Nuclear Power and its Opponents

Letters

Vol. 9 No. 3 · 5 February 1987

From Judith Cook

SIR: I would like to reply to the review by Walter Patterson of my book Red Alert (LRB, 8 January). I am grateful to him for bringing its inaccuracies and errors to the attention of the nuclear industry, since that industry can hardly have a more honourable advocate. However, he makes various charges about my work which suggest I have deliberately sought to plagiarise his own, and that it is poorly researched – a mere scissors-and-paste job – badly edited and inaccurate, giving carte blanche to the nuclear industry to rip it to shreds.

Firstly, if there are occasions when I have called upon his knowledge through his published work, then not only have I, to the best of my knowledge, said so in my own book but I am happy to pay due credit to him here and now. That page after page of mine bears a more than passing resemblance to passages in books he has written could not be avoided since both of us were not only writing about the same subject but often drawing from the same – earlier – material. (The Nugget File published by the Union of Concerned Scientists in the USA is just one such source.) There are, however, whole sections of my book about which Mr Patterson has not written. As to the title, Red Alert, this was one of several I put to my publishers. The first was Going critical, and indeed my book was to have been called by that name had not Mr Patterson published a book with the same name some months before I delivered my first manuscript to Hodder and Stoughton. I was unaware that ‘Red Alert’ was a ‘series’ title under which he had written his own first book on the subject, Nuclear Reaction – a book which was, in fact, never published.

With regard to the glossary, I must confess that when Mr Patterson has defined a term so succinctly that it could not be better expressed, I have sometimes used it, although I have found – in some instances – exactly the same wording used in other glossaries in other books and not attributed to Mr Patterson. When I completed my glossary it was read over by a specialist nuclear journalist who made his own suggestions, which I incorporated. It would be possible, I suppose, to list a source for each definition but I have never seen any book which did so.

There is one charge, above all, that I must protest at – that of intellectual ‘sharp practice’. I am a journalist, not a scientist, writing for lay people and not specialists, and when I have endeavoured to explain scientific matters I have done so bearing both these factors in mind. The charge that ‘the slapdash editing is unhappily typical’ must take note of the fact that I delivered the book before the Chernobyl disaster and had to retrieve it and return it for press, updated, within a matter of weeks.

My purpose in writing this book was not simply to take sides and attack the nuclear industry but to catalogue some of its hazards. I have, on numerous occasions, argued with its representatives in the media and have felt that, as a lay person, I have been well able to hold my own. I am naturally sorry that Mr Patterson feels as he does, as I hope we share the same concerns. I think it must also be recognised that there is often a feeling of hostility from specialists towards somebody like me who is merely a concerned journalist.

Judith Cook
Penzance, Cornwall

Vol. 9 No. 4 · 19 February 1987

From Walter Patterson

SIR: I thank Judith Cook for her kind words about me (Letters, 5 February). My intention was not, however, to bring the ‘inaccuracies and errors’ of her book Red Alert ‘to the attention of the nuclear industry’, some members of which may be surprised to hear Ms Cook call me their ‘advocate’. The nuclear industry will long since have catalogued the inaccuracies in Red Alert, and held them in reserve to discredit any opponent who relies on the book as a source for argument. My warning about the book was directed not to the industry but to its opponents. So that no misunderstanding persists, let me reiterate the warning as unambiguously as I can: do not rely on Red Alert for factual information. Cross-check with other sources – including, of course, those cited by Ms Cook.

As to the ‘more than passing resemblance’ between ‘page after page’ of Red Alert and my own writings, I could not and do not object to another narration of the same historical episode: I object only to a narration whose precise wording so closely mirrors my own. Like Ms Cook, I have of course drawn information from earlier material – albeit not, as she suggests, from The Nugget File; it appeared after, not before, the first edition of my book Nuclear Power, and I made no later use of it. Unlike Ms Cook, however, when drawing on such material I use my own words, not those of the other author.

I cannot accept the implication of Ms Cook’s defence, that she is ‘a journalist, not a scientist, writing for lay people and not specialists’. Specialists can hold their own; they can pick their way through lazy writing without help. Writing for lay people imposes an additional responsibility on the writer: to get it right, and to get it clear. A lay reader relies on the writer for accuracy and for clarity. If you cannot get it right and get it clear, you have no business writing for lay readers. I feel no hostility toward ‘concerned journalists’ – only toward lazy writers.

Walter Patterson
Amersham, Buckinghamshire