Yesterday we strode out onto the beach, me with my sticks and my expensive walking shoes, with a mind to walking. It was to be an easy walk, easing ourselves in slowly with a view to longer, harder walks, maybe even to Whitby. The sign here in the Bay says it is only three miles to Ravenscar. So off we went, the sun shining, but neglecting any cream to protect against it, along the sand, sidestepping the rocks.

I set the tempo, a good nordic walking speed. It felt purposeful, a strong stride, healthy. My husband and my son had no trouble keeping pace with me, however. Obviously it was only subjectively fast. Soon they began to hang back, eyes peeled on the ground, picking through the stones for fossils, for there are a great many here. The boulder clay and shale cliffs of this North Yorkshire coast, backing up the moors, coughing up its geological history in little mementos of ammonites and dinosaur claws from the Jurassic period. Holding a petrified creature that is millions of years old makes my paltry half a century seem irrelevant.

There are several classes of kids on geography trips on the beach. I came here as a child too, with measuring sticks and grids, wearing a uniform and calling „Sir, sir!“ to our geography teacher, whoever he was. Was it then that I fell in love with this place, or that holiday in the little house on the disused railway line up at Ravenscar, or much later as a rowdy teenager looking for drugs in the Bay Hotel and only finding herbal highs made of passion-flower that made you feel sick from the immense quantities it was necessary to smoke in order to at least get the impression of being drugged? Or maybe the combination of those visits and the later ones as an adult were what made me so besotted.

My legs were doing well, I thought, as I passed Boggle Hole. Last year I only got that far and had to turn back, I was still so weak from the illness. This year I was made for greater things, longer walks, higher climbs.

The further down the bay you go, the emptier it gets, till we were soon on our own. The rock formations with their crab-filled rock pools, adorned with seaweed beds and interspersed with sand or broken-up shale or pebbles, lead the way. Beware of following a rock spit and ending up surrounded with water, nowhere to go but all the way back. And getting too close to the cliff is also inadvisable, with its constant shedding of rock. So we picked our way through this natural obstacle course to the end of the bay, unsure how we would get up the cliff to return along the Cleveland Way.

And as it always is, we think the next bend or jutting-out cliff face will hide the path we are looking for. But when we are there, there is no path, just more cliff face, impossible to climb and the rocks below are becoming more inhospitable to our feet. I am mighty glad of the sticks.

Then we meet some people coming the other way and my son rushes to them, asking if they found a path down the cliff that we might use to go up. Yes, they say, just around the end of Peak Steel that marks the end of the Bay, there is a path, steep but walkable.

Now at every step another fossil winks up at us, the rock rich in natural history, but threatening to turn your foot and break an ankle easy enough. My son springs from rock to rock like the little mountain goat he is and my husband has taken the usual lead that is impossible to catch up to. One time on the island of Hoy in the Orkneys he was so far ahead I lost sight of him for hours and could only follow what might have been his smell, like a dog looking for its owner. He had the bottle of water in his bag and I had a terrible thirst. Since then I always make sure I have my own water. And the joke on that immense Hoy walk was that he had promised me there would be a tea room at the other end. All there was to be found was a beach full of rocks taller than myself, perfectly rounded, like the pebbles of giants and all different colours. No tea room and no bus to get back.

At least this time I knew that at the top of the cliff there was a tea room, or even a hotel with a lounge bar that served sandwiches, with a vista of the bay that could not be beaten. But first to scale the cliff that in olden times was the destination of the Lyke Wake Walk, the funeral walk forty-two miles across the moors at the end of which they would bury the coffin atop of the cliff, only for the sea to claim them back in later years as the cliff eroded.

As I began to climb, I was on my own and I soon realised this was not the path the walkers had pointed us to, that was further round the point. I was at the sharpest end of the point and needed to use my hands and the strength of my arms to ascend. I knew that slipping could, at the least, mean broken bones, and it reminded me of climbing the mountain behind our house on Mull for the first time alone, when I slipped and fell a small way, coming to stop just before a fatal drop. I was just a little older than my son is now, I think. A moment when I quite clearly understood how easy it is for life to simply end. And then what? The next one begins? Or nothing happens? Hard to believe with all that perfection of nature around, singing out meaning with every breath, that nothing more would come.

I did not think about death this time, but about living and most of all about climbing, the challenge of it, feeling strength in my arms and legs. And I was just past the most dangerous patch, back on two legs and panting with the exertion (and some realisation of fear) when my son and husband came around a bend, applauding my effort, amazed that I was back in the land of the healthy.

This morning at the Dock, watching the high tide bash against the sea wall, eating my toast, that little moth of a thought was there. Of course, aging means that the body makes itself heard with aches and pains, slowing you down. The stairs in the house force my legs to take them one at a time. The illness, however, is receding. There is some hope that I will find a normal life for a woman of my age, with a touch of arthritis in her knees and toes, and a desire to go on living for a good long while.

© xanthe hall, 2011

© xanthe hall, 2011

© xanthe hall, 2011

After the earthquake and tsunami hit Fukushima, many people around the world asked the question: after what the Japanese had suffered from the military use of nuclear energy on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, why did they invest so greatly in the civilian use? Indeed, it is surprising that the original distaste for all things nuclear was lost in the sixties, when Japan began building nuclear power plants to beat the band. More than just about any other country, except perhaps France, the Japanese seemed to think nuclear energy was the best thing since sliced bread. And while just about everyone else (except the Russians) was shifting away from the plutonium economy, saying that it was too dangerous and too expensive, Japan began using MOX and expanding its reprocessing facilities.

Yet this inexplicable splitting of the collective personality into nuclear good and nuclear bad is not just a Japanese phenomena. Attend any Review Conference of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), you will hear the same weird belief that nuclear energy is bad in weapon form, but good if you plug it in and run your kettle off of it. A whole institution has been built on this lie that was part of the 50s propaganda “Atoms for Peace”, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Nuclear energy is not good or bad, in my view. What I condemn is the human arrogance and ignorance that leads us to think that we can control a force as massive and potentially destructive as this, or that the risks inherent in harnessing it as a source of electricity are calculable. Chernobyl showed us how humans make mistakes. Fukushima has made it abundantly clear that we are not in control, and that we are pitiful in the face of nature’s ability to determine our fate. The disaster that hit Japan was bad enough, but did we need to compound it by adding our own stupidity to the equation by building nuclear reactors on fault lines?

It starts at the front end with the mining of uranium. Locked up in rock, uranium was not meant to be taken out of the earth – so we are wisely advised by the indigenous peoples of the world, who have lived on top of uranium-filled rock for centuries. Remove it from its natural habitat and it becomes dangerous, releasing particles that, when breathed in, can cause cancer.

After being processed, the uranium then has to be enriched. Again, the difference is minimal. Once you have the technology to enrich, then you can choose how much you enrich your uranium – roughly, 3-5% for nuclear power, 20% for medical isotopes, 85-90% for weapons. The only thing that stands in your way is the view that there is nuclear good and nuclear bad. And a treaty. But you can choose not to sign the treaty in the first place, or use it to get the nuclear technology and then leave the treaty. So far, so good (or bad).

The chain does split into two different branches when you get to putting your enriched uranium to use – you can put your enriched uranium into a nuclear power plant and make electricity with it, or you can enrich it a bit more and make nuclear weapons. (By the way, you can also use the by-product of the enrichment process, depleted uranium, to make weapons as well.)

When it gets to the question of waste, however, it gets more complicated. What should you do with it all? Rather than just throwing it all away (and where should it go?) you can reprocess it. And because you’ve successfully made plutonium by burning your uranium in a nuclear reactor, you can separate this out and, bingo, you have the stuff to make MOX. Or nuclear weapons. Japanese politicians have repeatedly reminded the world that they had enough plutonium stockpiled that they could easily make a whole load of nuclear weapons, should they be so inclined. What stopped them? The view of nuclear good and nuclear bad.

When it comes to Iran, there is only nuclear bad in the eyes of the West. It was the conflict with Iran that really started to shake the foundations of Article IV of the NPT that says everyone has a right to use nuclear energy “peacefully”. Actually, the discovery in the early 90s that Iraq had hidden a well-developed military nuclear programme successfully behind its “peaceful” programme while remaining an NPT member was the first major wake-up call. Then the lid blew on A.Q. Khan’s network and people began to realise that the proliferation of nuclear energy could lead and had led to the proliferation of nuclear weapons. The good, the bad and the ugly.

What we forget is that while the intention may be peaceful, the energy itself is not. The difference between “peaceful” and “military” use is no more than a hair’s breadth. From outside, it is hard to see the difference, you have to send in the IAEA to inspect, probe and interrogate. Still, we don’t really know whether Iran’s nuclear programme is good or bad and the IAEA is still looking for actual (rather than circumstantial) evidence.

Instead of splitting hairs over whether there is a difference between nuclear energy and nuclear energy, we should begin to understand the connection between all the aspects of the nuclear chain. There is an inextricable link that binds uranium mining, enrichment, nuclear power, reprocessing, nuclear weapons, radioactive waste and fallout together. When we talk about one, we should not forget all the others. They add up to make an ugly picture of death and destruction, of incalculable risk and contamination.

This article appeared first on the IPPNW Peace and Health Blog

© xanthe hall, 2011

The tendency to search for technological solutions to what are often ethical or even moral questions seems to be inherent in today’s society. The popular answer to the loss of extended family and dwindling social community seems to be Facebook and Twitter. The nuclear industry’s solution to climate change is a nuclear “renaissance”. What do we do about nuclear weapons? Build a firewall. How do we defeat our maybe-about-to-go-nuclear enemies? Put a worm in their system.

If one was to make a medical analogy out of this, then mine would be “the sticking plaster”. It might stop the bleeding, but if the wound isn’t cleaned out or the cause of the damage not dealt with, then it is only superficial. None of these solutions are sustainable. And in all of these cases, the solution on offer is part of the problem itself.

Let’s take a look at the firewall. On face value, the idea of missile defence is attractive. Ronald Reagan was completely in love with it because its simplicity was so beguiling. If one could stop the missiles coming in, then neither side would need nuclear weapons anymore and we could go to zero. Even though successive US Presidents have whittled the missile defence programme down to a mere shadow of SDI, the problem essentially remains the same: it doesn’t work. We are not talking even about only 95% effectiveness, the success rates are way lower than that. And in order for the military to feel safe enough to give up weapons, the system would need to be near to foolproof. This is the point the French were making in the debate on NATO missile defence last October. You need the firewall AND the weapons behind it, in case the firewall doesn’t work. This might bring the numbers down, but you would never get to zero.

This is what the German government was betting on. They thought – along with parts of the US administration and some of the academic community – that missile defence would offer us an alternative to “deterrence by punishment” (nuclear weapons) and give us “deterrence by denial” (missile defence). In other words, Germany hoped that by agreeing to missile defence in Europe they could get rid of the remaining 180 US nuclear gravity bombs based here.

But would missile defence even bring the numbers down? The Russians say nyet. In fact, they are saying that missile defence, if expanded beyond a point that is yet to be defined, will endanger new START because they will need to rebuild nuclear weapons to overcome the firewall and maintain strategic stability and effective deterrence. Moreover, if their concerns about missile defence and the US conventional superiority are not addressed, then the Russian tactical nuclear arsenal cannot be considered for negotiation.

Which brings me to the next problem. What to do about Iran? After all, missile defence was supposed to be the answer to the threat of Iranian nuclear-tipped missiles targetted on Europe. Let us lay aside the question of the correctness of this threat perception for now (although I would fundamentally challenge Western perception of the threat by Iran and its key players, especially after the latest Wikileaks revelations). Given the fact that it is common knowledge that a European missile defence system would only, at best, stop some incoming missiles and not all of them, building it would simply encourage Iran to build more missiles. And it focusses solely on one type of delivery system – missiles – when Iran has purportedly many other avenues to deliver its weapons of choice.

This is where Stuxnet the worm raises its little, ugly head. According to latest reports, Israel tried and tested this new cyberweapon in Dimona on a dummy of the Natanz installation, specially constructed for the purpose. The departing head of Mossad claimed that the Iranian nuclear programme has now been set back years, implying that Stuxnet was the reason for this.

Again, like the firewall idea, cyberwar also has its attractions. Noone got killed, I hear people say. There were no bombs, no military strike. Well, the question remains: who killed the nuclear scientists? Iran says it was Mossad. And other questions arise, like: how will Iran retaliate? More repression of its people? It is even conceivable that Iran killed its own scientists because of Stuxnet, who knows? Perhaps people think that it is a small price to pay – a couple of lives – to stop a fledgling nuclear programme whose purpose we don’t trust.

But the point is that the Iranian nuclear programme will not be stopped by a worm. Such an attack will only add to the fierce determination to continue the programme at all costs. It bolsters up the government position that the world is against Iran and they must stand united against outside interference. It adds to the rationale behind repression and prevents reform. Worst of all, if the nuclear programme was in fact entirely for power production and not to feed an illicit nuclear weapons programme – as Iran has consistently contended – this may have changed as a result of being attacked. Back when Lithuania was subject to a cyberattack by an unknown source inside Russia, their government responded by asking a nuclear alliance – NATO – for protection. Who can Iran turn to? If they want protection, they have to build it themselves.

It works both ways. If the West is looking to replace its weapons with virtual ones it will run up against the same problem as with the firewall. If the effectiveness is not 100%, then they will need to retain real weapons as well. At the end of the day, NATO will need a software arsenal of cyber weapons, a cyber firewall, missile defence as the hardware firewall, conventional weapons and as the final insurance: a nuclear deterrent in order to prevent war. And endless updates.

This will cost billions upon billions at a time when we really need the money to deal with other, more pressing, crises – climate change, energy security, economic instability – that are killing people or making them suffer every day. This is the real cost of the technological “fix”, and it is industry-driven. We have become addicted to technology in a way that is apparent to me every time I hear a bunch of schoolkids talking about gadgets. It is the new tobacco, purporting to be more “user-friendly” than the last global addiction we are still trying to eliminate. From Nintendo to Lockheed Martin, we want the latest in the technological arms race.

I am not against technology per se, but we need to differentiate between sustainable, useful technology and scams or sales gimmicks. I am all for pragmatism in politics, but there comes a time when we need a sea-change and this is that time. Instead of seeking “quick fix” solutions to these problems, we need to deepen our understanding of the interconnectedness of this world. Facebook cannot replace actual human contact. Wars cannot be fought virtually or using drones remotely-controlled from other parts of the planet, they will always turn into a battle with deaths on all sides – through insurgency, terrorism or cyberattack on the systems that are vital for our society. There was never before such need for sustainable solutions and common security built through trust, as there is now. And the funny thing is, we obviously have the intellectual capacity to achieve it. But are we evolved enough?

This was posted originally on the IPPNW Peace and Health Blog

© xanthe hall, 2011

© xanthe hall, 2010

But wait, there’s more: someone of unidentifiable origin is trying to turn off all the nuclear installations built by Siemens. Using a virus called “Stuxnet”, installations all over the world (well, okay, not in any of the recognised nuclear weapons’ states) began having problems, including Iran. The cyber war we have all been waiting for has begun and reporters are suspecting state sponsorship rather than terrorism. But what state could possibly want Iran’s nuclear installations to go offline? I wonder. On the other hand, it could be the beginning of a nuclear industry war between Siemens and Westinghouse.

I had only just finished laughing at that excellent film “The Men Who Stare at Goats” with George Clooney and Kevin Spacey, when I discovered that in fact it is all true. A glance at this article by Gary S. Bekkum in the American Chronicle confirmed that the US is still using “psychic spies”, now against Iran. So perhaps the Iranians should lock up their goats.

Bekkum asks the question that I know is on all your lips: is there a connection between cyber invasion and alien nuclear intrusion? Or worse still: will we soon be confronting a 9/11 scale “surprise attack against the human mind”? Apparently Stephen Hawking is convinced there will be an extraterrestrial invasion. I myself don’t mind, so long as they get rid of the nukes and then we can live in peace with each other. Hell, I’m not prejudiced against aliens. I was one myself for long enough.

Anyone remember that Edwin Corley science fiction book back in the 1970s called “The Jesus Factor”? I think I was about 14 when I read that and I have secretly believed that the conspiracy theory is true. Apparently the whole nuclear arms race was a bluff, the darn things just don’t work. Even so, I think we should get rid of them because they cost so much money.

While we’re on the topic of money, I was shocked to hear that just one new “Next Generation” nuclear-armed submarine is going to cost the United States 100 million dollars. Captain Picard would be very cross indeed. This news coincided with reports that people on state benefit (Hartz IV) in Germany are going to get a total of 5 Euros extra a month, so they have a grand total of 364 Euros (489 US dollars) a month to live on. I suppose people in other parts of the world would think they were lucky.

Moral of this story: in the next life, come back as a nuclear submarine. You get more money spent on you, go on world cruises and never actually see any military action. Besides, the missiles on board don’t work anyway. But you might get a visit now and again by an alien, a computer virus or even a psychic spy.

This post was originally published on IPPNW Peace and Health Blog