Aldermaston

For links to further and general information on AWE Aldermaston, see the section of the Aldermaston Blockade webpage.

Three dates in 2000

22nd March 2000

Dr John Rae, Chief Executive of AWE Management Ltd (the consortium that now runs Aldermaston) reported to the local liaison committee that they were expecting a one-third reduction in staff and funding:

“Having decided to make the UK deterrent smaller MoD expects a lower cost, therefore the funding from MoD will come down to a level which allows the programme to be delivered. As a rough guide there will be a 1/3 reduction in staff and funding will be reduced on a similar basis.”

20th May 2000

Nuclear Non-Proliferation (NPT) review conference reaches agreement, including:

“an unequivocal undertaking by the nuclear-weapon states to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals leading to nuclear disarmament to which all States Parties are committed under Article VI.”

21st May 2000

Within a day of the NPT agreement in New York, Geoff Hoon (Defence Secretary) undermined its signifance on the BBC, “there’s no specific timetable agreed and obviously it is dependent on every other nuclear weapons state agreeing the same and taking appropriate action.”

Something had changed by 2002

July 2002

Leaflet on AWE’s Site Development Strategy Plan published, setting out several major investments that would enable AWE “to maintain a capability to design a successor warhead to Trident should it ever be required in the future.”

October 2003

First planning notice for the new ORION laser building submitted by MOD to the local West Berkshire District Council. After a succession of planning notices and delays, work on ORION started in 2006 and is ongoing.

May 2004

Adam Ingram (Defence Minister) reported in Parliament that in total 190 visits had been made by UK personnel to nuclear weapons laboratories in the US, including 219 visitors to the Los Alamos National Laboratories. In December 2004, the Mutual Defence Agreement, under which the US and UK share nuclear warhead components and fissile material, was renewed for a further 10 years.

2006

New Larch supercomputer due to be commissioned in a 20 million pound contract, delivering almost 30 times the current computing power at AWE and Cray’s largest system in Europe. In AWE’s words, “Scientific and technical computing has always played a major role in the design of nuclear weapons and since the end of underground testing (UGT) this role is heightened.”

2007

Dr Clive Marsh (Chief Scientist, AWE) states on the AWE website (video link),

“The [research and development] work splits into two main but inter-related areas. The first is the requirement to maintain the current Trident stockpile. The second is to develop our overall warhead design and assurance capabilities, including the ability to provide a new warhead lest our government should ever need it as a successor to Trident. Most of our research is conducted in this capability area.”

AWE developments: stockpile stewardship or new warhead development?

The Government and AWE claim that their new developments relate to maintenance and stewardship of the current Trident warheads stockpile, and point repeatedly to the need to comply with the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). But Trident warheads were first deployed in 1993, and the UK ratified the CTBT in 1998, so neither of these can explain the change of policy from one-third reductions to new investment programmes between March 2000 and July 2002.

Even if we take the Government’s claims at face value, developments at AWE show that they have chosen an approach to stockpile stewardship that will make development of new warheads much easier, if not inevitable. Moreover, leading US scientists have stated that similar investments in the US (coined ’science-based stockpile stewardship’) are not needed merely to maintain safety and reliability of existing weapons, arguing that this is best achieved via engineering-based inspection and remanufacture.

(Thanks to BASIC, Greenpeace and AWPC for most of the above.)

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