US labs use British nuclear factory to build new bombs
The US has been using Britain’s atomic weapons factory to carry out research into its own nuclear warhead programme, according to evidence seen by the Guardian. This has been suspected for some years. The US weapons industry has long been prevented by Congress from researching a “replacement warhead”, and the UK denies it has such a programme. But the UK government has recently spent tens of billions mysteriously upgrading Britain’s factory at Aldermaston, and at Christmas secretly sold it’s stake to US companies; thus creating a Guantanamo for nukes, an offshore legal black hole where US companies can design the next generation of weapons without Congressional oversight and without sharing the secrets with foreign companies or parliaments. US weapons labs last week unhappily revealed that Obama may end civilian control of bomb development after decades and move such work to the Pantagon, a move seen to be an attempt to weaken the labs’ influence on policy. Article 1 of the Non-Proliferation treaty prohibits ‘transfer’ of nuclear weapons between countries, but the US and UK have a secret agreement on nuclear technology sharing - including recent warhead re-entry upgrades that gave British bombs the ability to destroy very hard targets in a first strike. Koffi Annan describes such modernisation as a swindle incompatible with the NPT.
Previous Stories
- 2008-12-23 Britain sells its nuclear weapons factory to US in secret
- 2008-11-10 Women or machines may be solution to ‘manning bulge’ problems on Trident submarines
- 2007-09-04 UK new nuclear High Surety Warhead under development ?
- 2007-05-05 Trident: UK tells one story to the UN, the opposite at home
- 2007-05-04 Congress slows new warhead, Star Wars
- 2007-03-23 Pentagon: new warheads seen as provocative, destabilising
- 2007-03-21 Trident warhead upgraded to destroy missile silos
- 2007-03-19 Iran attacks UK’s Trident nuclear arsenal modernisation plans
- 2007-03-11 Israel’s nuclear missile subs 20% the price of Blair’s Trident proposal
- Gorbachev attacks Blair’s “rush to deploy nuclear missiles” until 2050: ‘Astonishing’
- 2007-03-05 US chooses new green warhead design
- 2007-02-20 Iran 6 months from large scale enrichment, Trident does not help: El Baradei
- 2007-02-14 Nuclear weapons states “swindle” NPT - and new nukes are incompatible with treaty: Kofi Annan
- 2007-01-31 Gorbachev: The Nuclear Threat letter to WSJ
- 2007-01-04 Kissinger, Schultz call for a world without nuclear weapons in Wall St Journ
