The Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) Burghfield occupies a 225 acre site between Aldermaston and Reading in Berkshire. AWE is responsible for the assembly and maintenance of nuclear warheads for the Trident missile system. This system comprises four nuclear powered Vanguard submarines, Trident D-5 ballistic missiles and the warheads.
Each submarine is armed with up to 16 missiles each of which can carry at least three warheads. And each single warhead has an explosive power eight times that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. That bomb, ‘Little Boy’, devastated an area of five square miles and killed at least 140,000 people. Many others suffered long-term sickness and disability.
So, each single warhead on a Trident missile could kill more than a million people. And ‘the payload’ of a Vanguard submarine has the potential to kill some fifty-three million people, the entire population of South Africa.
The UK always has one armed Vanguard submarine at sea.
We are without excuse.
Exponents of the Trident system and its replacement claim it is a deterrent. The military theory of deterrence runs that the threat of using powerful weapons against an enemy deters that enemy from attacking you with similar weapons. Applied to nuclear weapons, deterrence translates into a security policy of Mutually Assured Destruction. Exponents of the policy seem to have no problem living with the darkest of ironies, that the acronym for this system is MAD.
Rebecca Kay sees MAD as the ultimate ‘othering’, and questions the moral logic of deterrence. She asks how, if ‘we’ were subject to a nuclear attack, ‘it would better to die knowing that ‘our’ bombs were killing those people too’? Mary Midgely pinpoints the indiscriminate nature of nuclear weapons, likening them to landmines on a vastly greater scale. ‘This feature cannot be sanitised by claiming that their owners are never going to use them. To say nothing of the fact that they have actually once already been used in combat, the mere act of threatening others with an abomination is itself already abominable.’
We are without excuse.
On 14th March 2016, the House of Commons voted in by 409 to 161 to retain a strategic nuclear deterrent beyond the life of the current system. The Conservative government is delaying a parliamentary vote on, specifically, renewing the Trident weapons programme until after the referendum on Britain’s EU membership on 23rd June.
If that vote carries, as seems certain, the Vanguard submarines will be replaced and the life of Trident missiles extended in a programme in conjunction with the United States. AWE is poised to play a major role when the warheads themselves need to be refurbished or replaced in the mid-2020s.
According to the government’s estimate, the Vanguard replacement programme will cost £31 billion. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament put the figure at £205 billion, however. This sum, they calculate, would be sufficient to build 120 new hospitals or pay the tuition fees for 8 million students.
We are without excuse.
Conflict-Time-Photography was an exhibition at the Tate Modern Gallery in London. Inspired by Kurt Vonnegut Jr’s reflections on the firebombing of Dresden, Conflict-Time-Photography took as its challenge looking back and considering the past without becoming frozen in the process. Ordered through the act of looking back rather than as a history of conflict, Conflict-Time-Photography began with images made moments after events, then days, months, years, decades and even a century later. The intention was for the exhibition to be ‘unstuck in time’, shifting from one moment in history to another without warning, as in Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five.
As part of a vast expedition, Chloe Dewe Mathews presented a series of photographs, ‘Shot at Dawn’. One image depicts a place, Six Farm, Loker, West-Vlaanderen in Belgium. A black and white photograph taken on a misty morning, it shows a meadow, a tree, a hedge and a gate. It was taken 99 years after three British soldiers were shot for desertion in this place during the First World War: Private Joseph Byers, Private Andrew Evans and Private George E Collins.
The viewer is vividly confronted by absence.
One absence at AWE is the many millions of people whom its missiles might kill on some future dawn, tomorrow or next week, next year, or 99 years hence.
‘Shot at Dawn’ is another manifestation of deterrence. Is the difference in scale between absences at Six Farm and AWE more affecting than the repetition of political execution?
We are without excuse.
In ‘The Invitation’ Barry Lopez encounters a grizzly bear feeding on a caribou carcass. Rather than concentrate on ‘the bear’, Lopez suggests that his indigenous travelling companions ‘would focus on that part of the world of which, at this moment, the bear was only a fragment. The bear here might be compared with a bonfire, a kind of incandescence that throws light on everything around it’.
Lopez proposes that, in the way they experienced the event, his companions ‘extended the moment of encounter with the bear backwards and forwards in time’. Their temporal boundaries ‘included the time before we arrived as well as the time after we left’. Lopez’s goal is to further illuminate ‘the land’ via paying more attention to patterns than isolated events - to material, temporal and spatial relationships. The bear, for instance, is part of a pattern consisting of ‘a piece of speckled eggshell’ and ‘leaves missing from a stem’, shifting weather conditions, the ‘sonic landscape’ etc.
The notion of an event, i.e. materialities interacting affectively at a place in space and time, as an incandescence which throws light on everything around that event might be analytically powerful.
What do protests at AWE Burghfield reveal? What materialities, spaces times and relations are illuminated by our incandescence?
Which absences render our glow so faint?
We are without excuse.
Robert Macfarlane considers the response of writers and artists to the Anthropocene, a putative geological age in which the human influence on planet Earth is the most significant impact and ‘will leave a long-term signature in the strata record’. The Anthropocene and the nuclear age start simultaneously, and part of this signature will be the global dispersal of artificial radionuclides from the testing and perhaps use of nuclear weapons.
Philip Larkin wrote that ‘What will survive us is love’. Wrong, says Macfarlane, claiming that our legacy will actually include plastic and Lead-207, the stable isotope at the end of the Uranium-235 decay chain. Energy released from the nuclear fission of Uranium-235 is used in atomic bombs. ‘Little Boy’ used enriched Uranium-235.
If it can be said to ‘take place’, the Anthropocene ‘does so across huge scales of space and vast spans of time, from nanometers to planets, and from picoseconds to aeons. It involves millions of different teleconnected agents, from methane molecules to rare earth metals to magnetic fields to smartphones to mosquitoes. Its energies are interactive, its properties emergent, and its structures withdrawn’.
Macfarlane further observes that, ‘We mostly respond to mass extinction with ‘stuplimity’: the aesthetic experience in which astonishment is united with boredom, such that we overload on anxiety to the point of outrage-outrage’. He asks: ‘How might a novel or poem possibly account for our authorship of global scale environmental changes across millennia – let alone shape the nature of that change?’
What is the perfect Anthropocene text?
We are without excuse.