Playing with Fire - Peter Burt

Up until 2017, the UK has had 110 accidents involving nuclear weapons according to a 2017 report.

As the war in Ukraine continues to escalate, our special blog looks at nuclear weapons and the incidents and accidents in the United Kingdom.

The report shows the risks posed by nuclear weapons every day and that the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has only once, in 2003, published an official list of accidents that have occurred o British Nuclear weapons.

There is no official public reporting procedure within the MoD.

The study was carried out in 2017 with extensive research from John Ainslie, to whom the report is dedicated. Published by the Nuclear Information Service in February 2017. Extracts from the report are included in this blog. The report is Crown copyright and is available on their website - https://www.nuclearinfo.org/reports

The report found the following:

The Ministry of Defence has only once, in 2003, published an official list of accidents that have occurred to British nuclear weapons. The 27 incidents recorded are far from a full record of all the accidents which have happened involving British nuclear weapons.

This report describes 110 accidents, near misses, and dangerous occurrences that have occurred over the 65-year history of the UK’s nuclear weapons programme, comprising of:

• 14 serious accidents related to the production and manufacturing of nuclear weapons.

• 22 incidents have taken place during the road transport of nuclear weapons.

• 8 incidents occurred during the storage and handling of nuclear weapons.

• 45 accidents that have happened to nuclear-capable submarines, ships, and aircraft.

• 21 security-related incidents. This is not a comprehensive list and they believe it represents merely the tip of the iceberg. There have been a further 17 incidents involving US visiting forces and nuclear weapons.

Government sources have invariably underplayed the seriousness of accidents involving nuclear weapons and refrained from telling the whole story. There is a consistent gap between the Ministry of Defence’s commentary on an accident and the assessment of independent outsiders and between public statements and the picture revealed by confidential internal reports.

The following factors have all contributed to accidents involving British nuclear weapons -

• Failures are caused as equipment reaches the end of its operating life.

• Equipment in short supply or overused.

• Operations hurried or conducted under pressure.

• Workers fail to follow even the strictest instructions and procedures. Currently, resources in the Ministry of Defence are stretched, exacerbating these hazards.

Experience also shows it is impossible to guard against unpredicted and unforeseeable chance accidents. Nuclear weapons are complex technical systems, themselves part of wider systems of even greater complexity. Accidents occur because our understanding of the technology and systems involved is inadequate to contain the dangers they may pose.

Throughout the history of the UK’s nuclear weapons programme, there have been numerous instances when operational needs have been placed ahead of safety needs. There are relentless pressures on managers, military commanders, and politicians to maintain nuclear operations at all costs as a national imperative.

Foreword - By Rob Edwards

A government nuclear regulator once told me something that has stuck with me over the years. Imagine, he said – off the record – that the Ministry of Defence (MoD) had come to us asking for permission for a shiny new project it was keen to pursue. Let’s call it Triton.

Triton, it turned out, involved taking some toxic and radioactive heavy metals, encircling them with high explosives, and packing the resulting bombs around a powerful rocket motor driven by a highly flammable and potentially explosive fuel.

Triton tubes containing all these hazards would then be squeezed into cramped submarines that would disappear under the oceans for months at a time to carry out top-secret close-quarter manoeuvres that might occasionally cause crashes.

And, said the MoD, we’d also have to load and unload Triton tubes near population centres, regularly transport them by road the length of the country and occasionally test fire them across the Atlantic.

Faced with such a proposition, said the regulator, the response would have been rapid, firm and unambiguous: no way. No one with even a basic grasp of health and environmental safety would countenance such a stupid and dangerous idea.

But that of course is not how it happened. The MoD nuclear bomb project was conceived in secrecy and haste, carried out for decades behind closed doors and was never run past a safety regulator actually representing the public interest.

Even now, as this report highlights, the MoD avoids transparent and independent regulation by relying on its very own, entirely internal and chronically shy Defence Nuclear Safety Regulator. It’s essentially MoD chaps watching over MoD chaps and assuring each other that it’s all OK.

But it’s not OK. As the Nuclear Information Service (NIS) graphically and authoritatively documents, there have been countless accidents, incidents and blunders. They have been kept secret, played down and spun to try and ensure public reassurance. We can never be sure we’ve learnt the whole truth about any of them.

The account of how mohawk-haired rainbow jumpered protestors scaled fences, tiptoed past guards and walked into the control room of a Polaris nuclear submarine docked at Faslane on the Clyde is, in turn, riveting, alarming and comical. “We’re from the Peace Camp,” one of the protestors ended up saying. “We’re hijacking this submarine. Take us to Cuba.”

We now know that this incident infuriated the then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, and led to a series of security clampdowns. But we only know that because of official papers released nearly 30 years after the event – and there are presumably still things that we don’t know.

The painstaking work of piecing together what has actually happened with UK nuclear weapons could hardly be more important. In an increasingly uncertain world, the task of prising open the MoD’s baroque and secretive citadel is crucial.

We need to know all the things that have gone wrong, and we need to understand all the risks that are being taken in our name, and with our money. That means as NIS argues, that we need a new system for honestly reporting and rating nuclear weapons accidents. It means that we must subject the MoD to truly transparent and independent regulation. We need, in other words, a fundamental shift – a sea change – in the relationship between the MoD and the taxpayers that fund it.

Perhaps then we could see for the first time the full scale of the hazard in our midst, and understand how dangerous it really is to play with fire. And then we could decide whether we want to live with it or get rid of it.

Executive Summary

This report from Nuclear Information Service discusses the accident record of the UK’s nuclear weapons programme over its 65-year history, looking across the full scope of the programme and describing the most significant incidents in detail.

The report describes 110 accidents, near misses, and dangerous occurrences that have occurred over the 65-year history of the UK’s nuclear weapons programme, comprising of:

• 14 serious accidents related to the production and manufacturing of nuclear weapons, including fires, fatal explosions, and floods.

• 22 incidents have taken place during the road transport of nuclear weapons, including vehicles overturning, road traffic accidents, and breakdowns.

• 8 incidents occurred during the storage and handling of nuclear weapons, including instances when nuclear weapons have been dropped.

• 45 accidents that have happened to nuclear-capable submarines, ships, and aircraft, including collisions, fires at sea, and lightning strikes. 24 of these accidents involved nuclear-armed submarines.

• 21 security-related incidents, including cases of unauthorised access to secure areas and unauthorised release of sensitive information.

In addition, there have been 17 incidents involving US visiting forces and nuclear weapons in the UK and its coastal waters.

These figures include 27 fires and eight explosions. Seven workers have died in industrial accidents at the Aldermaston nuclear weapons factory, and at least nine have died as a result of suspected radiation contamination. A further 100 are estimated to have died from cancers caused by the 1957 fire at the Windscale reactor which was producing fissile materials for nuclear weapons

Conclusion

With the war in Ukraine and the threat of nuclear weapons, we must eradicate them from the planet, we must not invest any further in their development, they do not protect society, they are not a deterrent, they are bargaining chips and the most deadly, most destructive force on the planet.

The report concludes with 3 recommendations:

1. Introduce procedures for publicly reporting accidents involving nuclear weapons. In order to remove the cloak of official secrecy which surrounds nuclear safety in the Ministry of Defence, safety regulators should prepare a quarterly report describing and evaluating all accidents with an International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES) rating of one or more which have occurred within the MoD’s nuclear programmes.

2. Place Ministry of Defence nuclear programmes under external regulation. We propose that regulation of the military nuclear programme should become the responsibility of an expanded Office for Nuclear Regulation, and visibly subject to the same regulatory standards as the civil nuclear sector. Such a step would help reduce the conflict of interest that the Secretary of State for Defence faces in managing nuclear programmes and redress the balance between meeting operational requirements and maintaining safety standards.

3. Support an international ban on nuclear weapons. NIS believes that the only way of eliminating the risks posed by an accident involving one of Britain’s nuclear weapons is to eliminate nuclear weapons themselves. This year negotiations will commence at the United Nations on a nuclear ban treaty that will prohibit the use, deployment, and manufacture of nuclear weapons. The ban treaty gives us an opportunity to get rid of nuclear weapons for once and for all, and Britain should embrace this opportunity.

None of which the Ministry of Defence has implemented.

The MoD nuclear bomb project was conceived in secrecy and haste, carried out for decades behind closed doors and was never run past a safety regulator actually representing the public interest. It still remains behind closed doors, with no access for people seeking answers to nearly 70 years of questions.

Read the Full Report