from Sunday Herald, 08 February 2009
The UK government deployed Trident nuclear missiles because they could cause the total breakdown of Russian cities by killing half their inhabitants, according to a top secret document passed to the Sunday Herald.
To ensure that the warheads inflicted “unacceptable damage” on Moscow and St Petersburg, the government was prepared to explode them at ground level to maximise lethal levels of radioactive contamination.
These revelations are considered so sensitive that the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has tried to cover them up in case they hamper current plans to replace Trident. Senior officials are still carrying out the same kind of “Dr Strangelove arithmetic”, critics say.
The original decision to adopt the Trident nuclear weapons system was taken in 1980 by the then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. As a result up to 200 warheads are now stored at Coulport on the Clyde, and deployed on submarines.
But the assumptions underlying Thatcher’s decision have remained secret until now. They are revealed in a seven-page document prepared by officials in 1978 for the MoD's chief scientific adviser, Professor Sir Ronald Mason.
This document, along with a series of others, was removed from the National Archives in London last year at the insistence of the MoD because it “could prejudice national security”. But it had already been photographed by Brian Burnell, a former nuclear weapons design engineer who now researches atomic history.
The document gives an extraordinary insight into the macabre calculations made by officials to justify Britain’s nuclear weapons programme. Stamped “TOP SECRET” on every page, it attempts to define the level of “generalised destruction” which the UK would be prepared to wreak on Russian cities in order to deter a nuclear attack on the UK.
It suggests Moscow and St Petersburg, then called Leningrad, as the best targets. The key criterion, it says, “is based not on destroying the whole city or killing a specified number of people but instead on creating sufficient damage to bring about the breakdown of the city as a functioning community.”
This could be accomplished, the document argues, by inflicting “severe structural damage” on buildings across 40% of a city. If the bombs were exploded in the air above the city, this would be likely to kill at least 40% of the inhabitants instantly, and seriously injure a further 15%.
But the document then points out that up to 30% of city populations could be evacuated to a network of underground bunkers. These would protect people against bombs exploded in the air, it says, but not against those detonated at ground level.
“Ground-bursts would subject 55-60% of the city to a radiation dose sufficient to cause rapid debilitation followed by death for most people in the area, and to contaminate food, water, air and both damaged and undamaged buildings,” the document states.
“Residual radiation would remain a hazard for many years to come. If there was a wind, the fall-out would be carried beyond city limits to extend the hazard.”
The government would hence have to retain the option of ground-bursts so that Soviet civil defence measures could be rendered ineffective, the document concludes. This, it observes, “would involve no change in our present policy of not commenting on such matters”.
The document ends by wondering whether the mass destruction threatened by British bombs would be enough to deter the Soviet Union from a nuclear attack. “Their leaders’ threshold of horror at widespread loss of human life may be higher than ours,” it says.
John Ainslie, the co-ordinator of the Scottish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, accused the government of deliberately hiding the document to avoid a proper debate on replacing Trident. “They don’t want anyone to think seriously about the possible targets of British nuclear weapons or the consequences of using them,” he said.
“So long as this country deploys nuclear submarines there will be officials somewhere carrying out the Dr Strangelove arithmetic required to target these horrific weapons of mass destruction.”
According to the Ministry of Defence, a number of files had been mistakenly released to the National Archives and legal action had been taken to remove them. “The papers were sensitive because they contain information relevant to the current deterrent or to any follow-on system,” said an MoD spokeswoman.
“Leaving the papers in the public domain could have compromised national security and affected bilateral relationships.” She stressed that the UK would only consider using nuclear weapons “in extreme circumstances”.
The MoD spokeswoman added: “We remain fully committed to the goal of a safer world in which there is no place for any nuclear weapons, and continue to work hard internationally to achieve that goal.”
But the MoD’s behaviour was attacked as “at best curious, and at worst outrageous” by the Scottish National Party’s leader at Westminster, Angus Robertson MP. “People will want to know what the government is trying to hide,” he said. “Perhaps if they reflected on the grim reality of what nuclear weapons do, Labour would posture less enthusiastically about Trident's replacement.”
The UK’s nuclear policy is to “deliberately maintain ambiguity about precisely when, how and at what scale we would contemplate use of our nuclear deterrent”, said a report by the Foreign Office last week. “Hence, we will not rule in or out the first use of nuclear weapons.”
Download a copy of the secret document here (1.3MB pdf)
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