Umeå universitets logga

Walking around the perimeter of the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) at Aldermaston, England, along with a group of artists and researchers—we peer through the fence, at industrial facilities shielding the construction of nuclear weapons. From this site, just an hour's drive from London, weapons are transported by road to Her Majesty's Naval Base on the Clyde, in Scotland, where they function as Britain's Trident nuclear 'deterrent'. Time is confused, here, oscillating between the Cold War, the banal reality of the nuclear economy, and a potentially apocalyptic future.

There's nothing romantically sublime about hanging around in the wet English countryside with a radiation monitor. This is a suburban landscape. Yet, behind the fence, plutonium is being milled into components for warheads capable of realizing even greater megatons of nuclear spectacle than demonstrated in the mid-twentieth century, at the Marshall Islands, and Semipalatinsk. The women at the Peace Camp explain that AWE is currently applying to the Environment Agency to increase its radioactive emissions to air.