Weapons of mass demonstration

Aldermaston is not something that belongs to the past – it produces Britain's weapons of mass destruction today, and will continue to do so into the future, unless we are effective in our opposition.

In 2002, the private consortium that manages AWE Aldermaston published a plan to redevelop and build new facilities at the site. The building work is now well advanced, and the developments are on the scale of Heathrow's Terminal Five.

They are estimated to cost in the region of £5 billion and they will also result in the employment of more than 1,000 additional staff. Recruitment has already begun. But what are these developments for? We believe that they are for the development and production of a new generation of nuclear weapons. It is just not credible that the scale of redevelopment is solely to preserve the existing capabilities of the establishment.

In December 2006, the Government's White Paper on Trident Replacement - which advocated replacing the submarines for Britain's nuclear weapons system – stated that a decision on the warheads had not yet been made, but would be made in the lifetime of the next Parliament. Either that's not true and they have already decided, or they are so certain of the outcome they have gone ahead and upgraded Aldermaston anyway.

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The equipment includes a new £20 million supercomputer, called Larch. This will give AWE one of the most powerful computer systems in Europe, possibly only exceeded by the supercomputers used in the US for their nuclear weapons development.

The computer simulations provided will be augmented by experimental data provided by other new facilities being built at the site. Crucial amongst these is the housing for the new Orion laser – a thousand times more powerful than the old laser. This will also be used to get a better understanding of the physics behind nuclear explosions and will aid the computer simulations that will be used in the design of the new warheads.

At the moment the government seems to be trying to ride two horses at once. Since Gordon Brown has been Prime Minister, there have been a number of high-level statements stressing the importance of steps towards disarmament by the nuclear-armed states. It has recognised the relationship between the failure to disarm and the increased likelihood of proliferation.

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