Avoiding Atomic Armageddon: Why we should not rejoin the nuclear bazaar

A Nuclear Colloquy: Lowry and Ford on “The Nuclear Bazaar”, New Paradigms Forum

Note:

Dr. David Lowry is an independent research policy consultant specializing in nuclear issues, working with politicians, NGOs and the media. He is a former director of the European Proliferation Information Centre [EPIC] in London. His text below, which he recently submitted to NPF, is the written version of his presentation to a workshop on “Challenging NPT-backed Nuclear Power Expansion” at the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) annual conference in London on October 9, 2010.

Avoiding Atomic Armageddon:

Why we should not rejoin the nuclear bazaar

by Dr. David Lowry

The venerable veteran Labour politician, Tony Benn, who once was responsible for the British nuclear power programme when he was Technology Minister in the late 1960s, when recently asked by The Times if he had made any political mistakes in his life, responded:

“Yes, nuclear power: I was told it was, when I was in charge of it, that atomic energy was cheap, safe and peaceful. It isn’t.” (Times Magazine, 11 September 2010)

A serious problem for today’s politics is both Conservative ministers and their Labour opponents have not learned from Tony Benn’s conversion on the road to energy sustainability, and do support new nuclear.

How was it that thinking politicians like Tony Benn could have originally got nuclear power so wrong in the 1960s and1970s?. In post-war Britain, after the United States had started the Nuclear WMD Cold War by detonating two atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, many nuclear scientists wanted to put their intellectual expertise in atomic science to the public good, so horrified were they over the nuclear attacks on Japan.

The British Atomic Scientists Association (BASA) – founded in 1946 – set about trying to bring good news, in contrast to nuclear weapons deployment, about atomic discoveries and developments to the public, even sponsoring a mobile exhibition called “The Atomic Train” which moved from city to city, town to town, seen by hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic members of the British public. BASA also published a regular edition of Atomic Scientists News, which became Atomic Scientists Journal, with a widespread readership among teachers, journalists and professionals, including MPs [members of Parliament].

It was absorbed into New Scientist in 1956, the same year the plutonium production reactors at Calder Hall on the Sellafield site – then called Windscale, operated by the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) – were opened by the young Queen Elizabeth, on 17 October that year, 54 years ago. Her Majesty told the assembled crowd of dignitaries, including representatives of almost 40 nations:

“This new power, which has proved itself to be such a terrifying weapon of destruction, is harnessed for the first time for the common good of our community….”

She went on to add

“It may well prove to have been among the greatest of our contributions to human welfare that we led the way in demonstrating the peaceful uses of this new source of power.”

But false words had been put into the mouth of Her Majesty. Calder Hall was not built or designed to be put to civilian – or peaceful – uses. Here is what the UKAEA official historian Kenneth Jay wrote about Calder Hall, in his short book of the same name, published to coincide with the opening of the plant. [He referred to] “[m]ajor plants built for military purposes, such as Calder Hall.” (p.88) Earlier, he wrote: “… The plant has been designed as a dual-purpose plant, to produce plutonium for military purposes as well as electric power.” (p.80)

Exactly 26 years ago this month, the CND Sizewell Working Group, in evidence to the Sizewell B Public Inquiry, demonstrated in detail how plutonium created in the first generation of Magnox reactors, scaled-up versions of Calder Hall, also produced plutonium put to military uses … in the United States.

Just over a year after Britain first tested its own atomic bomb, on 3 October 1952, U.S. President Eisenhower delivered to the U.N. General Assembly in New York what has turned out to be one of the most misguided speeches ever made by a world leader. This was the notorious “Atoms for Peace” speech, on 8 December 1953. It was crafted at the height of the Cold War, and purported to be an “atomic swords into nuclear energy ploughshares.”……..

The NPT review conference conclusions also stated:

39. The Conference affirms the importance of public information in connection with peaceful nuclear activities in States parties to help build acceptance of peaceful uses of nuclear energy.

Experience of such activities by national and international bodies suggest this will be pure propaganda.

So my real concern today is that the UK policy on promoting nuclear exports will open a Pandora’s Box of problems. Exporting the very technology used to make nuclear bombs and nuclear material such as plutonium as nuclear fuel, will put nuclear weapons capability and nuclear explosive materials into the hands of many countries – and possibly non-state terror groups – in an increasingly insecure world………

Labour published one of the most dangerous and deluded documents issued in modern times by any democratic government – “The Road to 2010” – interestingly released under the imprimatur of the Cabinet Office, not the Foreign Office. (The “2010” referred to the NPT Review conference held in May this year at the United Nations in New York.) Mr Bryant asserted that it would: “lay out a credible road map to further disarmament.”

In my judgment, whatever its laudable aims on nuclear disarmament, it is in effect a blueprint for nuclear proliferation and undermines Government aims to create a more secure world.

The reason for this is the deeply misguided policy to increase nuclear exports and spread nuclear technology and material around the globe.

The “Road to 2010” is a remarkably naïve and disingenuous document, and seriously suffers from not having been subject to critical review before publication.

It appears to have been only share with blinkered nuclear industry “cheerleaders”, such as the London-based international industry lobby group, the World Nuclear Association, which in its reportage of the proliferation blueprint wrote glowingly:

“The opening paragraphs in Britain’s Road to 2010 strategy set the scene: ‘Nuclear power is a proven technology which generates low carbon electricity. It is affordable, dependable, safe, and capable of increasing diversity of energy supply. It is therefore an essential part of any global solution to the related and serious challenges of climate change and energy security…. Nuclear energy is therefore vital to the challenges of sustaining global growth, and tackling poverty.’”

All these statements are demonstrably inaccurate: yet taken together they justify the promotion of a policy that one day will, I fear, result in multiple radioactive mushroom clouds rising from centres of global cities, as terrorists carry out their ultimate spectacular.

This may happen after the architects of this truly mad policy are dead. Sadly, they are condemning hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, innocent citizens join them before their time.

The spectre of an uncontrolled nuclear detonation should chill us all.

As President Obama told Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward in [Woodward’s] new book, Obama’s Wars: “When I go down the list of things I have to worry about all the time, that [ a nuclear terrorist attack] is at the top, because that’s one where you can’t afford any mistakes.”

He is right.

And it is a big mistake to resurrect global nuclear technology and material sales.

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