. We are still naive enough to believe that there is a difference between peace and war, in terms of their impact on the environment and on human prospects for survival. Clearly, if the world is to be preserved, our thinking must change altogether, to take account of phenomena which lack even the abysmal logic of war. We must look at ourselves, and at those we trust and admire, assuming nothing on the basis of such notions as “Western,” or “advanced,” or, for that matter, “Third World” or “socialist.” There are many people of goodwill ready to take action against destructive forces where they perceive them. But Sellafield, the plutonium factory, which gathers radioactive material from the ends of the earth and then pours it into the environment of Europe, is a thoroughly sufficient proof that the world’s would-be defenders neither see nor perceive nor hear nor understand. The most important and difficult thing to believe, out of all I will say, is that Sellafield is no secret. Most of what I write about comes from newspapers, often from the front pages of newspapers. It is said that American tourists buy 30 percent of the books sold in Britain. This indicates the kind of travelers who go there — people literate in English, and inclined to read. Is it possible to conclude otherwise than that our education produces an acculturated blindness which precludes our taking in available, unambiguous information if it is contrary to our assumptions?

This book deals with Sellafield and the peculiarities of British culture which allow it to flourish. It deals also with British and American social history. The nuclear threat to civilization and life is a subject talked almost to exhaustion. We think we know something about our “Anglo-Saxon heritage,” which we take to be loosely comprehended in the more amiable features of our own society, never implicated in its darker side. Marxism, which I will touch upon, has the chic of a modern, brave, and dangerous philosophy, but Marx is unread, and the versions of his thinking with which we are wearied are the opportunistic inventions of the sort of persons who love to believe they are brave and dangerous. Marx is by no means the source of the vocabulary we routinely use to describe the world. His reputation for intellectual giantism has been put to the uses of notions that were never his. So a slovenly, dishonest, self-congratulatory enthusiasm has affixed itself to him parasitically. His totemization is primitive nonsense, a major example of the necrosis in American intellectual life.

Looking at Sellafield and modern Britain, at British social history, and at Marx, I hope to disrupt assumptions which are important in America, and which are without basis. The subjects I have chosen do not together make a shapely book, but I forgive myself these formal inadequacies on the grounds that very large questions have had to be dealt with in order to anchor the fact of Sellafield’s existence in the reader’s understanding. I know that Sellafield will be dismissed, if it can be, on the grounds that Britain is a mild and decent society, and that while the plant developed and assumed its economic role, Britain claimed to be a socialist society. Oddly, these notions are potent enough in the minds of many people to mitigate the offense, as if ferocious plutonium, when it is the off-scourings of a government-owned factory pouring into the environment of a virtuous and public-spirited nation, takes on the character of its surroundings and becomes rose-hip tea.

I will suggest that the matter be looked at from another side, that the plutonium should be seen to cast doubt on the benevolence of the British government, and more generally on the legitimacy of the notion that government-run industries are less grasping than others, or that modern governments are reliably more benign than their nightmare progenitors in other ages. In Britain Sellafield’s profitability is considered a sufficient answer to every objection. The prospect of diminished profitability is sufficient to postpone improvements in the functioning of this old and primitive plant. The general, long-term effects of government policies, including economic stagnation, meager social benefits, and high unemployment, give the government great leverage, because people are desperate to work on any terms. As industrial employer, the government reaps rewards from its failures, if they are indeed failures, and not simply strategies for creating a cheap and docile work force. Could this be the key to interpreting the sorry condition of the working classes in other countries where the government is also the industrialist? The stability of these countries does not suggest failure, from the point of view of the existing regime. Why do we persist in assuming that any government has the welfare of the mass of its people as an object, where neither history nor present experience encourages this idea?

Can Sellafield exist in a country that is truly committed to economic justice? The plant’s great and often-invoked contribution to the economy of depressed Cumbria translates into exploitation of an area especially vulnerable to such abuse, just as it would if the same “contribution” were made to an impoverished region of Africa or Asia. Is a government that knowingly exposes its people to radioactive contamination for profit an appropriate provider of health care or reporter of health data?

Other questions come to mind. What, at this point, can possibly be meant by the defense of Europe? Have we bent our efforts to ensuring them the leisure and freedom to destroy themselves? Will anyone defend the notion that nuclear stalemate has brought us forty years of peace? Or must we give new meaning to the phrase “cold war,” seeing that the desolations of war will have been achieved in an atmosphere of quiet and civil order, by the cool, unforced policies of stable and prosperous governments?

It is instructive to consider the content, in practical terms, of the economic statistical categories that are used to compare the successes of governments, and even, bizarrely, the moral solvency of peoples. To the extent that they are accurate, such statistics do not necessarily reflect economic activity as we usually think of it, barter in soybeans and clock radios. Any fluctuation upward in British employment reflects in part the growth of the toxic waste-dumping industry. Any positive movement in Britain’s balance of trade reflects in part its successful marketing abroad of these wretched services. Japanese employment and balance of trade must then be thought to suffer a corresponding setback. Yet a sane method of accounting would express all this as aching deficit on the side of Britain.

It is time we developed ways of describing the world which can give us a better sense of its health and prospects. I am not the first to observe that there is, so far as we can know, only one living planet. And even if there were another, nothing in our present state of consciousness would save it from the abuse that threatens to kill this one.

My history of modern England is based largely on newspaper reports, usually contemporary with whatever is being described. Since the British impound all government records for thirty years and then release them selectively, and the Official Secrets Act makes it a crime for anyone to reveal, without authorization, any information acquired by him as a public employee, contemporary histories of Britain are typically undocumented, vague, lame, and opinionated or, when they are memoirs, self-serving. Such legal prohibitions on the flow of information are obviously significant in a country where doctors and nurses are public employees. These restraints necessarily render all data suspect. Where poverty and unemployment are endemic, educational attainment is low, and pollution is uncontrolled, as in Britain, there is no reason to be much impressed by statistics indicating a high average life expectancy, for example.

At the same time, the secretiveness of the government and the potency of the laws restraining the press assure that newspaper versions of events will be more than fair to the government. Most of the information I use has passed through a filter of official approval, simply by virtue of the workings of the Official Secrets Act and the government’s exercise of prior restraint, and because of regular, off-the-record briefings of journalists by government, which are a major source of news. The information to be found in the British press is alarming enough, however incomplete it may be, to provide material for a dozen sobering volumes. It is absorbed by the public very quietly, which means that the government has made a fair estimate of public passivity. In fact, the greatest burst of official admissions about the scale of contamination and the fecklessness of Sellafield’s management arose just at the time that the planned expansion of the plant and the construction of a similar plant at Dounreay, Scotland, were made known. Why this should be an effective way of managing public reaction I cannot speculate, but the government has encountered no important resistance, so, within the British context, the government must be seen to have handled it all very smoothly. Admissions of incompetence seem to ingratiate, and to enlist loyalty in their public. Admissions of past mismanagement seem to be accepted as earnests of good intention. American opinion was, of course, unruffled. So, again, all this alarming news alarmed no one, the plant grows and prospers, and the little earth is still without an ally, despite all the funds and clubs and naturalists, or because of them.

This book is essentially an effort to break down some of the structures of thinking that make reality invisible to us. These are monumental structures, large and central to our civilization. So my attack will seem ill-tempered and eccentric, a veering toward anarchy, the unsettling emergence of lady novelist as petroleuse. I have had time and occasion to note the disproportion between my objective and my resources. If I accomplish no more than to jar a pillar or crack a fresco, or totter a god or two, I hope no one will therefore take my assault as symbolic rather than as failed. If I had my way I would not leave one stone upon another.

I am angry to the depths of my soul that the earth has been so injured while we were all bemused by supposed monuments of value and intellect, vaults of bogus cultural riches. I feel the worth of my own life diminished by the tedious years I have spent acquiring competence in the arcana of mediocre invention, for all the world like one of those people who knows all there is to know about some defunct comic-book hero or television series. The grief borne home to others while I and my kind have been thus occupied lies on my conscience like a crime.

This book is written in a state of mind and spirit I could not have imagined before Sellafield presented itself to me, so grossly anomalous that I had to jettison almost every assumption I had before I could begin to make sense of it. My writing has perhaps taken too much of the stain of my anger and disappointment. I must ask the reader to pardon and assist me, by always keeping Sellafield in mind — Sellafield, which pours waste plutonium into the world’s natural environment, and bomb-grade plutonium into the world’s political environment. For money.