the times | Saturday April 30 2022 saturday review 17
extraneous details. He has 300 pages and
he’s going to use them. Fair enough.
This book is therefore almost interest-
ing by accident. His own description of the
project, given to a bunch of youths smok-
ing weed at a beauty spot during a middle
chapter, isn’t particularly lively: “A book
about birds and art and how birds make us
human and stuff.” Yet he is so absorbed in
this world, and such an able communica-
tor of its weirdness, that it is a pleasure for
outsiders to go along for the ride.
His absorption sometimes invokes
laughter too, with one particularly airy
reminiscence about the time “when the
news broke that it had been the most
successful season for hen harrier chicks”.
Who among us could forget that scoop?
He’s not really interested in winning you
over. Instead he proceeds respectfully
from the premise that you might be an in-
telligent grown-up who is curious about
the world around them. That’s refreshing.
And it’s his uninterest in embellishing
or condescending that makes Galbraith’s
encounter with the stoned teenagers even
funnier. “Nobody wants to read about
birds. People want to read about drugs
and sex and stuff,” the leader of the
pack says. “Write about that, lad.” For
Galbraith, there is no need. As we can see
from their drug-dealer-catching analo-
gies, the stakes for bird-lovers are just as
high. By the end of this book, you might
just feel the same.
H
G Wells was an enthusiastic
believer in the potential of
nuclear energy. “That perpe-
tual struggle for existence,” he
wrote in 1914, “will cease to be
the lot of Man. Man will step from the pin-
nacle of this civilization to the beginning of
the next... I see the... whole world once
more Eden. I see the power of man reach
out among the stars.”
That confidence in creating Eden was
once widely shared among physicists. The
atom, they assumed, would propel ships,
trains, aircraft and cars. Houses would
have their own little power plant. Electri-
city would be so cheap and plentiful that
there would be no need to charge for it. It
was even proposed that nuclear explosions
could be used in large-scale construction
projects such as a second Panama Canal.
The prototype for that project — Sedan
Crater, made in 1962 — can still be seen in
the Nevada desert. It’s the largest man-
made hole on Earth, a weird testimony to
gargantuan folly.
The boundless enthusiasm of the physi-
cists is rather endearing if one ignores the
perils that came with their dreams. Yet as
Serhii Plokhy demonstrates in this superb-
ly crafted but enormously frightening
book, those perils cannot be ignored. In-
stead of Eden, nuclear energy has repeat-
edly brought Purgatory. “Something is
wrong with the air,” a frightened child
remarked in 1979 as she was evacuated
from the area around the Three Mile
Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania. “My
mommy told me it could kill me.”
Plokhy, a professor of history at Harvard
and winner of the Baillie Gifford prize for
his book Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy,
examines six nuclear disasters that to-
gether expose the dangerous naivety of
nuclear ambition. He starts with the 1954
Castle Bravo test of a thermonuclear
weapon in the Marshall Islands, where
radioactive fallout poisoned islanders. In
1957 the explosion of a nuclear waste tank
near Kyshtym in the Urals made a large
area uninhabitable. In that same year
came a fire at the Windscale facility in
Cumbria, part of the British effort to pro-
duce plutonium for its nuclear weapons.
Plokhy then moves to three accidents
involving electricity-generating plants:
Three Mile Island (1979), Chernobyl
(1986) and Fukushima (2011). Each arose
from folly. He concludes that because
human beings inevitably make mistakes,
accidents will continue to happen. The
Three Mile Island catastrophe, for in-
stance, resulted entirely from flawed reac-
tions to warning signals.
As one historian concluded: “If the oper-
ating staff had accidentally locked itself
out of the control room, the... accident
would never have happened.”
The anatomy of these disasters reveals
consistent patterns of behaviour; essen-
tially the same story is repeated six times.
Plokhy shows how nuclear projects arise
out of a cacophony of political and eco-We make too many
errors for this ‘clean
energy’ to be safe.
Gerard DeGroot on
a frightening history
of nuclear disasters
sacrifice The memorial to Chernobyl firefighters in Ukrainenomic motives that inhibit good decision-
making. In the 1950s, for instance, the des-
perate British desire to join the top table of
nuclear powers led to corners being cut at
Windscale. In a similar manner, the Soviet
desire to compete economically with the
capitalist nations meant that they opted
for the cheapest reactor design, which one
expert judged “the most dangerous
method of making power using fission”.
Engineers invariably persuade them-
selves that all eventualities have been an-
ticipated and that accidents are impossi-
ble. Assumptions of cultural superiority
often cloud judgment. The Russians, for
instance, concluded that the Three Mile
Island accident had resulted from capital-
ist greed; the profit motive led to safety
standards being ignored. Communist sys-
tems, it was assumed, were inherently bet-
ter at nuclear generation. Chernobyl put
paid to that assumption.
The Japanese then interpreted Cherno-
byl as proof of Russian incompetence,
blithely assuming that they could do
better. Yet they built all their reactors
on the coast in a country where earth-
quakes occur daily and tsunamis are a
familiar threat.
Although accidents should be predicta-
ble, they inevitably take experts by sur-
prise, leading to bewilderment when they
occur. At Windscale, British engineers,
according to Plokhy, “[knew] what to ex-
pect but not... how to prevent it from hap-
pening”. “Oh dear, now we are in a pickle,”
the technician Arthur Wilson remarked
when he discovered the reactor was on
fire. The possibility of a meltdown isdismantling this kind of nonsense may be
akin to shooting fish in a barrel Murray’s
view is that barrel-dwelling fish still need
shooting. A tiresome job, perhaps, but a
necessary one.
Equally, positions that are actually
mainstream — Winston Churchill was a
hero! — are redefined as thrilling exam-
ples of Things That May No Longer Be
Said. At root, every polemicist wishes to be
subversive. There are moments in which
Murray lapses into the simplistic analysis
he condemns in his opponents.
It is perfectly reasonable to say that
Churchill was a racist — many of his con-
temporaries considered his views on India
extreme — and he was a great man too.
There is neither contradiction nor shame
in noting as much.
And Murray could usefully have gone
further. The anti-western opinions of left-
wing critics are themselves an expression
of western exceptionalism. If China is
given much too easy a ride this is because,
at some fundamental level, those critics
hold western civilisation to a higher stan-
dard than that applied to non-western
cultures. The US and its allies are expected
to be better and it is implicitly assumed —
for interesting if also unflattering reasons
— that non-western cultures cannot or
should not be required to meet the same
standard. “Wokeness” — if it must be
called that — is itself predicated on
western supremacy.
People who won’t read this book will
hate it; those that do may be provoked by
it. Yet as Murray concludes, whatever the
faults and sins of the western past, certain
truths must be reiterated, if only to provide
some necessary balance. Chief of these is
that “People growing up in the West today
remain among the luckiest people in
human history”. Hold on to that and there
may be some basis for hope.
familiar to anyone in the industry, but, as
one Three Mile Island engineer confessed,
“Most of us who had spent our lives in this
business didn’t believe that could happen.”
Plant manuals were supposed to cover
every eventuality. “We had these marvel-
lous safety systems which had back-ups of
back-ups,” the Three Mile Island engineer
Bob Long recalled.
Yet the crisis at Chernobyl, Plokhy re-
veals, was “not anticipated by the design-
ers and not listed in their manuals”. Again,
there’s that arrogance of expertise.
When an accident occurs, chaos invari-
ably reigns and workers are forced to im-
provise. British engineers at Windscale,
faced with the need to push fuel rods out of
harm’s way, first resorted to bamboo drain-
age rods, then grabbed scaffolding pipes.
In every one of these six catastrophes,
“suicide squads” were sent into the confla-
gration to manually address problems that
were never supposed to happen. Escala-
tion of the catastrophe was prevented only
because workers were prepared to die.
When news of an accident reaches gov-
ernment, ministers spring into action,
taking immediate steps to cover up and
find a scapegoat. Harold Macmillan, wor-
ried that the Windscale debacle might
scupper his weapons programme, had no
qualms about blaming the fire on the very
same workers who had heroically prevent-
ed it from raging out of control.
When radioactive dust resulted in weird
light patterns in the night sky around
Kyshtym, local residents were told that it
was the northern lights. Keen to
demonstrate that nothing untoward had
occurred at Chernobyl, Mikhail Gorb-
achev insisted that a May Day parade in
nearby Kyiv should go ahead despite dan-
gerous fallout raining down. Afterwards,
the KGB confiscated the uniforms child-
ren had worn in the parade due to their
radioactivity.
Without ever preaching, Plokhy con-
structs a formidable case for consigning
nuclear power generation to the past. His
six case studies are exquisitely rendered
with just the right level of technical infor-
mation to explain the problems without
making them incomprehensible or dull.
The suspense of reactor crews struggling
to find a solution to meltdown makes this
book weirdly entertaining, at least until it
dawns on the reader that these are real
incidents, real people and real deaths.
Despite the recent memory of Three
Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima,
the popularity of nuclear power is rising.
To many, it seems a solution to climate
change and dependence on dodgy political
regimes. Yet to solve the energy crisis with
nuclear power would require the con-
struction of thousands of reactors world-
wide. The problems so perfectly explained
in this book would not miraculously dis-
appear; they would proliferate.
Wells once dreamt of man reaching out
to the stars. That brings to mind Prome-
theus, who stole fire from the gods and
gave it to humans. In the early 1980s a
massive statue of Prometheus was erected
in Pripyat, the city closest to Chernobyl. It
symbolised that Wellsian optimism. It
has since been moved to a spot outside
the shattered plant, in the ghost town that
is Chernobyl.
A new location implies a new meaning.
The statue now provides ironic testimony
to the arrogance and folly of those
who once believed that the atom could
be tamed.Go nuclear, get more Chernobyls
‘Now we are
in a pickle,’
a Windscale
technician
said when
the reactor
caught fire
Atoms and Ashes
From Bikini Atoll
to Fukushima
by Serhii PlokhyAllen Lane, 368pp; £25It is reasonable to
say that Churchill
was a racist — and he
was a great man too
ALAMY