The spoken, performed piece is fictive, based on interviews and research. In it, a Man speaks from the Scottish side of the Firth; an area of cliffs, bays and granite. A Woman speaks from the English side; flat lands of ancient peat and grasses. The third, a Diver, speaks as she enters the night sea: 

“On the edge here, soft sand, bird tracks and worm casts and the plish of water on my bed-bare feet. More salt than fresh. Read the surface for danger. Go in, between heartbeats, mine and the sea’s … Tentacles brush my legs. Wrapping me in the softness of their sucking, jelly skins. They are curious about me. Me. Am I food? Can they take my bones to make their shells? Their tongues are testing me for an attachment. Drifts of something cloud my eyes. Plankton wandering in from far seas. I swim in sex and food and sea talk.”

Radiation cannot be heard, smelled or touched, but is known through the rattled clicks of the technologies that measure it and make it perceptible to humans. I found these technological sounds to be too familiar. I wanted to hear radiation through the human voice, through its vibrations and resonances as well as by the speakers’ words describing the consequences of radioactivity let loose. Similarly, the music by Pippa Murphy does not use conventional ‘nuclear’ sounds, but creates a melodic line that holds, falls apart, dissolves and reforms. 

the sea cannot be depleted is not a continuation of the investigative journalism or activist research that brought this situation into the public domain. Rather, this project sees the firings as episodes in the interlocked mesh of relations between the military, the nuclear industries, the arms corporations, capital, colonialism and political desires for international status. Uranium makes the situation timeless and casts a silence around the sea and around the human, even as its presence becomes banal, ordinary.

“No brink of the end of humanity was gazed over. It barely made the news … Thousands of years pissing in the sea with everything we can’t digest, all the rancid debris that we could throw in there, all of it, and now this … The military got it the wrong way around. They didn’t place the uranium. No. They placed this estuary. They made it into their place. They made it into their military nuclear sea,” the Man says. 

As the nuclear melds with the rivers and seas of an estuary, it engenders a loss of what can be known, a loss of what could be certain or safe. The fragments of what can be measured, recorded, assumed to be known dissolve, reform and calcify with the not-knowable, dropping down together to the sea bed, like the shells settling in the oceanic imagination.  

“I want to know this sea like the haaf-netters do, the men who fish with their bodies, standing in the waters with their nets, reading the surface for what’s coming. The slightest change and they know what’s moving beneath, how the sands are shifting. Their animal bodies know how to keep them safe … How do you keep safe?” the Woman says. 

As the writer of the piece, I had to negotiate the feelings of certainty that come with outrage – the reasoned, ethical and emotive resolutions that one is right. Regardless of the official and unreliable reports on the safety for humans of dumping Depleted Uranium in the sea, I find these military actions unjustifiable, expressive of hubris and embedded in a global economy of harm. But I did not want to set out adversarial arguments between two conflicting sides, as if that was a kind of balance or a reliable process towards truth. Nor did I want to hone the subject matter into something more solidly activist. Rather, for the Man and the Woman who reflect on their relation to the sea and the firings, I attempted to keep to the outrage, but as it is compromised and embedded in everyday life. 

For the Woman, it is the clenching forces of the silences tacitly ordered by the economic necessities of living in a region dominated by the civil-military nuclear industries. These silences keep the not-knowable consequences of nuclear releases below the surface, but not denied. 

“We help each other when the rivers flood. We help each other when the sea crashes against our feeble walls. We practice for emergencies on these temporary shores. In our silence … The sea will loosen and unravel all that we cannot talk about. The words will wash up with the tides … I need someone to ask me what I know.” 

For the Man, it is irreconcilable sorrow at losing the sea, losing the elemental being that gave meaning to life, and an unanswerable confusion over human actions. 

“What is it that we just can’t learn?” 

The Diver is a different kind of force, ambivalent between the imaginal and the everyday, not part of the equation between knowledge and certainty. She speaks of her sensed perceptions as she repeatedly dives below the sea surface. She sets out with promise and high delight but stays too long. She passes the threshold when coming back would be possible, making a loose association with the nuclear dream and the impossible scramble back to a world without its waste. 

“My body curls and tumbles. It joins the pock-marked hard things that roll along the bed. We’re a pulse of moving things. Another brush of something like dust. My skin starts to bleach with it. I’m burning, down here with no light, no air … I cool my body in a garden of soft-skinned creatures … Everything moves, the living with the dead. Lives within lives. Our cells are the lenses through which we see our futures. We are all transparent to the longer waters of the sea … ”