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Road crash could detonate UK N-warheads: report

IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency

London, July 6, IRNA
UK-Nuclear weapons-Safety risks
Britain's Trident nuclear warheads damaged in a vehicle pile-up or plane crash could partially detonate and deliver a lethal radiation dose, according to a newly declassified report from the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD).

The report, obtained by the New Scientist, also revealed that an attack by terrorists on a nuclear weapons convoy could produce an even more disastrous outcome and likely to cause "considerable loss of life."

The magazine underlined the dangers, saying that Trident warheads are regularly transported to weapons facilities in the US and the UK, where they are inspected to make sure their aging materials do not render them unreliable or unstable.

The MoD has always insisted that an accidental nuclear explosion could not happen in transit because a warhead's plutonium core must be compressed symmetrically by conventional explosives.

Bombs were said to be designed to be "single point safe" so a knock at a single point should not trigger all the explosives around the core.

But according to the declassified report, extreme accidents could result in a nuclear explosion even though the overall yearly risk of an "inadvertent yield" in the UK was put at 2.4 in a billion, mainly due to the possibility of an aircraft crashing onto a convoy.

The New Scientist, to be published on Saturday, found that US experts agree that the risk of an accidental explosion is real.

"You can't rule it out. If we are going to have nuclear weapons, we have to live with the risks," said Philip Coyle, from the Washington-based Center for Defense Information.

A terrorist attack is a less predictable danger when moving nuclear weapons around but the consequences include a possible "severe disruption both to the British people's way of life and to the UK's ability to function effectively as a sovereign state." Despite the report, the MoD maintained that neither a terrorist attack nor an accident could trigger a full nuclear explosion because each warhead is transported with "vital parts of its final configuration removed."

"A nuclear bomb-type explosion is therefore impossible," said an MoD spokesman, but he did not rule out an inadvertent yield of radiation was theoretically possible.

But the New Scientist said that this was disputed by Frank Barnaby, a nuclear physicist who worked on the UK's nuclear weapons program and is now a consultant with the independent Oxford Research Group.

"The MoD report confirms what many scientists have long suspected -- that nuclear bombs can go off by accident," Barnaby was quoted saying.

"They have also effectively admitted that a terrorist attack could cause a nuclear explosion. A Trident warhead exploded in a densely populated area could kill hundreds of thousands of people.

However small the risk, that is too horrifying to contemplate," he said.

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