“Crocodiles in the corridors” : security vetting, race and Whitehall, 1945 – 1968

In July 2018, the UK’s Intelligence & Security Committee issued a report into diversity and inclusion across the intelligence and security community. The picture the report painted was far from satisfactory; in short, Britain’s intelligence agencies did not ‘fully reflect the ethnic make-up of modern Britain’. The report argued that Britain’s spy agencies – MI5, SIS (or MI6) and GCHQ – should improve black, Asian and ethnic minority recruitment, highlighting areas for improvement, especially around the vetting of recruits. This problem stems from the post-war Cold War 'security state' and the development of security-vetting programmes from the 1940s, aiming to protect Whitehall from Soviet spies and 'fellow travellers' to those with so-called 'character defects' - drink, drugs and homosexuality. But this 'security state' also saw the newly emerging multicultural Britain as a major threat. The so-called 'Windrush Generation' of migrants from the Caribbean, and migration from the Indian subcontinent and Africa, forever changed the social complexion of Britain, but posed significant questions for security officials. What was Britishness? With first or second generation migrants entering the civil service, who was a 'UK eye' and what access to secret information should they have? To what extent was discrimination justifiable to protect state secrets, and how should officials respond to new legislation such as the Race Discrimination Act? As this article shows, new entrants to the civil service faced deeply engrained prejudices, and questions over their loyalty to Britain. As late as the 1960s (and beyond), 'coloured' members of the civil service were rejected from secret posts across government, including the Ministry of Defence and intelligence and security services, especially MI5 and GCHQ, with discrimination on ‘security’ grounds justified by the landmark 1968 Race Relations Act, which barred race discrimination for housing and employment elsewhere

Visible light tomography of MHD eigenmodes in the H-1NF stellarator using magnetic coordinates

A tomographic reconstruction technique is described for the inversion of a set of limited-angle high-resolution 2D visible light emission projections of global MHD eigenmodes in the H-1NF heliac. The technique is well suited to limited viewing access in toroidal devices and the strong shaping of optimized stellarator/heliotron configurations. Fluctuations are represented as a finite sum of Fourier modes characterized by toroidal and poloidal mode numbers having fixed amplitude and phase in a set of nested flux volumes in Boozer coordinates (Boozer 1980 Phys. Fluids 23 904-8). Iterative tomographic inversion techniques and standard linear least-squares methods are used to solve for the complex amplitudes. The method is applied to synchronous camera images of singly charged carbon impurity ion emission at 514nm obtained at three discrete poloidal viewing orientations (Haskey et al 2014 Rev. Sci. Instrum. 85 033505). The 2D amplitude and phase projections provide high quality reconstructions of the radial structure of the fluctuations that are compact in Boozer space and allow clear determination of the poloidal mode number as well as some degree of toroidal mode number differentiation

Experiment-theory comparison for low frequency BAE modes in the strongly shaped H-1NF stellarator

Recent advances in the modeling, analysis, and measurement of fluctuations have significantly improved the diagnosis and understanding of Alfvén eigenmodes in the strongly shaped H-1NF helical axis stellarator. Experimental measurements, including 3D to