Some rather shocking news has emerged. Britain’s Atomic Weapons Establishment has just had to admit that it stopped ‘live nuclear work’ at its Burghfield plant last December owing to safety problems. Reported by the Scottish Sunday Herald at the weekend, this is apparently the first time that the MoD has ever had to stop working on nuclear weapons.

The Burghfield factory is located close to Aldermaston in Berkshire.

Six years ago, the government’s Nuclear Installations Inspectorate discovered over 1,000 saftey flaws. Since then, the AWE management has failed to deal with the problems, hence the shut down of the problem sector. Last year, documents released under freedom of information law showed that the NII was concerned about a huge range of problems.

AWE missed a number of NII deadlines to remedy the problems, but the MoD allowed them to go ahead with regular work anyway, deeming it to be too necessary to disrupt. But AWE was so slow that in the end the MoD had to call a halt.

According to a recent NII report, “AWE has agreed that no live nuclear work will be carried out until the necessary fixes are in place.”
But Burghfield isn’t the only offender. The report also showed that Aldermaston was included in the inspection process toward the end of last year. Of 59 inspections made, in only two instances were the facilities found to be “good”, 43 were deemed “adequate” and 14 “had potential improvements identified”.

So not only are our nuclear weapons illegal, immoral, a waste of money and utterly useless in meeting any real security needs, we now know their production facilities are dangerous, poorly maintained, and a risk to the workforce and the population as a whole.
What is the government thinking of? Time to disarm.