I was broken in to the impact of nuclear warfare when reading an excerpt from Hiroshima by John Hershey. I was 10. I think my memory was the inspiration for Arnie Schwarzenegger's Total Recall. It's like living in a demented Tardis,
frenetically accelerating at warp factor 10. And, so, I recollect the seismic kick of anguish I experienced when Mr Matsuo took a naive course of action, diving into his bedrolls for protection, while his pal, Mr Tani-moto, ducked between two rocks. The men were two miles from the centre of the explosion. The
Virgin Mary could not have saved them from the merciless white light of annihilation.
Mr Tanimoto, some guy as ordinary as a tea biscuit, thought that when drops of water the size of marbles began to fall, they must be coming from the hoses of firemen fighting the blazes. When he dec-ided to carry wounded men and women from the sandpit beside the river bank, he had to keep reminding himself that these blinded, mewling scraps were people. And even when their skin came off in gloves, and the texture of their slimy backs sickened him, he kept going. He repeated: ''These are human beings, these are human beings . . .'' And in his ignorance of the effects of the H-bomb, Mr Tanimoto thought that he could help his fellow villagers. He believed that by saving them from drowning in the incoming tide, he was saving their lives.
There is a painful sadness in the realisation that a man's education is not as sophisticated as the capabilities of his killer. Mr Tanimoto's futile heroism, and the imagery of such a sweeping and casual act of genocide, opened up my perspective on what was already a gloomy world view of behaviour. There had been another occasion, when I wept a window cleaner's symposium of buckets at the evidence of the ruthless need to stockpile man's little toys. When I discovered the casualties of the arms race, those whose lifestyle person-ally apologises for an economy with no moral direction. Looking back, my father and my mother could stand accused of determining to subject me to savage horror, when other
tots could barely handle Bambi. Although, while some are influenced by Warhol, Wittgenstein, or Jung, I admit that I am Disney's child. It is the integration of Walt's best work (101 Dalmatians was also a seminal influence) and globetrotting at a very impressionable age, that makes me wary of putting on the blinkers of reason or bias.
When I was five I was escorted to Pakistan, once renowned as a producer of hard drugs, now universally famous as a threat to international security. It was the first of many takes on the landscape and culture of my father's birth and, for myself, revealed nothing but cruelty. I remember being held by the hand and walking out from under a canopy, where it was cool and dark, into the bright sunburst of a hot and muggy day. I was leaving Rawal-pindi airport, and it was only a short distance from the exit to my uncle's jeep. And they came from nowhere.
A tight wall of around 50 young girls, some carrying babies, closing in on me, fingering my jacket and touching my face. And I remember the din of their voices as they begged me for money, knowing expertly that my reaction could influence the wallet of my adult guardians. It was a dismal and harrowing spectacle. They were barely clothed in light, transparent cotton, not even heavy enough to protect them from sun or snow. And I felt not scared but helpless, and I cried because it seemed the right thing to do, until my family shooed them away and got me into the back seat. Needless to say, I refrained from looking out of the window during my journey; indeed, I thought it would be safer to shut my eyes for keeps, and succeeded in doing so to the detriment of my safety.
To those girls, and their families, anything Western represented cash, superiority, abundance, and, although I was a tot, I was an emblem of
prosperity, and was entitled to be exploited. The exceptional fruits borne of the West is a mythology the two countries have never quite questioned, and the recent case of competitive nuclear testing illustrates their awe. India and Pakistan are very poor, and the poverty is accep-ted, because the caste system allows the privileged to believe that social injustice is merely another form of tradition, a belief which essentially also allows the abuse of women. So nothing changes.
And Scotland is no different really, with her missing uranium, and her radioactive lobsters. Here, there is a healthy commitment to the nuclear industry, the unhealthiest and most poisonous of schemes, yet one which is economically viable and therefore justified as such. We tolerate the intolerable. We adapt and rationalise money always better spent on the means to kill rather than the means to live. Dounreay is a cultural icon as is any Asian bomb. It must be a penalty of the maturing spirit that the necessity of nuclear weapons, and the sinking or burying of waste, is acceptable and accepted. Like the pesky problem of carousel beggars, it's only the geography of its containment which causes concern.
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