REVEALED: UK’s 110 NUCLEAR ALERTS
A CHILLING catalogue of more than 100 accidents involving Britain’s nuclear weapons reveals for the first time how often we may have come close to disaster.
The shock report by an independent nuclear watchdog documents 110 major alerts – four times higher than the Ministry of Defence has acknowledged.
Among the incidents in the dossier by the Nuclear Information Service (NIS) are:
British warships carrying nuclear depth charges by mistake in the 1982 Falklands War;
a mid-Atlantic collision between nuclear-armed British and French submarines in 2009;
a truck carrying nuclear warheads overturning on an icy road in 1987;
the deaths of 116 UK nuclear workers from accidents and cancer.
The MoD’s sole comprehensive report on accidents involving nuclear weapons was published in 2003 and detailed just 27 incidents.
The Faslane naval base on the Clyde is home to the submarines which carry Trident missiles – Britain’s main nuclear deterrent. And the NIS dossier follows the recent disclosure that a Trident missile crashed into the Atlantic last year in
‘Staff failing to follow strict safety procedures’
an incident that was apparently hushed up ahead of MPs voting to renew the UK’s commitment to an independent nuclear deterrent.
Drawing upon whistleblower and eyewitness accounts, along with news reports and academic sources, the NIS has counted 27 fires at UK nuclear establishments, 14 serious accidents in the production of weapons and eight explosions since Britain developed atomic weapons.
There have been 22 incidents on road transport; eight incidents involving storage and handling; 45 accidents on nuclear-capable submarines, ships and aircraft; and 21 ‘security incidents’, according to the report, Playing With Fire, to be released this week.
According to experts at the NIS, the incidents have been caused by equipment failures, shortages of key safety items and staff failing to follow strict instructions and safety procedures, and some could have resulted in nuclear explosions.
The NIS called for Britain’s Defence Nuclear Programme to be placed under the responsibility of the Office for Nuclear Regulation, which regulates the civil nuclear industry.
Controversially, the MoD has its own internal nuclear regulator, which critics say lacks independence and cannot hold top brass to account over safety issues. NIS research manager David Cullen said: ‘Our report shows the MoD’s response to an accident is to downplay it and hope nobody noticed. With nuclear weapons, the risks are so large the MoD should not be allowed to regulate itself.’
The NIS report goes back to the creation of Britain’s nuclear deterrent in 1952. It claims there have been seven deaths after industrial accidents at the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston, where nuclear warheads are manufactured. A further nine people have died from radioactive contamination. A fire at the Windscale reactor in Cumbria in 1957 is said to have caused 100 fatal cancers.
The report also claims the MoD launched a cover-up after a collision between a British and a French submarine – both carrying nuclear warheads – in the Atlantic in 2009. HMS Vanguard and Le Triomphant were apparently on separate manoeuvres when the vessels bumped into each other at a depth of 1,000ft in the Bay of Biscay.
The MoD insisted that at no time was the safety of the subs or their crews in any jeopardy. But the NIS report includes testimony from an unnamed officer on Vanguard, who said: ‘We thought, this is it, we’re all going to die.’ An information blackout was also imposed by the MoD after a road accident in Wiltshire in 1987 when four nuclear bombs slid from a truck into a roadside ditch.
The MoD said: ‘The safety of the public is our priority… In over 50 years of transporting defence nuclear material in the UK, there has never been an incident that has posed any radiation hazard.’