Sacrificial Experts? Science,Senescence and Saving the British Nuclear Project

Rowe J. W. Kahn R. L. , “Human aging: Usual and successful”, Science, ccxxxvii (1987), 143–9. Doyle Yvonne G. , Martin McKee and Martyn Sherriff, “A model of successful ageing in British populations”, European journal of public health, xxii (2012), 2012–76. For a recent UK policy response to this issue, see: Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Building a society for all ages, Cmnd 7655, 2009.

Cole Thomas R. , The journey of life: A cultural history of aging in America (Cambridge, 1992), xx, 225.

Gowing Margaret , Britain and atomic energy 1939–1945 (London, 1964).

For the early years, see: Gowing Margaret with Arnold Lorna , Independence and deterrence: Britain and atomic energy, 1945–1952, vol. i: policy making and vol. ii: policy execution (London, 1974). For the UK's wavering radioactive waste policies, see: Berkhout Frans , Radioactive waste: Politics and technology (London, 1991). The stakeholders of British nuclear weapon development are explored, in the submarine case, by Mort Maggie , Building the Trident network: A study of the enrollment of people, knowledge and machines (Cambridge, MA, 2002). For radiobiology, see: Creager Angela N. H. Santesmases María Jesús , “Radiobiology in the Atomic Age: Changing research practices and policies in comparative perspective”, Journal of the history of biology, xxxix (2006), 2006–47, and Kraft Alison , “Between medicine and industry: Medical physics and the rise of the radioisotope 1945–65”, Contemporary British history, xx (2006), 2006–35. For radiology, see: O'Riordan Mike , Radiation protection: A memoir of the National Radiological Protection Board (Chilton, 2007). A similar insiders' view is Patterson H. Wade Thomas Ralph H. (eds), The history of accelerator radiological protection: Personal and professional memoirs (Ashford, 1994). An important moment in British nuclear politics is discussed in Jeff Hughes, ” The Strath report: Britain confronts the H-Bomb, 1954–1955”, History and technology, xix (2003), 2003–75. Johnston Sean F. , “Implanting a discipline: The academic trajectory of nuclear engineering in the USA and UK”, Minerva (2009), 47, 51–73. See also the Special Issue of the British journal for the history of science, forthcoming, on British Nuclear Culture, edited by Hogg Jonathan Laucht Christoph .

Welsh Ian , Mobilising modernity: The nuclear moment (London, 2000).

Wynne Brian , Rationality and ritual: The Windscale inquiry and nuclear decisions in Britain, (Chalfont St Giles, 1982), 24. See Agar Jon , “What happened in the Sixties?”, British journal for the history of science, xli (2008), 2008–600, for a general discussion of this phenomenon.

Wynne , op. cit. (ref. 7), 161.

Medvedev Zhores A. , The legacy of Chernobyl (Oxford, 1990). See also Petryna Adriana , Life exposed: Biological citizens after Chernobyl (Princeton, 2002), Smith Jim Beresford Nicholas A. , Chernobyl: Catastrophe and consequences (New York, 2005).

Papers Frederick Warner , Albert Sloman Library, Essex University (afterwards FWP), C. 558, Warner to “colleague”, undated (late October, early November 1986).

FWP, C. 573. Warner to VIR members, 29 January 1987.

Biographical information on Warner comes from the curriculum vitae kept in FWP, A. 11. Also, see: Swan Russ , “A respectable failure” and “Moving on, moving up”, a two part profile in The chemical engineer, 30 December 1998 and 18 January 1999, and obituaries published in the Telegraph (20 July 2010), Guardian (27 July 2010), and Scotsman (27 July 2010). Warner was a Londoner born in 1910. He received a chemistry degree from UCL in 1931. He was an active communist in the 1930s. His experience running ethyl acetate plant in Stratford gave him the skills to devise nitric acid plants and new penicillin plants during the war. Post-war, Warner eventually set up his own international chemical engineering consultancy (with Herbert Cremer). A knighthood in 1968 led to more involvement in public, professional and official work, including being a member of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution (1973–76), an adviser in the Flixborough chemical explosion inquiry (1974–75), an assessor on the Windscale nuclear inquiry (1977–78) and chair of the Royal Society's British National Committee on Problems of the Environment (1977–80) as well as the Royal Society's Study Group on Risk (1978–83).

FWP, C. 558, Warner, “Voluntary service for emergencies with radioactivity”, undated (October 1986). Warner later found out that Velikhov, vice president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences “had taken 7.5 sieverts in the emergency actions at Chernobyl, and that they take seriously the idea of using older men”, FWP, C. 573, Warner to Collier, 19 December 1988.

Warner had been a founder member of the Fellowship of Engineers.

Set out in Health and Safety Executive, Emergency plans for civil nuclear installations, London, 1982. VIR, explained Warner to a supporter in the House of Lords, was available for an “emergency from any nuclear accident including a weapon although the probability [of the latter] is almost zero”. FWP, C. 575, Warner to Mais, 17 July 1987.

FWP, C. 574, Joe Bird to Warner, 15 July 1986, responded warmly: “What an idea is your over 65's Reconnaisance Corps!”.

FWP, C. 569, Fremlin to Warner, 7 October 1986. The letter was typed by Fremlin's wife, the elderly professor's handwriting being judged indecipherable. Fremlin thought that “5 rems a day, around one fast electron through the average cell nucleus every few hours, should be coped with indefinitely by the repair system”.

FWP, C. 574, Edwards to Warner, 22 October 1986. Edwards, along with John Fremlin, was Warner's expert adviser on possible genetic damage to VIR.

The approach to St John Ambulance was planned a few months earlier to be made informally through a friend, Joe Bird. FWP, C. 574, Bird to Warner, 15 July 1986. The response was immediate and warm, see: FWP, C. 574, Boulton to Warner, 20 August 1986.

The “rad”, a unit of absorbed dosage of radiation, dates from the early twentieth century. When multiplied by a factor that depends on the way different kinds of radiation have biological effects, a measurement of “modified dose” can be made, in units of “rems” or “sieverts” (the SI unit, 1 sievert = 100 rems). 5 rems over 30 days is 150 rems, a dosage that would be expected to cause illness and sometimes fatality (although Fremlin's advice was that this level was still safe). The famous transplantation surgeon, Michael Woodruff, who had experience treating patients with whole body irradiation, and who was in the United States and Canada during Warner's first call for volunteers, later disputed Fremlin's assessment, since only marginally higher levels of irradiation (150 rads followed by 50 rads a week later) had proved fatal. FWP, C. 575, Woodruff to Warner, 26 February 1987. 1000 rems would be expected to be fatal.

A tabulation of the FRS replies can be found in FWP, C.570.

FWP, C.560, Jackson to Warner, 5 November 1986. Jackson had made the suggestion in a discussion between the Atomic Energy Authority and the National Radiological Protection Board. He was particularly pleased that Warner had chosen to use the old rem unit, and he recalled that he had “semi-facetiously” suggested the name “Remploy” for his own proposed cadre of over-65s. (Remploy was an existing government agency that placed disabled people in employment.) FWP, C.565, Kurti to Warner, 13 November 1986. In the 1960s Kurti, in a discussion about the use of beryllium for power transmission, had countered the objection that ” The harmful effects [of the element] did not show up for some 15 or 20 years”, with the idea that “people above 70 could be employed for its handling”. He added: “More recently I asked at a symposium whether something could be done about employing old people on work involving ionizing radiation but was told that the trade unions were dead against it”.

FWP, C.560, Calverley to Warner, 26 November 1986. FWP, C.560. Derrington to Warner, 3 November 1986. FWP, C.560, Redshaw to Warner, 18 November 1986.

FWP, C.565, Kurti to Warner, 13 November 1986. FWP, C.561, Thompson to Warner, 19 November 1986. FWP, C.560, Walley to Warner, 12 November 1986.

Fogg G. E. Southward A. J. , “Dennis John Crisp. 29 April 1916–18 January 1990”, Biographical memoirs of fellows of the Royal Society, xxxviii (1992), 113–29, p. 121. FWP, C. 565, Crisp to Warner, 20 December 1986.

Connerade J.-P. , “Professor W.R.S. Garton: Spectroscopist with a quest for the unknown”, obituary, The Independent, 10 September 2002. FWP, C. 565, Garton to Warner, 21 November 1986.

FWP, C. 565, Lipson to Warner, 21 November 1986.

FWP, C. 569, Rowlands to Warner, 5 September 1986. FWP, C. 569, Easty to Warner, 27 December 1986.

FWP, C. 565, Dainton to Warner, 19 October 1986.

FWP, C. 565, Doll to Warner, 17 November 1986.

For Bruno Pontecorvo, see: Turchetti Simone , “Atomic secrets and governmental lies: Nuclear science, politics and security in the Pontecorvo case”, British journal for the history of science, xxxvi (2003), 389–415.

FWP, C. 565, Lovelock to Warner, 16 November 1986.

FWP, C. 565, Zuckerman to Warner, 18 December 1986.

FWP, C. 565, Mandelstam to Warner, 18 November 1986.

FWP, C. 565, Mandelstam to Warner, 18 November 1986.

FWP, C. 565, Bondi to Warner, 13 November 1986.

FWP, C. 565, Loutit to Warner, 17 November 1986.

Lyon Mary F. , “Loutit, John Freeman”, New DNB.

FWP, C. 565, Loutit to Warner, 17 November 1986.

FWP, C. 565, Mew to Warner, 4 December 1986.

FWP, C. 560, Flurscheim to Warner, 8 November 1986. FWP, C. 560, Morrison to Warner, 7 November 1986.

FWP, C. 565, Goodwin to Warner, 28 November 1986. FWP C. 560, Freeman to Warner, 22 November 1986.

FWP, C. 560, Binnie to Warner, 10 November 1986. FWP, C. 560, Elstub to Warner, 22 November 1986. FWP C. 561, Broadway to Warner, 19 November 1986. FWP, C. 561, Merriman to Warner, 24 November 1986. FWP, C. 565. Humphrey to Warner, 12 December 1986. See also: Andrew Haines, “Editorial: John Humphrey”, Medicine and war (1988), iv, pp. 71–73; Agar Jon , The government machine (Cambridge, MA, 2003), 309 for Merriman.

As Giana Kurti, the wife of Nicholas Kurti, suggested, perhaps they should call themselves Volunteers for Ionising Radiation In Local Emergencies or “VIRILE for short”. FWP, C. 579, Nicholas Kurti to Warner, 12 January 1989.

FWP, C. 563, Arup to Warner, 7 November 1986. FWP, C. 563, Lockspeiser to Warner, undated (November 1986). FWP, C. 566, Hodgkin to Warner, 28 November 1986. The others were aircraft engineer Harold Roxbee Cox (Lord Kings Norton), Glossop R. , David Keith-Lucas (immobile), Alan Harris, Jack Ballard (immobile), A. R. Collins (shaky hand), Charles Oakley (too old, “little use in an emergency”), Smith J. P. (heart), John Cornforth (“I am totally deaf”), Nicholas Kemmer (prostate operation), Offord A. C. (too old), Helen Huggett (since deceased), Helen Porter (slow reaction times liability), George Taylor (probably too old but near Torness nuclear power plant so “on the spot”), and H. L. Willett (heart, Parkinsons, slow to walk, and “even slower on the uptake”).

FWP, C. 562, Keith-Lucas to Warner, undated (November 1986).

FWP, C. 563, Harris to Warner, 10 November 1986.

FWP, C. 563, Rowe to Warner, 5 November 1986.

FWP C. 560, Hooker to Warner, 6 November 1986. FWP C. 560, Page to Warner, 7 November 1986.

The seven were Stanley Brown, Leslie J. Clark, St John Elstub, D. C. F. Pratt, Wilkes, Porter and R. A. Raphael.

FWP, C. 563, Baxter to Warner, 15 December 1986.

FWP, C. 560, Sinclair to Warner, 30 November 1986.

Woolfson M. M. , “Obituary: Henry Lipson, 1910–1991”, Acta crystallographica A., xlvii (1991), 635–6.

FWP, C. 560, Mais to Warner, 17 November 1986. He would later compare the reluctance of the 1980s government to address “nuclear disaster” to that of the 1930s government to prepare for strategic bombing. FWP, C. 575, Mais to Warner, 5 August 1987.

FWP, C. 575, Fremlin to Warner, 6 August 1987.

FWP, C. 560, Broadbent to Warner, 6 November 1986.

FWP, C. 565, Pereira to Warner, 26 May 1987.

FWP, C. 569, Rockingham Gill to Warner, 5 September 1988.

FWP, C. 560. Kay to Warner, 7 January 1987.

FWP, C. 560, Conway to Warner, undated (November 1986).

Welsh , op. cit. (ref. 6). Davies Richard , “The Sizewell B nuclear inquiry: An analysis of public participation in decision making about nuclear power”, Science, technology & human values, ix (1984), 21–32.

FWP, C. 560, Freeman to Warner, 22 November 1986.

FWP, C. 565, Henderson to Warner, 19 November 1986.

FWP, C. 565, Pippard to Warner, 12 November 1986.

FWP, C. 566, Bowie to Warner, 15 November 1986. Bowie's second reservation was with established radiological assumptions about the relationship between ionising radiation and the incidence of cancer.

FWP, C. 567, Holt to Warner, 10 December 1986.

FWP, C. 563, Rowe to Warner, 5 November 1986.

FWP, C. 565, Stafford to Warner, 27 November 1986.

FWP, C. 565, Jones to Warner, 14 November 1986.

FWP, C. 561, Glossop to Warner, 4 November 1986.

Cowe Roger , “Obituary: Sir Michael Clapham”, The Guardian, 23 November 2002.

FWP, C. 569, Clapham to Warner, 7 August 1986. Note that this offer predated the formal invitation to the fellows of the two societies.

FWP, C. 567, Fleming to Warner, 24 November 1986.

FWP, C. 560, Halsbury to Warner, 3 November 1986.

FWP, C. 577, Halsbury to Warner, 29 September 1988, expresses the pride and Halsbury's comparative assessment of his experience: “Recently I have seen some publicity accorded to fellow volunteers, Solly Zuckerman, George Porter and others (none of whom, so far as I know, has ever seen the inside of a station while it was being constructed or knows his way around one, whereas I was a member of the consortia that built the best, eg Hinkley B, Hunterston B and Torness … and am very much at home on Nuclear Sites).” Halsbury was “eager to help” and to join Warner's “octogenarian volunteers to clean up nuclear messes”.

Lindsay O. J. M. , “John Anthony Hardinge Giffard, 3^rd Earl of Halsbury, 4 June 1908–14 January 2000”, Biographical memoirs of fellows of the Royal Society, lxvii (2001), xliv, 239–53.

This organisational handbook can be found in FWP, C. C.571, “VIR. Volunteers Radiation Emergency”, 11 November 1986.

FWP, C. 573. Warner to Fellows of Engineering, undated (November 1986). Warner to Fellows of the Royal Society, 28 November 1986.

FWP, C. 573. Press release, “St John prepares for possible nuclear emergencies”, 1 December 1986.

FWP, C. 565, Loutit to Warner, 17 November 1986.

Hansard, House of Commons, “Written answers. Nuclear accidents”, 30 June 1987. Health and Safety Executive, Emergency plans for civil nuclear installations (London, 1982).

FWP, C. 574, Warner to Marshall, 10 November 1986. FWP, C. 573. Warner to Fellows of the Royal Society, 28 November 1986. The CEGB's first, misleading response was that Warner should contact the Home Office. FWP, C. 573, Warner to VIR members, 6 July 1987.

FWP, C. 560, Halsbury to Warner, 3 November 1986.

FWP, C. 574, Collier to Warner, 2 December 1986.

FWP, C. 574, Marshall to Warner, 23 December 1986. Walter Marshall was a Harwell theoretical physicist, who was appointed successively chair of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority and then head of the CEGB, the body responsible for British power stations, nuclear and non-nuclear.

The National Archives (hereafter TNA), AB 38/2071. Minutes of the Chernobyl Issue Management Review Group, 20 May 1986.

TNA, AB 38/2071. Lord Marshall of Goring, “Nuclear power: Energy of today and tomorrow”, undated (April/May 1986), speech delivered to European Nuclear Energy Conference. The speech was hastily rewritten, and became a plea for all friends of nuclear power to “set about the process of educating the public and explaining”. It was squarely in the “deficit model” mode of Public Understanding of Science, as articulated in Britain in the mid to late 1980s by the Royal Society and other bodies.

TNA, AB 38/2071. Memorandum, Gittus J. H. , ” The Chernobyl accident and its consequences”, 18 September 1986, outlines the strategy. Gittus John , The Chernobyl accident and its consequences (London, 1987), is the official response published by UKAEA.

FWP, C. 573, Warner to VIR members, 29 January 1987.

FWP, C. 574, Marshall to Warner, 23 December 1986. “For example, there may be high temperatures which would require the wearing of cooling suits, noxious gases which would require the wearing of breathing apparatus and routes through damaged buildings might well require local knowledge and considerable physical challenge. I think therefore there is nothing you could do to help us on the nuclear station itself in the near vicinity”. Marshall also distinguished between the normal or “design basis accident” (which VIR could play no part in responding to) and the extraordinary emergency, which VIR could contribute to as part of a civil defence scheme, at a distance.

See FWP, C. 575, Flurscheim to Warner, 8 February 1987: “I am not surprised at the CEGB reaction, which lives up with the resistance to new ideas often encountered with long-established organisations –- Even in the war I encountered a similar negative response from the RAE [Royal Aircraft Establishment] which I had to overcome through Bomber Command”.

Hansard, House of Commons, written answers, 30 June 1987.

FWP, C. 574, Rimington to Fletcher, 15 August 1986. Rimington dismissed a formal role for VIR in the rehearsals for responses to incidents. However, in the more extreme cases “where the risks are very remote indeed and the uncovered situations could come in all shapes and sizes and define themselves rapidly” and in which preparation was difficult, “a possible role for a small corps of informed ‘hard men’ emerges”. For HSE's second response see FWP, C. 575, Woodruff to Warner, 26 February 1987.

FWP, C. 573. Warner to Marshall, 22 April 1987.

TNA, AB 38/2071. Lord Marshall of Goring, “Nuclear power: Energy of today and tomorrow”, undated (April/May 1986).

TNA, AB 38/2071. Wright J. K. , ” The Halsbury Scale of nuclear incidents and accidents”, 9 September 1986, captures the scale in the process of negotiation between various interested parties. It was to be a “crude but objective assessment of radiological significance for the public of any incident at a nuclear facility”, needed because “people do not understand rads, sieverts etc”. The proposal for the Halsbury Scale emerged in the Report of the European Communities Committee on Nuclear Power in Europe, 18th Report, 1985–86, H.L. 227, and was discussed in the House of Lords Debate of 20 November 1986, see Hansard 482, cc348–427.

“No nuclear role for Grandad's Army”, Sunday Telegraph, 10 May 1987. For a critical view of the article see FWP C. 575, Fremlin to Warner, 28 May 1987. Other periodicals that carried stories or letters on VIR include: The Times, Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail, Financial Times, Sunday Mirror, the Sunday Post, the Australian, Private Eye, Electrical Review, and the Energy Daily. The coverage was often lurid and, in details, inaccurate. For example, here's the Daily Mail's article “‘Death’ squad granddads join A-plant army”, 29 December 1988: “A group of pensioners are spending Christmas knowing that a phone call could plunge them into horrifying danger. They are a grandad's –- and grandma's army of scientists…. At short notice, the aging troubleshooters will fly out to deal with nuclear accidents at any of the world's 410 major power reactors.” VIR, of course, was not an international response team, nor a “‘Death’ squad”.

FWP, C. 573. Warner, “Chernobyl –- ethical and environmental consideration”, speech to IEE Management and Design Division, 12 May 1987.

“Veterans volunteer to brave radiation”, Sunday Times, 4 September 1988.

FWP C. 575, Halsbury to Warner, 29 September 1988. FWP, C. 575, Warner to Halsbury, 30 September 1988, says that Warner does not want to “set up a pressure group” and then suggests a group of like-minded lords who might contribute, including Dainton and Zuckerman.

Hansard, House of Lords, 502(8), 7 December 1988.

Lord Grimond was alarmed at relying on elderly Fellows. He suggested that they were worth preserving, perhaps more so than the Mappa Mundi, a unique thirteenth-century map that can be seen at Hereford Cathedral. Lord Peston asked for confirmation that Fellows were elected for their intellectual achievements and “not for their ability in practical matters or because they have any common sense”. He suggested deploying “one or two junior Ministers” instead.

Collins H. M. Evans Robert , “The third wave of science studies: Studies of expertise and experience”, Social studies of science, xxxii (2002), 235–96.

See the responses to Collins and Evans in Social studies of science, xxxiii (2003). An excellent attempt to show that Collins and Evans and their critics are attempting different things, one Rawlsian and other Habermasian, when viewed from political philosophy, is: Durant Darrin , “Models of democracy in social studies of science”, Social studies of science, lxi (2011), 2011–714.

FWP, C. 583 Paterson to Warner, 8 February 1989. Note that Hollywood films featuring the elderly returning to rescue the world heroically were indeed made, for example Armageddon (1998).

Shortland Michael Yeo Richard R. , Telling lives in science: Essays on scientific biography (Cambridge, 1996).

Merton Robert K. Zuckerman Harriet , “Age, aging and age structure in science”, 1972, reprinted in Merton, The sociology of science: Theoretical and empirical investigations (Chicago, 1973), 497–559, 511. Benoît Godin, “On the origin of scientometrics”, Scientometrics, lxviii (2006), 2006–33, p. 124. Godin's earliest citation is Wyman's W. I. “Age of production in invention and other fields”, published in the Journal of the Patent Office Society in 1919. Other important contributors in the twentieth century have been Adams C. W. (in Isis, in 1946), Wayne Dennis, Warren Hagstrom and Stephen Cole.

Merton Zuckerman , op. cit. (ref. 107), 503, 506.

Merton Zuckerman , op. cit. (ref. 107), 519–37. They (541–2) reject the claim that science is a gerontocracy on the grounds that although older scientists tend to fill the gatekeeping roles they do not use these positions to promote the interests of their age strata.

Merton Zuckerman , op. cit. (ref. 107), 530.

Merton Zuckerman , op. cit. (ref. 107), 533.

Cole , op. cit. (ref. 3).

Herzig Rebecca , Suffering for science: Reason and sacrifice in modern America (New Brunswick, 2005).

An alternative, and again probably complementary, approach might be to wonder if the endangerment of the body promoted other characters. Shapin and Lawrence have argued that neglect of the body foregrounded the mind in the self-fashioning of scientists. See: Lawrence Christopher Shapin Steven (eds), Science incarnate: Historical embodiments of natural knowledge (Chicago, 1998).

SCOPE, the Scientific Committee On Problems of the Environment, was funded through the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU). Warner chaired the Scientific Advisory Committee, along with scientists from the Soviet Union/Russia, France, India, Japan and the United States. RADPATH was SCOPE's project on biogeochemical pathways of artificial nucleotides. Warner also led two other SCOPE projects: ENUWAR (on nuclear winter predictions) and RADTEST (on data from the Chernobyl fallout).

Warner Frederick Appleby L. J. , “The post-Chernobyl environmental situation”, Environmental management and health, vii (1996), 6–10.

FWP, C. 573, Warner to VIR members, 7 August 1990. The ethical framework for subjecting patients and volunteers to ionising radiation had been clarified by the Medical Research Council in 1963 in terms of subject's benefit or valid consent. Grey areas remained around minors and others who could not give consent, and around boundaries of “negligible” and “acceptable” risk. See TNA FD 9/3932. “Exposure of human subjects to ionizing radiation in the course of research procedures”, report to MRC by its Committee on Protection against Ionizing Radiation, 1973. Warner's plutonium experiments contrast, at least ethically, with the 1940s abuses described in Moreno Jonathan , Undue risk: Secret state experiments on humans (New York, 2001).

FWP, C. 580, Zuckerman to Warner, 20 August 1990.

FWP, C. 580, Halsbury to Warner, 18 August 1990.

FWP, C. 580, Rockingham Gill to Warner, 21 August 1990.

“Loutit was a hands-on scientist (personally ingesting small quantities of radioactive material in order to assess their biological effects) and made many contributions to knowledge of the uptake and retention of radioactive isotopes from the air and the food chain, particularly isotopes of strontium and iodine.” Lyon Mary F. , “Loutit, John Freeman”, New DNB.

FWP, C. 579, Warner to Collier, 20 January 1989.

“Japan: Elderly engineers want ‘final mission’ to Fukushima”, Daily Telegraph, 25 May 2011.