National reconciliation is so much easier when one doesn’t have the capacity to vaporise one’s former oppressor at the touch of a button. Maybe this was why the previous government cut the wicks off our alleged nuclear arsenal: black majority rule could be envisioned, but not if a luminous mushroom cloud lit up the night over PW Botha’s log cabin in Wilderness.
In non-proliferated hindsight, no nukes has been good news for our little country. Which is why I was perturbed to receive a letter from a major insurance company informing me of a change to the terms of their policies.
Henceforth, I read, I would not be covered for any loss contributed to or arising from (and I quote), ionising, radiations or contamination by radioactivity from any nuclear fuel or from any nuclear waste; nuclear fission or fusion; nuclear explosives or any nuclear weapon; and finally, just in case I didn’t have the picture, nuclear waste in any form.
To clarify, the helpful company finished by telling me that I should regard ‘combustion” to mean any self-sustaining process of nuclear fission.
Thus forewarned against starting my car or lighting a candle lest I obliterate the neighbourhood, I had to time peruse the papers. Something about a Koeberg employee whose cancer was hushed up; a snippet about the FBI looking for nuke peddlers in South Africa.
It cast a whole new light, a softly pulsating green one, on the future of the Cape Town nuclear family. Here comes dad, wrapped up snug against the nuclear winter, home from a hard day at the McDonald’s Meat Substitute ash heaps where he herds and wrangles cockroaches.
Tiddles the golden retriever meets him at the gate. Ah Tiddles, says dad, poor dear Tiddles. Wag your tail while you can because tomorrow you’re going into the prototype McMutt burger. Just as well, thinks dad, the poor old pooch was getting a touch of arthritis in her seventh and eighth hips.
Mom is waiting for him in bed, the way she has every day since she got cancer. Luckily she has little Joey to keep an eye on the congenitally joined triplets: Joey might only have one eye, but it’s a good one.
Of course this won’t happen in Cape Town. Koeberg is safe, because its safety officer said it was, while Greenpeace activists played badminton on its dome.
Airport security is likewise impenetrable. If the obese army officer chatting to his girlfriend doesn’t get you, and if you somehow slip past the unmanned malfunctioning X-ray machine, and if you go unnoticed by the bipolar customs gang cavity-searching a pensioner who dared to bring golf-clubs into the country, then you are bound to be run over in the parking lot.
But let us, in a moment of berserk Schadenfreude, think the unthinkable and imagine that South African bureaucrats are capable of error. Does Cape Town have a nuclear contingency plan? And would sport carry on unmolested the morning after, to reassure fidgety citizens across the country?
Certainly Cape football teams, slowly disintegrating, would jog out on to a blasted pitch and play to a goalless draw with a deflating ball in a gale saturated with airborne chemicals and poisons, the whole affair smelling like burning rubber. But then, this wouldn’t be anything new.
The far more pampered denizens of Newlands might emerge from bunkers built to ward off Perils both Red and Black to see a smouldering ruin surrounded by jagged blocks of concrete, the grass dead and cars shattered for miles around. Ah, they will whisper, Kaizer Chiefs fans have passed this way. Tell me, Nobby old boy, is my vermouth glowing? I can’t seem to see for my monocle has been fused to my eyeball.
Pro surfers, legendarily unflappable, would compare radiation burns as they pushed out into the still-warm swells, contemplatively picking their way through clumps of belly-up fish and the odd smoking shark. Hectic, bru, did you see the flash? It was like, flash! And then it was like, ow! And then I was like, whoa! Totally whack. Dude, are these your toes or are you shedding chipolatas? Nooit. Tastes like chicken.
And of course when the dust settles, sometime around 2050, it will be the sports administrators who are called in as consultants in the most vital part of any nuclear disaster: passing the buck. ‘You must understand that redressing the imbalances of the blast is a long process, but we have set up a task team to investigate…”