IT MIGHT come as a surprise to know that nuclear weapons can be dropped by accident and nobody concerned seems overly worried. But an apparently bland admission that weapons were dropped at RAF bases during the 1950s has been made by the British Ministry of Defence (MoD) in response to a flurry of claims of cover ups of "nuclear incidents" over the past 40 years.
Apparently official information leaked to British newspapers claims to expose years of "incompetence and stupidity" and possible nuclear accidents.
Despite the ending of the Cold War there are still reasons why the truth about nuclear incidents needs to be known - and perhaps more importantly why these incidents have been denied so comprehensively by the US and British governments since the 1950s.
The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), has uncovered what it claims is documentary history of dropped and damaged nuclear weapons at the US air force base at Lakenheath in 1956 and at the British base at Wittering, Cambridgeshire, in 1959. Widespread contamination, fires, crashes are also alleged to have taken place.
Only one nuclear incident has ever been officially recognised by the British and US governments, a fire in a weapons store at Lakenheath in 1956. However CND is claiming to cave found documents at the Public Records Office which reveal four more serious incidents.
CND identified the first "serious incident" at Greenham Common air base in August 1957. At the time a Ministry of Defence report described the closure of the base, for three weeks, as the response to an outbreak of "Asian flu," so serious in fact that 83 US personnel were hospitalised in specially constructed barracks on the base.
The US commander on the base at the time, Col Arthur Cresswell, also became embroiled in the "official information" given to a local newspaper. The Newbry Weekly News was told on August 8th, 1957, that an "emergency" at the base had closed the base for three weeks, with the incidental cancellation of public open days. This was reportedly due to an "accidental spill of 2,000 gallons of fuel in the neighbourhood of six aircraft".
The documents at the Public Records Office do not bear this out. CND claims that this is because the official explanation of the incident bears no resemblance to what actually happened. The new documents CND has found describe an unreported incident at Greenham Common in 1957, in which a "loaded" US B-47 nuclear bomber caught fire and burnt with its weapons still on board.
British scientists at the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston did not believe the official account of the incident, according to the documents.
F.D. Morgan, a senior scientist at Aldermaston, wrote to Professor Sir William Penney, Britain's leading weapons expert in the 1950s, telling him his worries about the fire at Greenham Common. Dr Morgan had been investigating reports of a curiously high level of the atomic material uranium 235 outside the US Air Force base. The rate of the contamination was 100 times higher than Dr Morgan's research team bad been expecting.
In his letter Dr Morgan wrote: "I mentioned the high concentration of uranium 235 found around Greenham Common ... we expect to have a documented statement ready this month: the excess material is detectable to a distance of some eight miles." He was satisfied that "nuclear material" had been released at Greenham in 1957 and that the US air force had failed to inform the MoD.
Fast forward 29 years: last month, the MoD denied that it ever had any knowledge of nuclear incidents in the 1950s Or of an incident in 1961 when a nuclear weapon was dropped from its platform at a US base in Britain - sustaining damage described by the MoD as "scorching".
However, the pressure of documentary evidence, provided by CND this week, has led them to recent somewhat.
A ministry spokeswoman said this week that it was not yet clear whether any of the incidents took place or whether they involved nuclear weapons. The MoD also said that F.D. Morgan's research into the contamination surrounding Greenham Common in 1961 had been contradicted by studies in 1986 and 1994.
The statement poured scorn on the evidence of "nuclear accidents".
"There has never been an accident involving damage to a nuclear weapon in the UK. At the most we are talking about scratches. Somebody might have dropped one on the ground, and it is classified as an accident."
CND and the opposition parties are urging the MoD to "come clean" and simply tell the truth about Greenham Common and the other nuclear incidents.
"Each line of defence looks more implausible than the last. If the MoD is right in claiming there have only been minor incidents then they have nothing to lose by publishing the details, but they refuse to do that. The MoD should have learned . . . that a cover up becomes a bigger story in the end.