UK develops warhead.

[Blackleaf]

The Sunday Times March 12, 2006


Revealed: UK develops secret nuclear warhead
Michael Smith



BRITAIN has been secretly designing a new nuclear warhead in conjunction with the Americans, provoking a legal row over the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

The government has been pushing ahead with the programme while claiming that no decision has been made on a successor to Britain’s Trident nuclear deterrent. Work on a new weapon by scientists at the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston in Berkshire has been under way since Tony Blair was re-elected last May, and is now said to be AHEAD of similar US research.

The aim is to produce a simpler device using proven components to avoid breaching the ban on nuclear testing. Known as the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW), it is being designed so that it can be tested in a laboratory rather than by detonation.

“We’ve got to build something that we can never test and be absolutely confident that, when we use it, it will work,” one senior British source said last week.

The secret programme to build a new warhead in close co-operation with the Americans will spark anger among Labour opponents of any replacement of the Trident programme, which is estimated to have cost nearly £10 billion.

Developing a new weapon would also, according to expert advice from Cherie Booth’s Matrix chambers, be a material breach of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The office of Lord Goldsmith, the attorney-general, refused to comment on whether it had been asked for legal advice by No 10.

Both Labour backbenchers and the Liberal Democrats accused the government of introducing a replacement nuclear weapon by the back door without a parliamentary debate.

Paul Flynn, a Labour backbencher who has drafted parliamentary motions questioning the need for a Trident replacement, insisted there had to be a proper debate. “The Trident missiles will last for another 20 years,” he said. “Who on earth are we going to take on with them anyway? Replacing them wrecks any standing we have when we preach non-proliferation to countries like Iran.”

Michael Moore, the Lib Dem foreign affairs spokesman, called for a statement. “This work would appear to pre-empt the proper debate the prime minister has promised,” he said.

The controversy is set to ignite this week with an embarrassing report by the Foreign Policy Centre (FPC), set up under Blair’s patronage, calling for Trident to be scrapped and not replaced.

On Tuesday the defence select committee will take evidence from experts, most of whom are expected to say that there is no need for a new nuclear deterrent.

The FPC report says that Britain’s independent deterrent is an illusion. The missiles are stored in the United States and have to be collected by a British submarine before it goes on patrol.

Aldermaston is run by a consortium headed by Lockheed Martin, a US company, and there are 92 Americans working there, including the managing director and four of his senior managers.

“The UK should cease to try to keep up appearances and adopt a policy based on the reality that it is not an independent nuclear power,” the FPC report concludes. “Trident should not be replaced and should be phased out now.”

Blair is said to want to decide on Trident’s replacement before he steps down. “It is a huge decision for the country and it will probably be done in a far more open way than the decisions have been taken before,” he said last month.

As he spoke, work was well advanced at Aldermaston on designs for the RRW. The US Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore nuclear laboratories began a competition to produce an RRW last May. But Washington sources say the British have been designing their own Reliable Replacement Warhead and “are now ahead of the Americans”.

One possible way to avoid breaching the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is for Blair to announce that the new deterrent will have fewer warheads. We currently have about 200.


thetimesonline.co.uk

 

[Blackleaf]

Leading article: The case for Trident


The history of Britain’s nuclear deterrent is a long and not particularly glorious one. In the 1940s Churchill gave up trying to develop Britain’s own atomic bomb and sent scientists to collaborate with the Americans. Harold Wilson’s 1964 Labour government came to power having rejected Polaris in its manifesto but carried on with it anyway. A decade later Labour secretly pushed through the Chevaline programme to develop a new Polaris warhead.

The current state of Britain’s nuclear deterrent looks, on the face of it, like tokenism. Only one of the four Vanguard-class submarines that carry Trident nuclear missiles is at sea at any one time and, since the 1998 strategic defence review, those missiles are in shutdown mode, requiring several days’ notice before they could be fired. Many will say this is right, given the nature of the post-cold war threat. As we report today, however, work on Trident’s replacement is well under way, even before a political decision has been made on it.

Should Britain have a nuclear deterrent, let alone a new one costing billions of pounds? Michael Portillo, a former defence secretary, argued here last year that Tony Blair should call time on Britain’s era as a nuclear power. “The Soviet Union collapsed long ago,” he wrote. “There is no threat from China. The new nuclear weapons’ states, from India to Israel, do not have the capability to hit us.” Far better to spend the money on other defence needs, he argued, and shelter under America’s nuclear umbrella.

The Foreign Policy Centre, which has Mr Blair as its patron, says in a new report that discussions over Trident’s replacement are based on the false premise that Britain has an independent nuclear deterrent. Not only do we depend on America for the supply of weapons but there could also be no question of using them without US consent. In the unlikely event that a British prime minister wanted to press the button, America has the political power and the technology to stop it happening.

So why not get rid of them? The first argument is about Britain’s place in the world. Put crudely, would we really want to hand France the role of being western Europe’s only nuclear power? The nuclear deterrent gives Britain a place at the top table that it would be loath to surrender. Nor does the argument that Britain is in nuclear terms the 51st state cut much ice. Harold Macmillan acknowledged that more than four decades ago and his successors have accepted it. In some respects America would prefer it if Britain did not have its own deterrent. While we do, there is at least a chance of exerting influence.

More important than this is the nature of the world into which we are moving. The threat from the Soviet Union may have gone but the danger of “loose nukes” getting into the hands of terrorists or rogue states has increased. When Michael Foot proposed unilateral nuclear disarmament in the 1980s, the enemy was clear. Today that enemy is more difficult to identify, but may well come to include countries such as Iran and North Korea. To abandon our nuclear weapons in the naive hope that regimes like this will respond in the same way would be folly.

Nobody wants nuclear proliferation. The Trident replacement will be designed and brought into use in a way that respects the comprehensive test ban and nuclear non-proliferation treaties. What we do need, however, is a decent public debate. John Reid, the defence secretary, has promised this but it has yet to take place. He will doubtless say that the Trident replacement work going on at Aldermaston, Los Alamos and the Lawrence Livermore laboratory in California does not prejudge the political decision on whether to proceed. That may be so, but it creates suspicions of a backdoor move, as with nuclear power, on which we have had tantalising hints from the prime minister but little more. There is a strong case for Britain to maintain a nuclear deterrent. The government should be making it.

thetimesonline.co.uk

 

[ProCanadian]

Wow. Go Britain Go.

 

[I think not]

This is nice, we have our idiot developing new nuclear weapons for busting bunkers and we have another group of idiots doing the same thing. :roll:

 

[Daz_Hockey]

I see your point : who is the bigger fool?...the fool or the fool who follows the fool?

 

[I think not]

They're both idiots. It all boils down to the bigger dick theory. :roll:

 

[Daz_Hockey]

well....when this nuclear fusion test base in france buggers up this is all gonna be academic anyways