ON THE DAY Prince Charles made a speech on ‘declining standards’ in education, there was another news item. It was a report warning that nuclear warheads for British Polaris and Trident submarines and for RAF bombs were unsafe and could explode accidentally, dispersing radioactive material over a wide area, and putting cities at risk. Glasgow, especially, is vulnerable. The report’s authors, the authoritative British American Security Information Council (BASIC), called on the Government to halt ‘the handling and transportation of all UK nuclear weapons until a full safety review is carried out, overseen by an independent panel’.48
What is most alarming about the report’s conclusions is that they are drawn mainly from an official study commissioned by the US House of Representatives Armed Services Committee. Known as the ‘Drell Report’, this warned that certain nuclear weapons could explode if involved in an accident or exposed to fire. ‘For a while we were worried that these things might go off if they fell off the back of a truck,’ a Pentagon official was quoted as saying in the Washington Post, whose investigation and disclosures triggered the committee’s inquiry.49
The Pentagon has since hastily withdrawn two types of nuclear weapons from deployment. One is the SRAM-A air-launched missile, which was fitted to Fill and B52 bombers; the other is the W79 nuclear artillery shell, which has been in Europe since the mid-1980s and apparently could go off if struck ‘in the wrong place’.
According to the BASIC report, the American concern arose ‘as a result of more powerful computer modelling techniques recently developed’. That is to say, computers are now able to simulate almost precisely the causes and conditions of nuclear accidents. This has led to enhanced safety provision in the United States; but there are no equivalent measures in this country, leaving certain British nuclear weapons without up-to-date safety features. The British WE177 ‘tactical freefall bomb’, deployed by the RAF for the past twenty-five years, fails the new tests completely.
‘These are not academic concerns,’ says the BASIC report. These bombs are ‘regularly transported around the UK’. The authors estimate that there is, on average, approximately one convoy carrying these warheads on Britain’s roads every week; one left RAF Honington in Suffolk on Monday of last week. Convoys carrying WE177s have been involved in two known traffic accidents.
The British Polaris/Chevaline programme, a legacy of the Callaghan years, was developed in such secrecy that the Cabinet meetings at which it was discussed were not numbered. Drawing on an American design that, says the BASIC report, had ‘serious corrosion problems’, Chevaline was ‘a system produced under pressure . . . that far outstretched British knowledge and technology’. Chevaline also fails to meet the new safety criteria. Chevaline’s warheads are transported by road between Coulport in Scotland and the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Burghfield in Berkshire, a journey of more than 600 miles.
The American study is sharply critical of the warheads fitted to D5 Trident submarines. Britain has ordered four Tridents at a cost of more than £9 billion. Using the new computer techniques, it has been discovered that the design of the Trident missiles’ W88 warheads – which are shaped to surround the propellant – makes them vulnerable to detonation if the missile is involved in collision or it literally falls off the back of a lorry.
The US Navy is now studying a complete redesign of the Trident warhead. Hitherto unpublished Ministry of Defence evidence to the Commons Defence Select Committee has confirmed that the British warhead is the same as the American, and that a redesign has been rejected as ‘too expensive’.
The Ministry of Defence has ‘dismissed Trident fears’, according to the Guardian’s defence correspondent, David Fairhall. He wrote that officials ‘point out that the [Trident] missiles are never moved around with the warheads inside, so the proximity of the propellant only affects their safety while on board the submarine’.50
This is not so. Polaris missiles are moved, with their warheads, from the jetty at Coulport up a winding road to their bunkers. Trident’s missiles will be stored on top of the hill, for which special armoured carriers are being designed so that the missiles, with their warheads, do not slip off the back of their particular lorry. Glasgow is just thirty miles away as the wind blows.
The official ‘dismissal’ makes no mention of the other British weapons referred to in the report as unsafe. The armed services minister, Archie Hamilton, gave assurances to Parliament that British nuclear weapons were constantly safety-tested and scrutinised with ‘the most sophisticated computer modelling’. William Peden, principal author of the BASIC report, told me, ‘There are only certain ways you can use the computer. The question is: how could the minister not be aware of the American findings?’
There seem to be two pressing issues here. The first is the public’s absolute right to know about potential catastrophe, no matter how ‘infinitesimal’ the danger. The widely held view in Whitehall, and the media, that people are not concerned with such matters was addressed in a Gallup poll commissioned by BASIC. The results were offered to several Sunday newspapers, but appeared in none. They are: 58 per cent of the British people believe all transporting of nuclear weapons should stop immediately; 79 per cent believe Parliament should have the same access to information on nuclear weapons as the US Congress.
The second issue is the policy of the Opposition. Rather, what Opposition? Labour is for Trident; but what is Trident for? It is not a defensive weapon. So at whom is it aimed? Baghdad? Tripoli? The £10.5 billion cost is the ‘official’ figure. This takes no account of construction and operational costs, as well as the running of the weapons factory at Aldermaston. According to a Greenpeace study, the Government has underestimated the total cost of the Trident programme by £22,567 million.51 What this money would otherwise buy requires just a little imagination. Here’s a scribbled shopping list:
Ending homelessness and restoring a national housing programme: £3.8 billion
Restoring the transport system: £2.4 billion
Stopping the haemorrhage of teachers from our schools by raising salaries in education to a decent level: £1.5 billion
Paying every outstanding bill in the National Health Service and ensuring that people no longer die waiting for operations or because of the scarcity of equipment: £7 billion
Research and development that would catch up with the best in Europe: £3 billion52
Spread over twenty years, this would still leave billions of pounds in the Exchequer. No Labour leader, let alone a prime minister, has ever laid out these choices to the British people, who are constantly said to be ‘pro-nuclear’. During the election campaign the ‘peace dividend’, like so much else, was not an issue and the Trident farce was hardly mentioned. Yet less than a third of the public say they want to keep Trident.53
‘They who put out the people’s eyes’, wrote Milton, ‘reproach them of their blindness’. Yes; but it’s not the people who have been blinded.
April 1991 to May 1992