The experience that spurred us to write A Nuclear Refrain was participation in a Trident Ploughshares campaign against nuclear weapons. In 2016, Kye Askins and I organised an academic seminar to be held at AWE Burghfield – the place where the UK’s nuclear warheads are built and maintained. On the theme “no war, no warming, our call for contributions spurred participants to explore the connections between “conflict, particularly nuclear conflict and its requisite institutions, development and infrastructures, and a range of impacts on environments, nature and society”. There is clearly a relation that cuts both ways: environmental impacts, pertinently the effects of climate change, can foment armed conflict; while armed conflict inevitably has negative environmental impacts – in the most extreme case a nuclear winter.
Our seminar was to be held as a direct action, a blockade of one of the gates of AWE. Such blockades in the past have featured lawyers putting nuclear weapons on trial, symphony orchestras playing music invested with non-violent values… Bricklayers might build a wall across the gate to a military base. You get the concept: people enact their working lives as democratic protest. In the event, we only had five participants: the police chased off one academic, sending her home because her vehicle tax had run out; a scant few other academics sent their apologies. On the day, Kye, Phil and I roped in Lotte who was there mainly to participate in a singing blockade, and an artist who was painting at the ad hoc peace camp near AWE. We even tried to include the community policeman who had been assigned to keep watch on us! Nevertheless, we weren’t much of a blockade.
But we did have an extremely moving, thought-provoking and action inspiring seminar.
I won’t try to summarise all that we said, heard and experienced, but a couple of episodes will, I think, give a flavour of why A Nuclear Refrain is what is, as one reviewer apologetically stated it: “an uncomfortable hybrid between academia and fiction”. He need not have apologised because an uncomfortable – unsettling – hybrid was exactly what we were after! More on that in due course. First, the seminar was a very emotional experience. Even being there and, for instance, hearing birdsong so near to a place that contained the potential to end all birdsong forever made the ambience – the vibe - very intense. Kye had brought along “a people paper chain”, four-inch high red cut-out figures, to make present at the seminar all those who weren’t there for whatever reason: from the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, through the academics who were too busy elsewhere to participate, to our real and imagined grandchildren, humans whom a nuclear conflict might prevent being born, might kill, or might compel to exist in the hell on Earth of nuclear winter… However, when we wove these little paper figures into the wire fence of AWE, the heavily armed MoD police inside threatened to arrest us. By turns and according to our individual personalities we were flabbergasted, outraged, dismayed and amused. For the authorities to allow our paper figures to remain for just a few minutes, we were obliged to enter into serious negotiations. The experience was at once deadly earnest, ludicrous, terrifying and – finally, after we’d negotiated our concession with the police – exhilarating. Throughout that intense day we ran the gamut of emotions, and I think we learned a lot.
So to the book.
A Nuclear Refrain couldn’t be a dry academic analysis. If we were going to write anything at all, our experience demanded we paid attention to:
- the human and environmental tragedy of nuclear weapons, the emotional horrors that even the prospect of using them raised;
- the terrifying absurdities of the securitised nuclear state;
- alternatives to nuclear deterrence and the socio-political relations it dictates, alternatives that reflected the resolve of democratic protesters, people who must – we suggest - be prepared take political responsibility.
We were also committed to continuing our direct action in anything that we wrote. And that had to include making that action widely accessible, welcoming and emotionally vital, as our seminar had been. But how? It was at that point that Dickens – channelled by the ever-creative Kye Askins - came to our aid: Let’s emulate Dickens, she said, combine social commentary with fiction. Making such a connection, creating political literature or art, is sometimes dubbed “cultural activism”. With it theme of ghosts past, present and future, Dickens’ A Christmas Carol seemed the perfect template for us (though, I’ll admit, I was dubious until persuaded by an irrepressible Kye, who you’ll realise by now, is the innovative, exuberant and inspiring elephant in this room, though I doubt she’d excuse that metaphor).
An excerpt, then: Our Scrooge, the Right Honourable Roger C. Bezeeneos, a pro Trident MP, finds himself transported by our version of the Ghost of Christmas Present, the hesitantly heroic Group Captain Lionel Mandrake. Roger finds himself in a TV studio where he is the focus of an edition of a live current affairs programme Just Answer Me That! It is hosted by the adroit Jeremy Dimble.
A studio technician wearing a headset and porting a microphone on a boom hurriedly moved to a woman sitting in the midst of the audience. Roger recognised her immediately as that irritating MP from that little party that refused to completely disappear. Her constituency was that ridiculous South-coast bubble. This was the woman whom, very recently, the PM had shot down for a lack of patriotism. Though he remembered it all too well, Roger never deigned to acknowledge the MP by name.
“How is it essential for the UK’s survival,” she demanded now, “when there are over one hundred and eighty countries without nuclear weapons? Does that mean those countries are not safe? By the logic of nuclear weapons ensuring security, should every country obtain nuclear weapons in order to be safe?”
“Oh come on, no.” Roger smiled, feeling superior but very conscious of not wanting to come across as patronising. These days that simply wouldn’t do. “I mean, we’re not starting from a blank slate here, we are where we are. Britain is in a position of global power, and it is up to the global powers to work together to fulfil pledges to the non-proliferation treaty, while being realistic about the serious national security threats that we face. The fine people of the British military are quite certain about that.”
“Well,” Jeremy Dimble said with a smile on his face, “it’s interesting you should mention that, Roger, because we are joined in the front row by Major General Patrick Cordingley, who led British forces in the first Gulf War, and Field Marshal Lord Bramall, former head of the armed forces.”
As the technician moved to bring the microphone to them, Roger gave the uniformed, stately looking men the once over. They were very plainly of good stock, he decided, made of the right stuff. He smiled at them, waiting to lap up the authoritative support for Trident and its replacement that they would surely lend.
“So, Trident is necessary for keeping us safe, Field Marshall?” Dimble asked.
“Nuclear weapons have shown themselves to be completely useless as a deterrent to the threats and scale of violence we currently face, or are likely to face, particularly international terrorism.”[1]
Roger gasped. The Field Marshall looked extremely serious and sober, yet he must surely have had one too many single malts in the Victoria Services Club?
“And Major General,” Dimble prompted, “your thoughts?”
“Strategic nuclear weapons have no military use. It would seem the government wishes to replace Trident simply to remain a nuclear power alongside the other four permanent members of the UN Security Council.”[2]
Roger was stunned, this wasn’t how this debate was supposed to go. These two looked like thoroughly decent, reliable chaps, former top brass, pillars indeed of the establishment. How was it that he hadn’t heard their views before?
Fast forward to the end of a very testing evening for Roger:
“So,” Dimble said, turning to Roger, “would you push the button?”
Roger froze, like a rabbit caught in a car’s headlights. Scrolling in his mind’s eye was a covert nuclear history: Clement Attlee, the Mutual Defence Agreement, the secret memorandum of 1979, the cover-ups, the crashes, the radioactive leaks, the near misses, the half-truths, and the down-right lies. He recognised no democracy in this litany. Did it really boil down to Britain’s place in the world being defined by the potential for instantaneous mass murder? Now this had crystallised for him as the key question, he sat transfixed as he heard Dimble’s repeat the question, his voice seeming to come from a long way off.
“Would you push the button?”
Roger’s vision blurred, the studio lights of Just Answer Me That dimmed, and the audience melted away. Through a thickening fog, he heard the question once again:
“Would you push the button, Roger?”
“Let me be clear….” Roger mumbled into the darkness. Feeling sweat roll down his temple, he reached for the monogrammed handkerchief in his breast pocket but all he plucked was duvet! He was back in bed, in his pyjamas with Marjorie sleeping soundly next to him!
[1] This is a direct quote from a letter to the Times written by Field Marshall Lord Bramall, See Helen Pidd, “Trident Nuclear Missiles Are £20bn Waste of Money, Say Generals,” The Guardian, January 16, 2009, https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/jan/16/trident-is-20bn-waste-say-generals.
[2] Major General Patrick Cordingley, quoted in Kate Hudson, “Trident’s an Outdated Waste. Even the Military Say So,” New Statesman, June 24, 2015, https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/06/tridents-outdated-waste-even-military-say-so.