THE Ministry of Defence has refused to reveal official safety ratings for the Trident nuclear weapons system and nuclear-powered submarines on the Clyde, citing “national security”. The annual ratings, and the reports that justified them, were published for ten years by the MoD, uncovering a series of concerns about spending cutbacks, staff shortages and accidents. But now ministers have clamped down and decided that they can’t release any findings at all on security grounds.
Sunday Herald 15th July 2018 read more »
The Ministry of Defence has never been a beacon of transparency. So it was a pleasant surprise in 2010 when it was forced by a three-year freedom of information battle to release a raft of nuclear safety reports. For the first time the public had an insight into the staffing and technical issues that plagued Trident nuclear weapons and reactor-driven submarines. For the next few years the MoD kept publishing the reports by its internal watchdog, the Defence Nuclear Safety Regulator (DNSR) – and the media kept writing stories about them. It was as if an ancient beast was at last inching out of its secretive citadel, blinking in the daylight. But it was too good to last. Last November we revealed that the reports had gone back under wraps, apparently for national security reasons. Today we report that the MoD will not even tell us the headline summaries of the last three years’ reports. So has the DNSR given overall assurances that our nuclear weapons operations were safe, or not? We don’t know. The MoD won’t say. This is a surreal level of secrecy. It’s fundamentally undemocratic – and dangerous. It’s symptomatic of the way the MoD sees itself: a thing apart not subject to the checks and balances normal for other bodies.
Sunday Herald 15th July 2018 read more »
