Reporter's dream forced Britain to admit nuclear test

The British government was forced to admit it had sanctioned a nuclear weapons test in 1974 after a journalist dreamed one had taken place and wrote an article, newly released documents showed Friday.

Then prime minister Harold Wilson strived to keep secret the test in the Nevada desert in the United States that May, but his efforts were foiled by the unorthodox reporting methods of Daily Express journalist Chapman Pincher.

The newspaper's foreign editor, John Ellison, recounted Pincher's dream to senior Foreign Office official Crispin Tickell, who relayed the story in a memorandum to Wilson's Downing Street office.

"Mr Ellison said that, believe it or not, Mr Pincher's source was Mr Pincher himself," wrote Tickell, later Britain's ambassador to the United Nations.

"He had been on a fishing holiday in Scotland. One morning at breakfast he said that he had had a particularly vivid nightmare about a nuclear explosion which he was sure was British...

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