God and nuclear deterrence

The following is an article I wrote originally for the website scientificblogging.com

Des Browne was Minister of Defence in the Blair and Brown governments and MP for Kilmarnock from 1997 to 2008.

Father Joseph Boland is now the parish priest at St Bride's Catholic Church in West Kilbride.

I'm reproducing the piece here because of the continuing relevance of the arguments.


God and MAD
As Des Browne strides up to me and demands to know who I am, the answer briefly escapes me. It is on the tip of my tongue and will come to me in a moment, I am sure. But whoever I am, this close to a combative Minister of Defence is not where I would like to be.

The occasion is a debate about the morality of replacing Trident, organised by one of Browne’s constituents, Father Joe Boland of St Matthew’s Church, Kilmarnock.

In opening the debate the priest had done a fine job of demolishing the pro-nuclear arguments: “The government says we don’t know what the world will be like in 30 years’ time, so we need nuclear weapons to keep us secure. But if nuclear weapons equal security, then every country in the world should have them.

“If Iran cannot have nuclear weapons when faced with an immediate threat from nuclear powers, what right do we, based on some future threat? It is sheer hypocrisy.”

Deterrence is doomed to failure, he points out, because it must work without error until the end of time. “We have been incredibly lucky so far.”

When Browne stands up he looks edgy but determined. The politics are complex, he says, and the morality unclear. We must prevent more countries getting nuclear weapons, while those that have them disarm gradually and multi-laterally:

“That is the answer to the charge of hypocrisy. That is how we will achieve a nuclear-free world.”

In the meantime, deterrence is no more complicated than self-defence: “I learned when I was young that if I didn’t want to fight I had to carry myself in a particular way. I had to generate a sense, on the streets of Scotland, that I could look after myself.”

He still does, I realise, after he has lost the vote, and spots me taking notes of a conversation with a constituent. On the topic of hypocrisy, Sarah Hall is challenging him on accepting the Minister of Defence post, after attending a rally against the invasion of Iraq.

“I wasn’t there. You’re wrong about that,” he tells her.

She starts to ask about his youthful support for CND, when he notices my notebook and strides over to me. I identify myself and ask a question – not the best question to a man you’ve just met, who already feels under attack.

“I didn’t realise until today that you were brought up as a Catholic …” I begin. But he interrupts, moving closer.

“What has that got to do with anything?” he demands.

“I was wondering about Father Boland’s closing remark,” I explain as rapidly as I can: “That in the end his opposition to replacing Trident springs from his Christianity. Jesus taught us to turn the other cheek and love our neighbour. He would never support nuclear weapons.”

Browne responds that the churches disagree on war and nuclear weapons, but very few of them are in favour of unilateral disarmament. Then he goes on the attack.

“Are you a Christian?” he asks me.

“No,” I say. So he changes tack.

“Were you in favour of intervening in Kosovo?”

“Yes.”

“What about Afghanistan?”

“Well…” I prevaricate.

“There you are…” he says and I interrupt, misunderstanding.

“Don’t give me that lawyer’s stuff about having to answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Afghanistan is complex – both militarily and politically.”

“Of course it is. That’s my point,” he replies. “International issues are always complex. It’s all very well saying ‘nuclear weapons are morally wrong’, but we live in a difficult and dangerous world.”

True enough, I think to myself, casting my mind back 25 years to when I was a physicist with a young family, working for Rolls-Royce on the next generation propulsion system for the Navy’s nuclear submarines.

The system that propels the Vanguard class, the largest, most powerful submarines ever built in Britain. The system that carries Trident.

It is time for Des Browne and Father Joe Boland to leave. They are having dinner together at the priest’s home.

“Nice talking to you,” Browne says to me, offering his hand. His grip is firm but not crushing. Deterrent.

Goldacre on humanities graduates

I have some sympathy with each of the following statements individually. But coming together in one article they constitute a pretty relentless attack on "humanities graduates" and do nothing to heal the Two Cultures divide.

They also perpetuate the thoroughly unhelpful stereotype, not just among humanities graduates but also younger people with a leaning to arts, language or social sciences - who considerably outnumber the science fans - that physical scientists are cold, arrogant and superior and regard themselves as almost infallible.

Goldacre's thoughts
“It predictably generated a small flurry of ecstatic pieces from humanities graduates in the media, along the lines of science is made-up, self-aggrandising, hegemony-maintaining, transient fad nonsense;”

“Statistics are what causes the most fear for reporters, and so they are usually just edited out, with interesting consequences. Because science isn't about something being true or not true: that's a humanities graduate parody.”

“But it also reinforces the humanities graduate journalists' parody of science, for which we now have all the ingredients: science is about groundless, incomprehensible, didactic truth statements from scientists, who themselves are socially powerful, arbitrary, unelected authority figures.”

“And humanities graduates in the media, who suspect themselves to be intellectuals, desperately need to reinforce the idea that science is nonsense: because they've denied themselves access to the most significant developments in the history of western thought for 200 years, and secretly, deep down, they're angry with themselves over that.”

All quotes from Goldacre, B., 2005. Don't dumb me down. The Guardian, 8 Sep. Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2005/sep/08/badscience.research

First Cell Controlled by Synthetic Genome

Scientists have developed the first cell controlled by a synthetic genome. They now hope to use this method to better understand the basic machinery driving all life and to engineer bacteria specially outfitted for fuel production, for example, or environmental cleanup.

The research team has already chemically synthesized a bacterial genome, and they have transplanted the genome of one bacterium to another. Now, Daniel Gibson and colleagues have put both methods together, to create what they call a “synthetic cell,” although only its genome is synthetic. In this case, the synthetic genome was a copy of an existing genome, though with added DNA sequences that “watermark” the genome to distinguish it from a natural one.

In the future, the scientists would like to design more novel genomes that would make bacteria capable of performing specific tasks that could help solve energy, environmental or other problems. The team first synthesized the genome of Mycoplasma mycoides, then transplanted it into Mycoplasma capricolum. The new genome “booted up” the recipient cells.

Although fourteen genes were deleted or disrupted in the transplant bacteria, they still looked like normal M. mycoides bacteria and produced only M. mycoides proteins, the authors report. “If the methods described here can be generalized, design, synthesis , assembly and transplantation of synthetic chromosomes will no longer be a barrier to the progress of synthetic biology,” they write.

To support public discussion and understanding of synthetic biology, Science will be making this paper and the accompanying News piece freely available online, at www.sciencemag.org, starting Thursday evening, 20 May.

Article #19: "Creation of a Bacterial Cell Controlled by a Chemically Synthesized Genome," by D. Gibson; J.I. Glass; C. Lartigue; V.N. Noskov; R.-Y. Chuang; M.A. Algire; M.G. Montague; L. Ma; M.M. Moodie; C. Merryman; S. Vashee; R. Krishnakumar; N. Assad-Garcia; C. Andrews-Pfannkoch; E.A. Denisova; L. Young; Z.-Q. Qi; T.H. Segall-Shapiro; C.H. Calvey; P.P. Parmar; J.C. Venter at J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, MD; G.A. Benders; C.A. Hutchinson III; H.O. Smith; J.C. Venter at J. Craig Venter Institute in San Diego, CA.

Contact: J. Craig Venter at jcventer@jcvi.org (email). Daniel Gibson at dgibson@jcvi.org (email).

Reproduced from email by the AAAS Office of Public Programs.

Down the glen

Killearn Glen May 2010
According to recent research, just five minutes a day of moderate exercise in green spaces has a measurable effect on human beings - of which I am one. So I decided to include a walk in the village glen in my early morning routine - which is how I like to think of my daily, aimless shambling around and bumping into furniture.

The sun-dappled leaves, the blackbird's song, the bluebell banks were all wonderful, but I now have a problem. Morning before breakfast is precisely the time when my brain works best and the words come easily.

I first noticed this when laid up after spinal surgery and memorised huge swathes of poetry, from Morte d'Arthur and the Lady of Shalott to Tam o' Shanter and The Cremation of Sam McGee.

It was very easy until I'd eaten, when lines I'd just memorised suddenly had big holes in them, and I'd have to start all over again. I'm guessing it's the difference between the brain getting all the blood and oxygen it needs and having to compete with other parts of the body. It was a repeatable effect and one I've confirmed many times since.

So here's the problem - walk in the glen in the morning sun, which makes me feel great, or write, which I also enjoy, pays the mortgage and puts food on the table?

It's not easy being a writer.

New Labour is a deadly parasite.

George Monbiot had a fantastic piece on New Labour's record, who they are and what they stand for, in the Guardian Mon 3 May 2010.

Here are his most telling - and shocking - paragraphs:

"While Labour has liberated billionaires, it has trussed up the rest of us with 3,500 new criminal offences, including provisions that allow the police to declare any demonstration illegal. It has introduced control orders that place people under permanent house arrest without charge or trial. It has allowed the US to extradite our citizens without producing evidence of an offence. It has colluded in kidnapping and torture. Britain now has more CCTV cameras than any other nation, and a DNA database that is five times the size of its nearest competitor. The number of prisoners in the UK has risen by 41% since Labour took office.

This government blocked a ceasefire in the Lebanon; sacked Britain's ambassador to Uzbekistan after he complained that the regime was boiling its prisoners to death; gave aid to a Colombian military that collaborates with fascist death squads; announced a policy of pre-emptive nuclear war; and decided to waste our money on replacing Trident. But worse, far worse than any of this, it launched an illegal war in which hundreds of thousands have died. This is the government that colleagues of mine on the Guardian want to save.

There's a parasite called Toxoplasma gondii that colonises the brains of rats, altering their behaviour to attract them to the scent of their predators. The rats seek out cats and get eaten, allowing the parasite to keep circulating. This is New Labour. It has colonised a movement that fought for social justice, distribution and decency, rewired its brain and delivered it to the fat cats who were once its enemies."

Physicist on the farm

I've a friend who combines science communication, brewing and being a farmer's wife. Hard to beat at this time of year, it would seem:

"Hey, my beer won best best at the Portsmouth beer festival! Bit of a shock, think they were being nice to a beginner or they were a bit scared of me (I'd had 6 pints and I went roaming around isntructing people to drink my beer).

I have had a lovely day today, mended some beer pipework then made lunch and then went into the garden this afternoon.

Weeded and planted. Heaven. Me and the worms love the soil. I can sit in the sun all afternoon preparing a good seed bed. This afternoon I did carrots and beetroot. Removing stones, removing perenial weeds (dandelions and dock mostly), and breaking up the soil. I love the smell and the texture, and the excitement of planting the seeds.

When you get up close to the soil you see all manner of things, little red spiders, beetles, crysalis, etc but my favourite are the worms, especially the really big fat ones.

Some of my worms are 20cms long. I hope they dont mind me touching them for a bit (I'd be very scared) but their scaly bodies are beautiful."

Easter

I love what Jesus has to say about living in this world, although I don't believe his message about the next one.

So I'm on the mailing list for the homilies delivered by a wise parish priest down in Ayrshire, who seems particularly close to Jesus.

Below is Father Joe Boland's homily for Easter Week. If you want more of his homilies, you can find them at the St Matthew's Church website.

For more on the man's thinking, take a look at a post I wrote at Scientific Blogging, following a nuclear arms debate between Father Boland and Des Browne, then Secretary of State for Defence.


Father Joe Boland homily for Easter Week
One of the things about the Holy Week Liturgy is that, before we even begin, we know how the story ends. Even as we try to stay with Jesus through the agony in the garden on Holy Thursday or follow him on the road to Calvary on Good Friday, we are already thinking about the Resurrection and making sure everything is ready for Easter. But it wasn’t like that two thousand years ago. For the original disciples what happened during the final hours of Jesus’ life was a complete disaster. Everything they had believed in and hoped for was falling apart. They had come to see Jesus as the one the ancient prophets had spoken of and, to their utter dismay, he had been crucified like a common criminal.

And on Easter Sunday morning it was no different. At the moment of Resurrection there was no angelic choir waiting outside the tomb to greet Jesus with the Alleluia chorus from Handel’s Messiah, no adoring crowds to witness the moment of triumph. The whole of Easter day in the gospels is a story of disillusioned and frightened people failing to recognize Jesus and refusing to believe he had risen. And it’s only if we can get in touch with that Easter, the real Easter, the doubt-filled and fear-ridden Easter of history, rather than the romantic Hollywood version of it we see in films, that we can begin to understand what the Resurrection means in our own lives now. Quite simply, the experience of many in the world today is much closer to that of those early disciples two thousand years ago than it is to the Handel’s Messiah version, and it’s this that I invite you to reflect on this morning.

For so many of our contemporaries, you see, the world is a terrible place. All around us too, as was happening during the original Holy Week, things seem to be falling apart. I meet people who no longer watch the News on TV, so depressing do they find it all. Everything that is bad and unhealthy seems to be on the increase, from teenage pregnancies to drug taking right through to the current financial crisis. And within the Church things seem no better. All over the developed world congregations are falling and, to make it worse, there are hardly any young people to be seen in our churches. And then, of course, there is the scandal of sex abuse which is causing and will continue to cause many to struggle with issues of faith until such times as the Church as a whole has the courage to face up to its deep-rooted causes.

These are difficult times, and as such they are an opportunity for us to enter in some way into the experience of those who lived through the events of what we now call Holy Week but which felt far from holy at the time. They knew nothing then about the Resurrection just as for many today talk of Resurrection and the presence of the Risen Jesus among us is just words. I constantly meet church-going people who tell me that they cannot see any evidence of God in the world around them. And yet I can say to you today with absolute certainty that God is at work deep within everything that happens. Jesus is risen, alive and present among us, even if, like the people on the first Easter Day, we struggle to recognize him. So where is he? Well, that’s a bit like asking where the air we breathe is. He, like it, is everywhere. But, based on Resurrection stories from all four gospels, I would like to suggest three ways in which we might begin to recognize him.

And the first concerns Mary Magdalen. In a passage we will hear at Mass on Tuesday morning, St John has her stooping down and looking into the tomb, weeping, totally unaware that Jesus us standing behind her. A friend of mine who lives in Jerusalem often laughs at pilgrims visiting the church of the Holy Sepulchre on the grounds that it is the only place in the world of which the bible says, ‘He is not here.’ And if we spend our time bending down looking into tombs and weeping over the past we will never see Jesus. Jesus is not to be found in the past, in old hurts, in resentment nursed over years, in what once was or used to be. If we are to recognize the Risen Jesus in our lives, then we, like Mary, must leave the past behind, turn round and stop looking into tombs.

And the second scene is the upper room on the evening of the first Easter Day. There, the eleven were gathered together in a locked room, filled with fear. And of all the tombs we can crawl into, none is more debilitating and crippling than fear. And so Jesus calms their fear, opens their minds to understand the Scriptures and tells them that they will be witnesses to the resurrection to the ends of the earth. Within days, the Spirit of Pentecost will transform these weak, fearful men who at the first sign of trouble had abandoned Jesus and run away, into men of deep personal faith. And until that happens to us and our minds, too, are opened up to understand, not just the Scriptures, but many other things too, our fears will continue to cripple us and prevent us becoming the witnesses to the presence of Jesus in the world that we are called to be.

And the third scene I invite you to contemplate this morning is the road to Emmaus. Those disillusioned and disappointed disciples whose hopes had been crushed still exist in the Church today. Those first disciples, like so many in our own time, could not see God in what was happening to them. And yet the Risen Jesus was with them as they walked along. And the truth we must come to realise is that that same Risen Jesus has been with us every step of our journey too. All of us – and again I say this without fear of error - have had moments of grace and insight over the years, moments when the veil covering our eyes has been removed for a time and we have seen realities normally hidden from us. The trouble is that we forget them and live as if they had never happened.

And so I invite you this Easter to take time to think back over your personal journey to Emmaus. Ask the Risen Jesus to show you times you have experienced his presence along the way. Look forward in hope, not backwards in fear. Choose life in all its shapes and forms and sooner or later you will recognize him at the breaking of bread.


We begin our prayer this Easter by praying for the world at this moment in its history. We are living through a time when millions are filled with fear and anxiety about the future. The great epidemics of our age are stress, depression and anxiety resulting, in many cases, from the pressures of living in a consumer-driven society. And so we pray that the Good News of Easter will fill us with hope and that, by showing the people of our time that there are better ways of living, we will share that hope them.......Lord hear us

The hope we speak of is no naive optimism. Bad things have always happened, happen still and will continue to happen in the future. To be a hope-filled people we will often have to dig deep, as Jesus himself had to dig deep during the agony on the garden or as he hung dying upon the cross. We will sometimes have to trust when there is no obvious reason for doing so. But our trust is in the God who turns death into life and we pray for the grace to believe in his love no matter what happens........Lord hear us

As long as Mary Magdalen stood looking into the tomb she was never going to see the Risen Jesus. For that to happen, she had to turn away from what was empty and lifeless and look in a new direction. The past had nothing to offer. And so we pray for the grace we need to put the past behind us: to let go of old hurts or resentments; to embrace new ways of thinking; to accept and embrace the inevitable changes and developments of history and so recognize the Risen Jesus in our lives now..........Lord hear us

As the two disciples left Jerusalem and began their journey home to Emmaus, they were filled with a deep sense of disappointment. Their hope had been that Jesus would be the one the prophets had spoken of and now their hopes and dreams were shattered. And yet, without them realising it, Jesus was with them. And so we pray for the insight we need to recognize the ways in which Jesus has been with us every step of our life-journey, especially at times of pain and disappointment..........Lord hear us

On the first Easter Day, the disciples were huddled together in the upper room, paralysed by fear. Faith will always mean asking question, not understanding and, in some cases, spending many years struggling with doubt. But what prevents us becoming the people God calls us to be is not doubt but fear. Doubt can be our friend. Fear is always our enemy. It is fear that prevents us becoming the people God calls us to be and we pray for the grace we need to overcome our fears here in this parish.........Lord hear us

Millions today have lost faith in life after death. They cannot understand it and so it cannot be true. To lose faith in life after death, however, has profound effects of the way we live. If there is no life after death then our only hope of happiness lies in material things. And yet these constantly disappoint and fail to deliver the happiness we seek. And so we pray that the men and women of our time, seeking happiness in all kinds of strange places, will come to understand again that happiness ultimately lies in God alone..............Lord hear us