UK up in arms over US nuke cooperation

It's not exactly a non-partisan source, but a Scottish newspaper is stirring up 'news' about the sourcing of UK nuclear weapons components.

Britain’s Trident deterrent’s independence ‘undermined’

The Ministry of Defence has been forced to reveal one of the most closely guarded secrets behind Britain’s nuclear weapons programme.

For years UK ministers have repeatedly refused to say where neutron generators – a vital component of the Trident warheads stationed on the Clyde – were manufactured. The information had to be kept secret for national security reasons, they said.

But now, having been confronted with undeniable evidence by the Sunday Herald, the MoD has admitted that the devices are imported from the United States. And in so doing, it has opened the Westminster Government to a barrage of criticism from assorted experts, politicians and campaigners, who now claim that Britain is not in full independent control of its own nuclear deterrent.

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Neutron generators are vital because they initiate nuclear explosions by bombarding plutonium or uranium with neutrons at a precise time, and they have to be regularly replaced. The neutrons are generated by fusing together two radioactive isotopes of hydrogen, tritium and deuterium.

The Scottish National Party’s Westminster leader and defence spokesman, Angus Robertson MP, has twice asked ministers to say where the neutron generators for Britain’s nuclear weapons were made, first in July 2004 and again in April 2005. On both occasions ministers withheld the information citing “defence, security and international relations”.

But a detailed report just released under freedom of information law by the US Government’s National Nuclear Security Administration has blown away British secrecy. It says that 14 neutron generators made at the Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico, were delivered to the UK in three batches in 2008.

When this was drawn to the attention of the MoD last week, it accepted for the first time that Trident’s neutron generators were made in the US. “Certain non-nuclear components of the existing warhead were procured from the US on cost-effectiveness grounds,

By: Brant