Selling off the defence of Britain
THE Government is set to sell off more of the ‘British’ nuclear deterrent capability to the Americans which will result in US firms owning two-thirds of the factory that makes and services ‘Britain’s’ atomic warheads.
It was a Conservative Government that privatised the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) at Aldermaston back in 1993, setting up a contractor, AWE Management, to run it. However a one-third share was kept under State control with British firms owning the rest.
When the current Labour Government came to power it sold-off a third of our warhead plant to US defence giant Lockheed Martin. This was a company closely linked to the Pentagon and dependent on the US Government for lucrative contracts for its survival so it is hardly likely to put British defence interests above that of the US.
Now Gordon Brown is about to sell-off another third share to American corporation, Jacobs of Pasadena preferring more US involvement than keeping it in British hands by using engineering firm AMEC. The remaining third share of our nuclear deterrent will stay with Serco, founded in 1929 as a UK subsidiary of Radio Corporation of America, but majority British-owned since a 1988 management buyout.
The result of all this is that two-thirds of the site which makes and services nuclear warheads for the so-called British nuclear deterrent will be owned by, and therefore controlled by the Americans.
But then the Trident D5 missiles that carry our deterrent are built in America and the Royal Navy submarines that launch them are serviced by Americans at an American port in Georgia!
Tony Blair banged the patriotic drum last year when he announced the ageing Tridents and their submarines were to be replaced over the next 30 years at a cost of £15 billion, but what he less loudly trumpeted was that this replacement would be provided by the Americans.
The reality is that Britain doesn’t have an independent nuclear deterrent, whatever Labour and the Tories tell you. Britain’s nuclear bombs are based on US designs, depend on US components, and will shortly be built and serviced in a mostly-US-owned factory. They are carried by US missiles which require US servicing to keep working.
The British people have been sold the lie of the “independent British nuclear deterrent” by Tory and Labour Governments alike for the past forty years.
British scientists under the leadership of Sir William Penney built Britain an independent nuclear bomb in the 1950s. The Americans used British scientists and engineers to help build their Bomb which ended World War Two but then abruptly withdrew all co-operation after 1945. We also designed and built an independent British Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile, the Blue Streak, also in the 1950’s.
Once Washington saw that Britain could go, and had gone it alone, they bullied the weak Tory Government of Harold Macmillan into compliance. Under the terms of the 1958 Anglo-American Nuclear Co-operation Agreement, Macmillan agreed to scrap Britain’s H-bomb, destroy the blueprints, and replace it with the US Mark 28 device, from which the current ‘British. warhead is derived. The Tories also scrapped Blue Streak and replaced it, and subsequently the independent British V-Bomber force, with US Polaris and later Trident missiles.
Since this Tory betrayal, endorsed by every Labour and Conservative Government since, Britain has not had an independent deterrent. The assertion by successive Governments that we do, has been a deliberate lie.
A British National Party Government would bring the defence of Britain back under British control. We would invest in the expertise of British engineers and scientists and provide for them the facilities so that they can do what they did back in the 1950s and build our own nuclear deterrent. Britain still has the equipment and the raw materials to do it as we still have the capability to build the missiles needed to deliver them.
