PD Smith

Shock & AWE

05 March 2009 | AWE, nuclear weapons | Post a comment

As a post­script to yes­ter­day’s piece about our nuclear future, it was announced last night that the Min­istry of Defence’s plans to mod­ernise the Alder­mas­ton Atom­ic Weapons Estab­lish­ment (AWE), at Burgh­field in Berk­shire, have been giv­en the go-ahead, despite the fact that it’s in an area at risk of flood­ing.

The AWE facil­i­ty is where Britain’s nuclear war­heads are pro­duced. Last month it was revealed that the US mil­i­tary has been using Britain’s atom­ic weapons fac­to­ry to car­ry out research into its own war­head pro­gramme, accord­ing to evi­dence seen by the Guardian.

The Min­istry of Defence has admit­ted it is work­ing with the US on the UK’s “exist­ing nuclear war­head stock­pile and the range of replace­ment options that might be avail­able” but has declined to give any fur­ther infor­ma­tion.

Although Con­gress halt­ed the Bush admin­is­tra­tion’s plans for a new gen­er­a­tion of nuclear war­head known as the Reli­able Replace­ment War­head (RRW), it seems the US mil­i­tary may have used facil­i­ties in the UK to get around the restric­tions at home.

At a time of glob­al reces­sion, with job loss­es being report­ed every day, there is a sil­ver lin­ing to this sto­ry: appar­ent­ly the nuclear arms indus­try is flour­ish­ing and indeed expand­ing in the UK. One web­site I found has two pages of cur­rent jobs on offer at AWE.

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