My Lords, I thank the Minister again for his exemplary exposition. This is a most important instrument. I look at page 5, under “Interpretation of Part 1”, and I see the words “ionising radiations”, “dose consequences”, “endangered persons”, “exposure” and,
“‘emergency services’ means those police, fire and ambulance services that are likely to be required to respond to the radiation emergency”.
I support what the Minister proposes and I will not detain the Committee but I will give an insight.
Some of your Lordships may have heard of CP Snow, a novelist who ended up in your Lordships’ House and was at one time a Minister under a trade union leader who was a Cabinet Minister, Mr Cousins. As a novelist, CP Snow wrote a series of 11 novels, Strangers and Brothers. One—which I have read, as I have the others—is relevant to these regulations, in a historical sense if no other, and might be of interest to the Minister and his able colleagues in the department who brief him.
The novel in question is The New Men, which describes, clearly based on what had happened, the consequences of an individual receiving an unwanted dosage—that is, a radiation emergency, the words in the regulation. The novel is set in north-east Wales in the small village of Rhydymwyn, where the first steps of Britain’s attempt to make an atom bomb were taken under the cover of chemical substances that were possibly to be used in war. That small village is outside Mold, the county town of Flintshire, and I have always lived within eight or nine miles of it.
Snow describes the scientists who were transplanted from their dreaming spires and assisted by university men from Liverpool and Birmingham, to name but two centres inhabited by the scientists who were making,
or attempting to make, our first bomb. Noble Lords may know that the attempts were ended and went lock, stock and barrel to Los Alamos in New Mexico. A former Member of the other place wrote a tract entitled How the Americans Stole Britain’s Bomb. That is not for me to describe further.
The novel that I have been referencing is an attempt by the insightful novelist, who was engaged in science and the upper echelons of the Civil Service, to describe the making of our bombs. These regulations relate to that, and it may occasionally be the duty of any Parliament to consider how a regulation first came about. Once again, the novel is The New Men by CP Snow, part of the 11-novel Strangers and Brothers sequence.
My question, if I may pose it, is: how many shipments, if any, are by road annually? Is there any information that the Minister can give responsibly?
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