Britain's secret nuclear blueprint

The Sunday Times March 12, 2006

Two weeks ago a group of Britain’s brightest young physicists gathered at the US nuclear test site in the Nevada desert and headed for Control Point 1. There they waited for a test codenamed Operation Krakatoa to erupt.

A thousand feet beneath the desert scrub, components for a new British nuclear warhead were ready for detonation. Though it was not to be an earthquaking full nuclear blast — since Britain is a signatory to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty — the physicists were about to witness only the second “sub-critical” test Britain has conducted in nearly a decade.

The controlled detonation, measuring the effect of conventional explosives on a small piece of plutonium, was ostensibly to help ensure that the UK’s nuclear warheads, deployed on Trident submarines, remain effective. But that was only half the story.

As The Sunday Times reveals today, the data produced by the test were part of a much wider, secret research programme to build a new nuclear weapon that some experts say will breach the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty (NPT). <snip>

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-2081514,00.html

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Last year a former warhead designer from the Los Alamos laboratory revealed there was a serious flaw in the US W76 warhead, on which British warheads are based, that could prevent it exploding.

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It would be very good if none of the nuclear bombs in the world worked, provided that nobody knew until after governments tried to use them.

For a deterrent to work, isn't belief enough?