‘The answer becomes clearer still if you look behind the scenes at the British government’s commitments to NATO; that same answer emerges again if you look behind the scenes at the British government’s commitments to the US – and we do have a major, very secret, defence treaty with the US. With regard to both these commitments, the major part of our contribution is not in ships, or in tanks, or in guns, or aircraft, or personnel; it is in plutonium. Our contribution is to supply NATO and the US with plutonium for nuclear weapons. The easiest way to manufacture plutonium is through nuclear power stations. Plutonium, at close to the ideal level of enrichment for nuclear weapons, is a waste product of nuclear power stations. The major percentage of the defence budget of the British government is concealed in your electricity bills.’

Sir Isaac continued for a further twenty minutes’ worth of impassioned and highly plausible-sounding speech. His theme seemed to drift at times, and he didn’t always explain clearly what he meant, but he got the basics of his message through loud and clear: the British public were being conned by a government that was too clever by half, and the result of this conning was a spreading network of nuclear power stations on an island far too small to cope with them. Britain, he said, was on the edge of a dark and deep nuclear abyss. She was about to ride, like her countrymen a century and a half before in the Charge of the Light Brigade, into a valley of death and despair from which she could never return. She was too small a land to have so many nuclear power stations, not to mention the fuel-reprocessing plants and the waste plants. One major accident in any of a couple of dozen of nuclear establishments could distribute, across every inch of the land, a cocktail of radioactive horrors so thick and so strong, that nobody would be able to inhabit Britain for generations to come.