UK to invest more on nuclear warheads

The British government has emerged as willing to spend £750 million on its nuclear weapons program while imposing strict budget cuts across departments especially defense staffing.

Secret documents from the Ministry of Defense show the government has allocated roughly a £750 million budget for building a new enriched uranium facility at the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) in Berkshire.

This comes as the Defense Minister has announced 1,100 navy staff will lose their jobs as part of the government’s spending cuts plan.

Based on the Enriched Uranium (EU) Capability Investment Appraisal section of a formerly confidential MoD report, British taxpayers will foot the bill for the government’s nuclear aspirations: replacing an enriched uranium facility – built in the 1950’s – with a new one, Project Pegasus.

The revelations that AWE is to funnel £747 million into the project has raised questions about the MoD’s real commitment to a spending cuts program based on the priorities that would not anger the public.

Liam Fox attacked the previous administrations for allowing MoD “to operate without controls on its spending” last week when he announced the Navy will lose 1,100 jobs.

However, under his own command, the MoD is injecting hundreds of millions of pounds into Britain’s nuclear program at a time the country has not even decided whether the Trident nuclear missile system should be replaced.

The Trident bill is estimated to run into tens of billions of pounds, yet with the replacement plan still undecided, the MoD is spending another £500m on Project Mensa at nearby AWE Burghfield to upgrade its warhead assembly facilities.

The AWE has recently become a spendthrift with taxpayer money with its total expenses hitting £2.6 billion between 2008 and 2011.

The British government is pursuing sweeping spending cuts to fill in its £156 billion deficit.

The revelations concerning the AWE secret projects show the veracity of Greenpeace activists’ estimates that the controversial Trident replacement plan can cost the taxpayers some 62 percent of the deficit figure.

The government claims the replacement will cost only £25 billion but when considering the costs of the missiles, warheads and infrastructure as well as those of decommissioning, one comes to appreciate the Greenpeace estimates of a £97 billion “cradle-to-grave” operating bill for the Trident project.