“Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount.” –
This is a rough transcript – edited for text medium – of the speech I gave at Scottish CND’s fringe meeting at the STUC Annual Congress on April 29th, 2025.
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When I was invited here, I was given a very broad remit for the topic of discussion. I thought I was going to talk today about the economics of nuclear bombs perhaps by way of talking about opportunity costs of investing in nuclear weapons – and what we could be building instead. Or maybe I’d talk about the cost of rebuilding a nuked city – though the images we’re seeing in real time from Palestine show that those costs can be visited upon humanity without us splitting a single atom. But when I sat down to decide what to actually say, something else came to mind entirely.
Here is my proposal for discussion: It is possible for an economy the size of the UK’s to sustain a civilian nuclear power sector without nuclear weapons. It is not possible for it to sustain a nuclear weapons sector without civilian nuclear power. Therefore, when politicians claim to back new nuclear power – especially in Scotland – despite renewables being cheaper, more effective, cleaner, faster to deploy and more secure, what they are actually doing is trying to shore up support for nuclear bomb infrastructure but they know they can’t say that.
To give a bit of a back story about myself and how I very nearly became an example of that proposal in action. Some here might know that I’ve not always been a policy wonk.
My degrees are in physics. I have a Masters in Laser Physics and Optoelectronics and a PhD in two-photon fluorescence with applications in distributed optical fibre sensing (don’t worry – no-one else understands it either).
Back in 2010, I was giving a lecture about my PhD work in London and got talking afterwards with someone who turned out to be from AWE Aldermaston. They were interested in some of the “extreme environment” applications for my research but amusingly, we had to cut the conversation short when he said “I don’t think I should say any more in case you start working out some secrets”. Probably for the best, though I’ll never know if my next thoughts were correct or not…
The point of that story is that I could very well have gone down that route. Several of my friends went into conventional military engineering. A couple went into civilian nuclear – including one who had to leave because he wasn’t willing to give up a dual citizenship for a promotion.
If we only had the couple hundred jobs sustained by the bomb sector, why would unis run those physics courses? As my friend Robbie [Mochrie] on this panel can attest – would he be teaching his courses if there were no jobs for his students to go into?
Where would the physicists and engineers who didn’t get those jobs go? Sure…some might become policy wonks…but while I love my job, I didn’t need to become a laser physicist to get it.
As an analogy, imagine trying to plan for an oil company and someone magics away all of the world’s plastic but nothing else changes. You’d lose a tiny fraction of your customer base but you’d still be selling oil to all the people with cars and gas boilers. You wouldn’t see much change in your business model.
A nuclear bomb sector without a civilian nuclear power sector is a bit like trying to run an oil company when all the cars are electric, the boilers are heat pumps and we recycle all of our plastics. The economics don’t work.
So bear this in mind when the politicians talk about bringing new nuclear power Scotland. There might well be a case for it – I’m not ideologically against it. But renewables are so cheap and Scotland’s potential so great that we don’t need that kind of civilian nuclear sector here. Unless…they want them here for the reason they know they can’t say.
The Common Green 