Nuclear

There are some words that arrive with a certain mood. Before we think about what they mean, we know how they make us feel.

Home, war, mother, God, freedom and nuclear.

Sit for a moment with that last word. Notice what happens, not what you think, but what you feel. Perhaps an image appears.

• A mushroom cloud.

• A family.

• A warning sign.

• A hospital.

Perhaps there is a tightening somewhere in your body. Perhaps curiosity, perhaps unease, perhaps hope, perhaps nothing at all. Whatever appeared, it almost certainly wasn’t an atom, it was a world.

Words are extraordinary things. They do far more than describe. They gather memories, stories, emotions, arguments and images. They gather entire (but incomplete) histories until eventually a single word can summon an entire landscape of meaning. “Nuclear” is one of those words. The moment it enters a conversation, something enters with it, not because of the word itself, but because of the world that has gathered around it.

Imagine hearing the word in different places. A consultant in an oncology ward carefully, or perhaps hastily, explaining tomorrow’s treatment with nuclear medicine. A campaigner speaking through a loudhailer outside a power station. A submarine commander receiving sealed orders beneath the Arctic ice. A physicist watching data appear on a screen. A schoolchild opening a history book. The same word producing different worlds. No two people meet the same nuclear.

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It is tempting to think that these differences are simply matters of opinion, but they are not, because they shape the way we attend, and the way we attend shapes the world we inhabit. One person sees invisible danger, while another sees invisible healing. One sees technological brilliance while another sees human arrogance. One sees a solution, while another sees a threat.

The atom has not changed, but the worlds have.

This is where something fascinating begins to happen. The living world is hidden behind the stories we tell about it. “Nuclear” begins to feel as though it exists independently, as though it were a thing in itself. As though somewhere, beneath the cooling ponds and cancer wards, beneath Hiroshima and Sellafield, there exists a single object called *nuclear*, but there isn’t. There are atoms, there are unstable nuclei, there are chain reactions, reactors, missiles, submarines, and there are hospitals.

There are human beings trying, as we have always tried, to make sense of powers larger than ourselves. “Nuclear” is the name we have given to the world that gathers around these encounters.

Barry Lopez wrote ‘We create wolves’. Perhaps modernity creates nuclear, not because uranium is imaginary or because atoms are unreal, but because, like the wolf, they become clothed in stories, hopes, fears and symbols until we can no longer see where the living world ends and our world begins. The question is not whether those stories are true, because most of them are. The question is whether they have become so complete that we mistake them for the thing itself.

There is another word for this. For centuries people spoke of the world as enchanted, not because they believed in magic, but because they experienced the living world as filled with presence, significance and mystery. Then the modern world became disenchanted, or so we are told. The old enchantments faded as the world became measurable, predictable and calculable. Objects replaced presences and mechanisms replaced mysteries. Perhaps that story too is incomplete, perhaps we have not stopped enchanting the world. Perhaps we have simply enchanted different things.

Today, words like nuclear, economy, artificial intelligence, market, brain and data all carry something of the power that dragons, angels and forests once carried. They summon wonder, fear, charm, authority, hope and dread. They organise our attention before we begin to think about them. They become the modern myths through which we encounter the living world, and, like all enchantments, they reveal as much about us as they do about the realities to which they point.

A couple of years ago I stood outside a nuclear power station situated behind a stunning Scottish beach. It was disappointingly dreary. A perimeter fence, concrete, steel and steam pouring into the sky. Security cameras, lorries, workers changing shifts. Gulls circling overhead and grass growing undisturbed along the roadside. Nothing in the scene announced itself as *nuclear*. If someone had removed the warning signs and the fences, I might have driven past without a second glance. That is what struck me. You cannot see “nuclear.” You can see buildings, machines, people, pipework and clouds. You can measure radiation with the right instruments. You can detect unstable nuclei. But you cannot point to a thing called *nuclear*. It exists, if it exists at all somewhere else.

The same is true of the wolf. Standing on the ridge, it knows nothing of fairy tales or conservation. Nothing of fear or symbolism. It simply lives. Everything else gathers around it. The atom, too, knows nothing of Hiroshima, deterrence, clean energy, protest marches, defence policy or dread. It just is. Everything else gathers around it.

This seems almost too obvious to mention, yet perhaps it is one of the easiest things to forget. We begin treating the world that gathers around something as though it were the thing itself, the distinction disappears. Eventually we can no longer imagine one without the other. Say the word nuclear and we rarely think of uranium resting within ancient granite. We think of history, politics, fear, hope, technology, risk and much more. The atom has become almost impossible to meet directly because we encounter it through the world we have built around it. Exactly as we encountered the wolf.

We have always covered the living world with meaning. The night sky became constellations and the seasons became festivals. Mountains became sacred and springs became holy, while animals became ancestors, messengers or companions. The world was alive with significance. Modern people often congratulate themselves for having escaped these enchantments. We imagine that we now see reality objectively. Without myth, symbol or projection. But do we? Or have our enchantments merely changed their clothing?

Stand outside a power station and notice your own attention. Where does it go? Towards the steam? Towards the security fence? Towards the invisible radiation? Towards climate change? Towards Hiroshima? Towards tomorrow’s electricity? Towards a child receiving radiotherapy? The physical landscape remains apparently stable. What changes is the landscape through which we experience it. The enchantment was never in the atom. It was in the meeting between the atom and human imagination, into the relationship between ourselves and what stands before us.

Perhaps this is why these words possess such extraordinary power. They organise our attention before they organise our thinking. Long before we begin weighing evidence, our imaginations have already begun assembling a world.

This is not a weakness of human beings, it may be one of our greatest gifts. Without it we could never recognise meaning, tell stories, build cultures, discover science, or fall in love. The question is not whether we enchant the world. We cannot help ourselves. The question is whether we remain aware that we are doing it. When we forget, our enchantments harden into reality itself. And that is when the living world disappears behind the worlds we have reduced it to.