‘Hallo,’ he said. ‘I am Sir Isaac Quoit and I am the chairman of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority. For those of you who have not heard of this organization, it is the body responsible for the development and organization of the nuclear energy industry in the United Kingdom.

‘The reason I am here in Russia is that I do not feel safe in England, nor virtually anywhere in the free world. You may wonder if I have gone mad. The answer is no, I have not gone mad; but I am tired of lying to you, the British public, of feeding you an endless farrago of twisted statistics, of statements from corrupt scientists who have been paid to make statements that they do not themselves believe; I am fed up with doing nothing but heading and running a massive propaganda machine that has been set in motion by the government to cover up its complete inability to understand the implications and dangers of nuclear power, to cover up the fact that it has ruinously overestimated the demand for electricity for both the immediate and the long term, and has, even more ruinously, underestimated the cost of generating this electricity.

‘I am tired, in a nutshell, of lying to you that nuclear power is safe and cheap. It is not. It is immensely dangerous; not only has it been responsible, almost totally, for the ever-increasing incidence of death from cancer in the last twenty years, but it can, and almost certainly will, one day wipe out our entire country. And during the next five years, the cost of nuclear-generated electricity will become as much as eight times higher than the cost of conventionally generated electricity.

‘These lies are put upon you to protect the face of the government, and to protect the jobs of the many thousands involved in the nuclear energy industry. On the question of jobs, I can say that many thousands more jobs would be created as a result of generating electricity by conventional methods, and exploring new methods, than are currently available in the nuclear energy industry.

‘Why, you might ask, is this massive and lethal deceit maintained? Look back to the origins of the nuclear industry in this country, and an answer may begin to emerge.

‘Our first reactor, Calder Hall, became operational – went critical, as they say – in 1956. In front of the press of the whole world, the Queen switched the power from Calder Hall into the national grid, and the nuclear age was born. But the amount of power Calder Hall put into the grid was miniscule. That was not the reason why Calder Hall was built; it was built to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons. The electricity was a by-product.