Grand Harbour accident could have led to nuclear contamination

A Royal Navy ship's mishap in Grand Harbour in 1974 which could have triggered a nuclear spill is among the blunders admitted by the British Ministry of Defence after decades of secrecy.

The Maltese government was not informed.

The MoD was forced to publish a list of 20 accidents and mishaps with nuclear weapons which occurred between 1960 and 1991, following a verdict by the parliamentary ombudsman in the UK.

In that period nuclear weapons were dropped or fell on four occasions, and other munitions struck atomic weapons four times. Four of the incidents happened abroad - in Malta, near Hong Kong, and two in Germany, the Guardian newspaper reported.

The Malta incident took place in Grand Harbour in February 1974 when two Mk44 torpedoes which were being removed from a storage rack fell a few inches onto a nuclear WE177 weapon on board the battle-cruiser HMS Tiger.

The MoD said that only "superficial scratching" on the plastic protective strips on the edges of the weapon's rear tail fin were caused. A leaked version of the accident, seen by The Times yesterday, says that a torpedo blast could have detonated an explosive in the weapon, scattering radioactivity in the sea and land.

The Maltese government was not informed about the accident, according to the board of inquiry set up to investigate the incident.

An official inquiry had subsequently criticised crew training and that the torpedo handling equipment was incorrectly rigged. Modifications were made to the equipment as a result.

Sir Kevin Tebbit, the MoD's permanent secretary, has had to disclose the list following a six-year campaign by The Guardian.

The MoD initially blocked the request submitted in 1997, prompting the newspaper to lodge a complaint with the ombudsman.

The list shows that trucks carrying nuclear weapons on British roads overturned on two occasions, and cars crashed into two convoys.

One accident "hushed up" by the MoD was in 1960 in Lincolnshire when according to the MoD, "an RAF nuclear weapon load carrier, forming part of a convoy, experienced a brake failure on an incline and overturned".

In 1967, a Vulcan bomber carrying a nuclear weapon was struck by lightning at RAF Waddington, Lincolnshire.

In 1987 in Wiltshire a truck with two 950lb WE177 n-weapons skidded and rolled on to the side; a second truck also slid off the road. According to the MoD, only minor damage was reported.

In Germany in 1974 a WE177 was dropped while being loaded onto a plane at RAF Laarbruch, and in 1984 another WE177 was dropped at RAF Bruggen which reportedly caused base to shut for the period.

Since Britain started making nuclear weapons in the early 1950s, convoys have regularly transported missiles hundreds of miles on motorways and other roads from bases to the atomic weapons factories.

Frank Barnaby, a nuclear physicist, described the designs of Britain's early nuclear weapons, from the 1950s and 1960s, as unsafe and primitive, and that the MoD was lucky to have got away with not having more serious accidents, including nuclear explosions. The MoD insists the accidents never caused radiation leaks but Shaun Gregory, a Bradford University academic who has studied the dangers of nuclear accidents, said that the ministry's descriptions of the incidents had the "appearance of being a sanitised version" of events and did not ring true.

He believed that there was little chance of a nuclear detonation, but an accident could have caused a fire or explosion which could have showered radioactive debris around the immediate area.