House of Commons - Defence - Written Evidence

Select Committee on Defence Written Evidence

Memorandum from Greenpeace UK

Greenpeace's submission looks at the Government's investment programme at AWE Aldermaston. In Annex C of its November Memorandum to the Defence Select Committee, the Ministry of Defence wrote about the investments that the Government is now making in AWE that:

"The additional investment at AWE is required to sustain the existing warhead stockpile in-service irrespective of decisions on any successor warhead."

And then Defence Secretary John Reid told Parliament on 19 July 2005 that:

"The purpose of investing some £350 million over the next three years is to ensure that we can maintain the existing Trident warhead stockpile throughout its intended in-service life."

In our evidence to the Committee (attached) we give reasons for doubting that this is in fact the case:

— The quantum leap in the capacity of technology now being put in place at Aldermaston, and the hiring of a new generation of scientists, engineers and technicians, does not make sense if the purpose is to maintain the safety and reliability of the existing warheads;

— There is considerable a tension between statements by AWE itself that the purpose of this investment program is both to maintain the safety and reliability of existing warheads and to develop its capacity to build a new nuclear weapon with out testing, AWE statements that most of the scientific effort at AWE is focused on problems associated with building a new nuclear weapons, and the Government's emphasis that these investments are for maintaining the safety and reliability of the existing stockpile;

— Leading US nuclear weapons scientists argue that a science-based stockpile stewardship programme is not what is needed to maintain the safety and reliability of existing warheads. They argue that, to the contrary, this is best done by engineering-based inspection and remanufacture. Most seriously, they argue that if science-based stockpile stewardship leads to alterations in warheads, or new warhead design, this will lead to uncertainties about their functioning and this will create political pressure for a return of nuclear testing. This is a particularly serious concern at present as the USA has recently carried out a test, named "Unicorn," to ready the Nevada test site for a return of nuclear testing should that be ordered by the President.

There is also the serious concern that the cost of the facilities now being developed at AWE Aldermaston may turn out to be far larger than currently anticipated. Take the Orion Laser now being built. The precedent set by the US facility, the National Ignition Facility is not reassuring. Its cost has escalated from $1.2 billion to $4.5 billion and is still climbing.

This program of investment raises two linked concerns.

— Undermining Deliberative Democracy and the Sovereignty of Parliament. The Government's investment programme is undermining deliberative democracy and the sovereignty of parliament. The proper procedure should be an open and informed debate first, then a decision by parliament on whether to go ahead with the investments necessary to make a bomb, and finally the investments. Instead, the evidence strongly suggests that we have an "Alice in Wonderland" situation of investments first, official decision second, and public debate and parliamentary vote last of all.

— Undermining the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. These investments directly threaten treaties that Britain has signed. Greenpeace believes that if the UK and other nuclear weapon states continue to flout the deal they made with the international community first in 1968, when they signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and again in 1996 when the 1996 when they signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in part fulfilment of their NPT obligation to negotiate disarmament, then the system of international cooperation will fail.

The two issues are linked because Parliament's ratification of the NPT and the CTBT made it a guardian of these treaties and a duty to ensure that the UK does not undermine them. In the light of the evidence set out in our submission to the inquiry, Greenpeace strongly urges the Defence Select Committee to conduct a thorough inquiry into the real purpose of the investments now being undertaken at AWE Aldermaston.

In particular we would strongly urge the Committee to use its powers of investigation to question nuclear weapons scientists, engineers and technicians at AWE Aldermaston and that it will also invite those leading US nuclear weapon scientists who have questioned the need for science-based stockpile stewardship to maintain the existing deterrent and raised very serious concerns that science-based stockpile stewardship will lead to a return of nuclear testing to give written and oral evidence to the committee.

As these are issues of some technical complexity it would make sense for the Committee to secure independent counsel with a knowledge of this area, two persons who might be able to assist the Committee in this way in the UK are Professor Donald MacKenzie at the Science Studies Unit, the University of Edinburgh (widely regarded as one of the top international experts on the sociology of science and technology and who conducted in-depth studies of nuclear weapons expertise in the US), and Dr Graham Spinardi also at the Science Studies Unit (whose particular expertise is the Trident nuclear missile system).

There is much that needs to be cleared up here and the Committee is in a unique position to gather and probe the UK and US expert evidence needed to find out the truth.

THE GOVERNMENT'S PROGRAM OF INVESTMENT IN AWE ALDERMASTON

1. The Government will spend more than £1 billion over the next three years on upgrading AWE Aldermaston and Burghfield.[46] The actual money for the upgrades, however, will almost certainly be larger. Similar US projects have typically ended up being many times their predicted costs. For instance the US National Ignition Facility laser costs have escalated from $1.2 billion to $4.2 billion and is still climbing.[47]

2. The Government has stated that its current program of investment in Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) Aldermaston is "necessary" to maintain the safety and reliability of the UK's existing nuclear warheads "irrespective" of any decision to make a new nuclear weapon. AWE's statements that a central purpose of the current investment program is to ensure that that it can build a new nuclear weapon programme, and the scientific and technical details of the facilities being developed and scientists, engineers, and technicians being hired make the this claim very hard to believe. When combined with statements by independent US nuclear scientists and top US nuclear weapons scientists that the kinds of facilities being developed at AWE Aldermaston are not necessary at all to maintain the safety and reliability of the nuclear deterrent, the Government's claim becomes incredible.

3. Ten years after all five declared nuclear weapon states signed the Compehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), the US nuclear weapons scientists raise a further issue. They argue that any attempt to improve existing nuclear weapons, or to make new ones, using the kind of exotic technologies being developed at Aldermaston will, inevitably, lead to uncertainty about the performance of nuclear warheads and this will create political pressure for a return of nuclear testing. The fact that the UK does not possess its own test site means that it could not carry out such tests on its own. AWE's warhead development, however, will be done in close cooperation with the giant American nuclear weapons laboratories—Los Alamos and Sandia in New Mexico, and Lawrence Livermore in California—and there are already serious concerns that their developments of new warheads will lead to a return to nuclear testing.

4. The entry into force of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty is a major foreign policy goal of the UK. The UK should not, therefore, cooperate in any US-UK warhead development work which may lead to nuclear testing. The seriousness of this issue is underscored by the fact that, with the Unicorn sub-critical nuclear test, the US is bringing the Nevada test site into an advanced state of readiness for a resumption of nuclear testing. The upgrading of Aldermaston may also lead to a resumption of nuclear testing by another route. The use of exotic technologies to design and build a new nuclear weapon will lead other countries to ask: "Why should we continue to respect the CTBT when the UK is using exotic technologies, and its access to US expertise and facilities to develop a new nuclear weapon without testing?"

THE UPGRADING OF ALDERMASTON'S CAPACITY TO BUILD A NEW NUCLEAR WARHEAD

5. The quantum leap in AWE Aldermaston's capacity to design and build a new nuclear weapon, and the hiring of a new generation of scientists, engineers, and technicians now underway strongly suggest that a major purpose of current investments is a nuclear weapon development programme.

6. The Blue Oak and Larch Supercomputers: Supercomputers are used by nuclear weapons laboratories to simulate in great detail the detonation of a nuclear weapon and can be used as a tool to improve nuclear weapon design. Aldermaston plans to purchase two new supercomputers—known as Blue Oak and Larch. They will improve its capacity to model nuclear weapons explosions nine hundred times.[48] The Blue Oak computer, with a power of just under three teraflops,[49] was installed in 2002. Then in 2006 an order was placed for Larch, a £20 million computer with a peak performance of 40 teraflops. If it were in service today, Larch would be the most powerful computer in Europe.

7. The Core Punch Hydrodynamic Facility: Hydrodynamic testing allows nuclear weapons laboratories to gather test data previously only available from underground nuclear tests. Specifically it is used to study the behaviour of plutonium and other nuclear materials under the pressure of high explosives. For example, it is used to examine how the primary stage of a nuclear warhead implodes under the pressure of its detonating high explosive. The term "hydrodynamic" is used because under the high pressures produced in these experiments, solid materials flow like liquids. AWE is planning to build a brand new hydrodynamic testing facility, known as the Core Punch Facility. This will have the capacity to make measurements an order of magnitude more precise than the existing hydrodynamic facility.[50]

8. The Orion laser: AWE plan to build a new laser called Orion that is 1,000 times more powerful than its current "Helen" laser. Lasers are used to simulate conditions found within a nuclear detonation on a minute scale. They enable scientists to study the processes of nuclear fusion and boosting, and construct predictive models for nuclear explosions. Multiple laser beams are focused on targets containing deuterium and tritium. These targets are heated and compressed sufficiently for fusion to occur. The technical term for this is "inertial confinement fusion". Data from the Orion laser will supplement that received from the vast new US laser, known as the National Ignition Facility (NIF). In 1999 the UK committed £29 million to NIF, for British tests on the facility.

9. Sub-critical testing Sub-critical tests are exactly the same as nuclear tests, except that when the atomic bomb is detonated it has insufficient fissile material in its core for a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction to build up. Data from the tests are then fed into supercomputers to model how a nuclear weapon would work. AWE Aldermaston and the US Los Alamos National Laboratory undertook their first joint sub-critical underground nuclear explosion, Vito, on 14 February 2002 at the US Nevada nuclear test site. A second, Krakatau, was carried out on 23 February 2006. The Ministry of Defence has insisted that it is using these tests solely to test the safety and reliability of the Trident warhead. However sub-critical tests are regarded as extremely provocative, as the data can be used to model new nuclear weapons designs. Indeed in March 2006 the Sunday Times reported that results of the Krakatau sub-critical test will be used to help both US and Aldermaston scientists to design a new warhead.[51]

10. New laboratories for materials testing It is proposed that new facilities will be built at Aldermaston, and possibly also at Burghfield, for research into material science. This research will look not only at how individual materials behave but also at how components of a nuclear warhead may interact. Additionally AWE plans to build a new explosives handling facility, as well as a facility for uranium and tritium.

11. Hiring a New Generation of Scientists, Engineers, and Technicians. As well as building these new facilities, Aldermaston is also having a huge recruitment drive—to hire a new generation of nuclear scientists, engineers and technicians. During the period July 2005 to March 2006, Aldermaston recruited 90 scientists, 250 engineers, 57 technical support staff, and 98 business services staff. By contrast, it lost only 180 staff. It now plans to recruit a further 700 staff by the end of March 2008, in roughly the same proportion.[52] Of particular interest are plans to increase the number of scientists with expertise in hydrodynamics testing from 70 to 95 over the next three years. The only real use for hydrodynamic expertise, according to Greg Mello, the Director of the Los Alamos Study Group, is for designing a new nuclear weapon.

12. Increased US-UK nuclear weapons cooperation. We are also seeing the kind of increased co-operation between the UK and US that might be expected if a nuclear weapon programme was underway. In 2004, the UK government prepared the way for the scientific and technical co-operation with the US necessary to develop a new nuclear weapon by renewing the Mutual Defence Agreement. This agreement provides for technical co-operation between the US and the UK on the manufacture of nuclear weapons. Furthermore, the government has authorised officials to begin talks with the US and with defence companies about a successor to Trident. In recent years there has also been a significant increase in co-operation between Aldermaston and the giant US nuclear weapons laboratories, including a rough doubling in the number of meetings between Aldermaston scientists and their US counterparts.[53] Answers to Parliamentary Questions confirmed that UK and US nuclear scientists are currently on 16 joint working groups,"nuclear weapons engineering" and "nuclear weapon code development" being prominent among them.[54] The level of intimacy between the US and UK nuclear weapons laboratories is also reflected by the fact that the Ministry of Defence has appointed a top US nuclear weapons scientist, Don Cook, to manage Aldermaston.

All about safety and reliability?

13. When questioned, the UK Government has repeatedly claimed that investments in AWE are necessary irrespective of any decision to develop a new nuclear warhead. For instance on 19 July 2005 then Defence Secretary John Reid stated that: "The purpose of this investment of some £350 million over each of the next three years is to ensure that we can maintain the existing Trident warhead stockpile throughout its intended in-service life."[55] Also in its November Memorandum to the Defence Select Committee the Ministry of Defence stated that: "This additional investment at AWE is required to sustain the existing warhead stockpile in-service irrespective of any decision on any successor warhead."[56]

14. The Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) itself however takes a different view. In 2002 it stated that "The capability to build a successor (to trident) will have to be achieved without conducting nuclear tests. This poses considerable scientific and technical challenges. We are therefore developing a complex science-based program at AWE that will require special facilities across a variety of disciplines."[57] On the AWE website Dr Clive Marsh, AWE's Chief Scientist also states: "Our research & 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."

15. Leading US nuclear weapons scientists, who have been at the heart of US science policy and nuclear weapons physics, also believe that such facilities are unnecessary simply to maintain the safety and reliability of nuclear weapons.[58] They include: Ray Kidder—a Senior Nuclear Weapons Designer at Lawrence Livermore and advisor to the Senate Armed Services Committee; Norris Bradbury former Director of Los Alamos; Carson Marks—former Head of Los Alamos Theoretical Division; Physicist Jonathan I Katz, who was a member of the elite JASON group of eminent scientists formed to give high-level science advice to the US government; and Richard Garwin—who not only headed research at IBM's Thomas J Watson Research Centre, but has also been a member of the President's Science Advisory Committee and the Defense Science Board.

16. These scientists have repeatedly argued that the maintenance of existing US nuclear weapons stocks (weapons which were the subject of repeat nuclear tests before a testing moratorium was imposed in the US) is best done via engineering-based inspection and re-manufacture.

17. In essence inspection and re-manufacture involves detaching and checking each of the thousands of individual parts that make up a nuclear weapon and its subsystems. If there are any problems or signs of deterioration the part is simply replaced by an identical part. Stocks of identical parts are created through re-manufacturing parts according to their original specifications. As long as the basic weapon design, particularly the plutonium pit in the warhead itself, is not changed then this method will continue to work.

18. This engineering approach (sometimes referred to as curatorship) is the way that the US stockpile was maintained during the Cold War. The small number of nuclear tests that were done to check the safety and reliability of the stockpile showed that the method worked. Hisham Zerriffi and Arjun Makhijani of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research conducted an extensive survey of past flaws with US nuclear weapons. They concluded that existing procedures for maintaining their safety were entirely adequate and that science-based stockpile stewardship was not—as claimed by the weapons laboratory directors—needed for this purpose.[59]

19. Two reports commissioned by the US Department of Energy from the JASON group, an elite body of US scientists set up to give high-level advice to the government, reinforce the point that unless nuclear weapons are modified or re-designed, an engineering approach is adequate: "The primary—if not the sole—nuclear weapons manufacturing capacity that must be provided for in an era of no nuclear testing is the remanufacture of copies of existing (tested) stockpile weapons . . . the ultimate goal should be to retain the capability of remanufacturing SNM [special nuclear materials] components that are as identical as possible to those of the original manufacturing process and not to "improve" those components. This is especially important for [plutonium] pits."[60]

THE COMPREHENSIVE TEST BAN TREATY

20. These developments will increase pressure for a return to nuclear testing—thereby undermining UK efforts to get the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty to enter into force, and the international norm of not testing which emerged from the long moratoria on nuclear testing during the 1990s and the fact that no country has tested since 1998. The concerns expressed by leading scientists about the "virtual" design and testing of new nuclear weapons rather than simple remanufacture of old designs is also inextricably linked to the issue of nuclear testing. The creation of completely new nuclear weapons through the use of advanced computer modeling and laboratory experiments will inevitably lead to reduced confidence in the reliability of those weapons because the conditions created by the use of powerful lasers or hydrodynamic tests are very different to those created by an actual nuclear explosion. It will only be a matter of time before politicians and the military begin to create pressure for a return to full-scale nuclear testing to make sure their new weapons "really work".

21. As Sidney Drell, US nuclear weapons physicist and long-time advisor to the US government put it: "If anybody thinks we are going to be designing new warheads and not doing testing, I don't know what they are smoking. I don't know of a general, an admiral, a president or anybody in responsibility who would take an untested new weapon that is different from the ones in our stockpile and rely on it without resuming testing."[61] And Jonathan I Katz has also commented: "Nuclear weapons are not well enough understood to permit the development of new weapons, or the modification of those we now possess, without tests at substantial (multi-kiloton) nuclear yield. Despite 50 years of experience, including large numbers of tests at full nuclear yield, we do not have sufficient confidence in our design tools. It is unlikely that any future work without nuclear testing could give us that confidence".

22. So the new hi-tech developments being built at Aldermaston are not only unnecessary if the aim is simply to maintain the UK's existing weapons, they also undermine the CTBT and NPT, and set Britain on the road towards resuming full-scale nuclear tests. Worryingly, the US administration, which often supplies the UK with nuclear test data, seems to be already preparing to resume testing. On 16 September 2003 the US Senate voted to spend $45 million over three years, to reduce the time needed to prepare the Nevada Test Site for underground nuclear tests from 24-36 months to 18 months.

23. The upgrading of Aldermaston threatens the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) through another route. Readers of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four will not be surprised that this is being done in the name of respecting the CTBT. Thus AWE insists that it is developing the scientific capacity and the exotic technologies it needs to make a new nuclear weapon so that it can comply with the CTBT ban on nuclear testing! In a strictly legal sense AWE may be right that it is complying with the CTBT which only commits its signatories not to carry out nuclear tests. These developments are, however, completely against the disarmament and non-proliferation purposes of the treaty.

24. The negotiating record of the CTBT and its preamble show that it is intended as a non-proliferation and a disarmament measure. At the 1995 Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference the non-nuclear nations insisted that they would only agree to the indefinite extension of the Treaty demanded by the US and other nuclear states if the declared nuclear weapon states deliver on their obligations under Article 6 of the NPT to negotiate nuclear disarmament. In particular the non nuclear states insisted that they would only agree to indefinite extension of the NPT if the declared nuclear weapon states agreed to negotiate a CTBT by 1995 as part of their NPT Article 6 commitment to negotiate disarmament. The CTBT is, therefore, part of the grand bargain at the centre of the NPT whereby the declared nuclear weapon states agree to negotiate disarmament and the non-nuclear states agree not to acquire nuclear weapons.

25. The disarmament purpose of the CTBT is clearly set out in the preamble to the Treaty which states that the State Parties to the Treaty recognize that: "The cessation of all nuclear weapon test explosions and all other nuclear explosions, by constraining the development and qualitative improvement of nuclear weapons and ending the development of advanced new types of nuclear weapons, constitute an effective measure of nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation in all its form." The preamble concludes by emphasising the disarmament purpose of the CTBT. All the States Parties who sign the Treaty, it emphasises, recognize that "an end to all such nuclear explosions will thus constitute a meaningful step in the realization of a systematic process to achieve nuclear disarmament."

26. More broadly, AWE's invocation of the letter of the CTBT to justify a program of investments which goes directly contrary to its disarmament purpose is out of step with the majority of the world's nations. As Hans Blix's timely report on Weapons of Mass Destruction underscores, the majority of the world's nations continue to see themselves as stakeholders in a jointly managed system of treaties and organizations for disarmament, arms control, verification and the building of security. Crucially, they do "not accept a de facto perpetuation of a licence for five—or more—states to possess nuclear weapons and they resist measures that would expand the inequality that exists between the nuclear haves and have-nots. Renouncing nuclear weapons for themselves, they wish to see steps that will lead to the outlawing of nuclear weapons for all."[62]

27. The future use of high technology to develop a new bomb is only one way that Aldermaston is seeking to get round the CTBT. This is especially grating to the majority of the world's states because they do not have access to the immense financial and technical resources needed to upgrade or develop nuclear weapons in this way. There is, therefore, a danger that they will come to accept the Indian Government's claim that the Treaty is simply as means for perpetuating a global system of nuclear apartheid.[63]

28. Equally threatening to the CTBT is the fact that AWE Aldermaston, and its US counter-parts, are already working to get round the CTBT by adopting a systems approach which enables them to transform the capabilities of a nuclear weapon without actually having to develop an entirely new warhead. Since the end of the Cold War the US and the UK have developed Trident so as to make it more "usable" against a non nuclear state. The rationale set out by the UK Government is that Trident can be used to secure the UK's "vital interests" (trade, investment, alliances, and access to raw materials such as oil) and to destroy chemical or biological weapons before they could be used against UK troops fighting overseas.[64]

29. The UK has upgraded Trident to carry out these tasks. These developments have been guided by the fantasy that a highly precise, low yield, Trident strike would be able to destroy military targets without disproportionate civilian casualties. To accomplish this vision the UK has deployed missiles with only a single warhead, acquired a new targeting system from the US, and given Trident a low yield capacity. Aldermaston's development of the upgraded system was quietly slipped out in the history section of its 2000 Annual Report which announced: "With high accuracy, targeting and an option of two warhead yields, [Trident] can now operate in both strategic and sub-strategic roles."[65]

30. Trident's two yields may mean that Trident can now function as a mini-nuclear weapon (ie have a yield below five kilo-tonnes). The Ministry of Defence, however, has refused to tell MPs whether or not it has actually done this.[66] The UK is now being asked by the US whether it wants upgrades to Trident which take its transformation into a "usable" nuclear weapon further.[67] Specifically, the UK is being asked whether it wants a new guidance system which will use satellites to steer a new Trident re-entry vehicle to within metres of its target and whether it wants a new contact fuse which will allow a smaller warhead to be used to destroy hardened military targets.

31. The systematic development of the whole Trident weapon system, then, is providing the US and the UK with a way of making the major part of the US and UK nuclear arsenal more usable against non-nuclear nations while nominally respecting their commitments to nuclear disarmament under the NPT and to not to test under the CTBT.

9 October 2006

46 Ministerial Statement by the Secretary for Defence, John Reid, Hansard, Column 59WS, 19 July 2005. Back

47 Marylia Kelly, "National Ignition Facility Update," INESAP Bulletin 21, http://www.inesap.org/bulletin21/bul21art33.htm Back

48 "The Way Ahead: AWE Annual Report 2002," (AWE, April 2003 ): 4. Back

49 A teraflop is a unit of computing speed, equal to one trillion floating point operations per second. Back

50 Ibid: 5. Back

51 Michael Smith, "Britain's Secret Nuclear Blue Print," Sunday Times, (12 March 2006). Back

52 Written Answer, Hansard, 3 July 2006, to question by Mike Hancock MP. Back

53 Nicola Butler and Mark Bromley, "Secrecy and Dependency: The UK Trident System in the 21st Century," (BASIC, 2001): 21. Back

54 Ibid: 20. Back

55 Ministerial Statement by the Secretary for Defence, John Reid, Hansard, Column 59WS, 19 July 2005. Back

56 The Future of the UK's Strategy Nuclear Deterrent: Written Evidence from the Ministry of Defence, HC835 (The Stationary Office, 30 June 2006): Ev 5. Back