WHILE Saddam Hussein and George W Bush this week continued their game of high-risk brinkmanship, another event was taking place at Barrow-in-Furness yesterday that cast an odd new light on these world-shaking events.

Two ships slipped into a modest dockside berth at the Cumbria town - best-known, recently, for its outbreak of legionnaires disease - after an extraordinary round-the-world journey.

The Pacific Pintail and Pacific Teal are ships nobody, other than us, seems to want. Their cargo: nuclear waste rejected by the rest of the world and now, after a journey of three years and 18,000 miles, back in Britain, where it was produced.

The five tons of plutonium and uranium mixed oxide (Mox) was originally shipped to Japan, where it was to be 'burned' as fuel in a reactor to produce uranium and plutonium. But the Japanese rejected the cargo after learning that safety records at the Sellafield nuclear processing plant in Cumbria where it had been produced had apparently been falsified.

Since then, for more than a year, unloved and unwanted, the cargo has sailed the high seas, skirting the coast of Tasmania and rounding the Cape of Good Hope on its journey back home.

Even more extraordinary than what this tells about us as the 'dirty man of the world', however, is the fact that the cargo itself contains enough weapons-grade plutonium to make, according to some environmentalists, 50 nuclear bombs.

True or not, that such a cargo should have been plying the oceans of the world at a time when the United States and its ally, Britain, have been making such a fuss about the need to stop Saddam and other terrorists acquiring the materials needed to produce weapons of mass destruction, reveals the depth of confusion, incompetence and hypocrisy being displayed in the so-called war on terrorism.

Environmental protest group Greenpeace, whose ship the Rainbow Warrior, tracked the two carriers as they approached Cumbria, says both the ships and Sellafield itself are a prime terrorist target.

Throughout their 18,000-mile journey, the two carriers - said to be 'lightly armed and patrolled by security officers' - have been dogged by flotillas of protest vessels.

If environmental protesters had the nous to work out where the ships were, then surely determined terrorists could have done so, too.

The fact that they didn't - and that the British or American governments never seemed unduly concerned they might - must surely say something about the real threat of terrorist organisations or so-called 'terrorist states' such as Iraq actually acquiring the materials and technology to pose a nuclear threat.

Like most ordinary, bewildered people in this country, I'm not really in possession of enough facts to know. But it all leaves a nasty taste in the mouth and the uneasy feeling that if we do go to war against Saddam it could well be for all the wrong reasons.

Don't you just love it? Europe's first fertility centre for lesbians opens in London, and who's behind it? A man, of course. It just goes to show how wrong all those people are who worry about men not having any real role to play in society any more.

We may be dumber than women (look at those exam results), less healthy and have a shorter lifespan. Our self-esteem may be in freefall, our sperm counts plummeting and, in the age of cloning and Dolly the Sheep, we may not even be strictly necessary any longer when it comes to producing kids.

But at least we'll still be needed to run all the female-only fertility clinics.

In Chris Titley's absence, his column this week was written by Stephen Lewis.

Updated: 10:39 Wednesday, September 18, 2002