IT'S A strange thing to be 800 yards from a nuclear submarine and to witness its dark, silent beauty. Of all the monsters potentially lurking within a Scottish loch, a fusion-powered submarine, possibly carrying intercontinental ballistic missiles that could destroy 12 capital cities, can appear benign and tranquil, almost a thing of nature, gliding along as gracefully as a seal.
It is even stranger to admit that these are the thoughts of a man who was once an active member of CND. Correction – who was, at the age of 12, too young to be a proper member, but who nonetheless was a unilateral disarmament activist, had an obsess
ive understanding of the workings of nuclear fusion, and woke almost every night with nightmares of a blast wave blowing his house to powder; of eyeballs melting; of people walking zombie-like with radiation sickness.
Perhaps my childhood was not normal. While I grew up beneath the same cold war shadow as everyone else in my generation, our home was 20 miles from the Dounreay experimental reactor and the Nato base at Forse.
I had been radicalised by a film my liberal parents allowed me to see. It was called The War Game and had been made by the BBC (then withdrawn). CND got their hands on it and toured it round community centres and town halls all over the UK. It included footage of the carpet bombing of Dresden and showed people suffocating as the air burned. The voiceover explained that this was one of the effects of thermonuclear explosion; that in Dresden the UK had created its own nuclear-scale destruction. There was also footage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
So it was, with these images in mind, that I spent two weeks walking round Wick with my little sister and a petition to shut down Dounreay – horribly naive and unaware that almost every person in town had a family member who was employed there.
The local sweet shop owner was the most vocal: "Bugger off, ya hippy, and don't come back!"
He would die from the blast, I told my sister, and we would be fine: after all, we had a stash of Heinz beans and HP2 batteries and a torch under the stairs.
I was totally sick and obsessed with the idea of imminent nuclear catastrophe. Then suddenly, one day, all my fears stopped. Perhaps it was puberty and more pressing concerns, or perhaps the collapse of the Soviet Union and the lack of an enemy in the post-cold war world. Or maybe I just got fed up with worrying all the time.
I find it hard to grasp, so many years later, how I can sit by the banks of a Scottish loch and wax lyrical about the beautiful design of a nuclear submarine. There are as many warheads on and off our shores as there were in my childhood, but this seems not to bother me. I walk on a beach every morning which may be contaminated, but I do not seem to care. Even the old peace camp down the road at Faslane looks abandoned and seems to belong to a lost era.
How did I become comfortable with nuclear power and nuclear weapons? Have I become stupid, desensitised? Have I forgotten the horrors that woke me every night? Or am I living and breathing in the very real peace that they have brought to our country?
