The Face of Evil?

‘‘Herr God, Herr Lucifer

Beware

Beware.

Out of the ash

I rise with my red hair

And I eat men like air.’’

(Lady Lazarus, Sylvia Plath)

It was yesterday whilst watching a quite brilliant documentary on BBC 2 titled ‘A British Guide To The End of The World’ that I found myself sitting in my living room and confronting a vision of evil on my television. Of course this is rather melodramatic and, on showing my adult son the scene from this documentary, is exactly what he said to me. But I tried to explain to him, that this was where, I felt, that I had witnessed evil for the very first time in my life. I didn’t do a great job explaining to him as he responded ‘‘that science is not evil’’, so I am going to try again but this time in writing. So here goes.

The scene is of the explosion of the first British atomic bomb at Christmas Island in 1957. It is accompanied by the eye witness accounts of 3 or 4 now elderly men who were part of the military sent out to the Island to both build the test site and act as human guinea pigs. Their ‘superior officers’ as one man states were nowhere to be seen. They it transpires were well screened from the effects in protective clothing and in bunkers. The guinea pigs describe what they saw. As they describe…