Most damaging of all, the Russian had a chain of agents inside the American atomic weapons development program, and another with access to almost every document of importance which passed between British and US governments in 1945, including private telegrams sent by Churchill and Presidents Roosevelt and Truman. ibid. p182
I don’t know anybody that I can think of who has contended that the Iraqis had nuclear weapons. (Iraq & Nuclear & Weapon) Donald Rumsfeld
And we believe he [Saddam Hussein] has in fact reconstituted nuclear weapons. Dick Cheney
Saddam Hussein already possesses two out of the three components needed to build a nuclear bomb. Colin Powell, address to United Nations
We are able to keep arms from him. His military forces have not been re-built. Condoleezza Rice, July 2001
We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud. Condoleezza Rice 8th September 2002
The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop Anthrax, and nerve gas and nuclear weapons for over a decade. George W Bush
The danger to our country is grave. The danger to our country is growing. The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons. The Iraqi regime is building the facilities necessary to make more biological and chemical weapons. And according to the British government, the Iraqi regime can launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as forty-five minutes after the orders were given. The regime has longstanding and continuing ties to terrorist organisations, and there are Al Qaeda terrorists inside Iraq. The regime is seeking a nuclear bomb. And with fissile material can build one within a year. George W Bush
‘Nobody thought we were going to come out of it alive. Most kids of my age didn’t expect to make it through the sixties.’ Steve Gibbons, The Ugly’s vocalist
Out there somewhere under the sea is a British submarine ready to launch an atomic strike. Continuously on patrol its job is to hide, to wait and to deter ... Four new Trident submarines that are expected to last a generation. A Very British Deterrent, BBC 2016
In 1957 Britain was one of only three nuclear powers in the world ... Macmillan had staked his reputation on Britain remaining a member of this elite club. ibid.
The Soviet Union has put a satellite into space and stunned the free world ... would bring the Cold War to boiling point. ibid.
As America’s crisis of confidence deepens, Macmillan reaches out to Eisenhower ... Macmillan travels to America for his summit with Eisenhower. ibid.
This top-secret project was called Blue Streak ... drained millions from the public purse, but it didn’t go as planned ... Blue Streak took half hour just to get its engine ready. ibid.
[Admiral] Burke has come up with a brilliant idea: put nuclear missiles into submarines ... called Polaris. ibid.
‘There was a great deal of anger in Scotland about this.’ ibid.
Harold Macmillan has turned the Clyde into a major Soviet target ... Skybolt has been promised to Macmillan by president Eisenhower. ibid.
Skybolt begins to cloud the relationship between their two countries. ibid.
Kennedy won’t hand this [Polaris] over without strings. ibid.
Nothing like the RAND of the early 1950s has existed before or since. It was the original think tank, a strange hybrid of which the unique mission was to apply rational analysis and the latest quantitative methods to the problem of how to use the terrifying new nuclear weapons to forestall war with Russia – or to win a war if deterrence failed. The people of RAND were to think the unthinkable, in Herman Khan’s famous phrase. Sylvia Nasar, A Beautiful Mind
Fuchs was a German émigré scientist who fled to Britain during the war and eventually wound up working with Von Neumann and Edward Teller at Los Alamos. A clandestine member of the British Communist Party, Fuchs subsequently confessed in January 1950 to passing atomic secrets to the Russians and was tried and convicted in London that February. ibid.
We got a phone people from some people in Cricklewood … British Nuclear Fuels are about to park their trains at the end of our gardens. Mark Thomas Comedy Product s3e5: Nuclear Trains, Channel 4 1999
Only 3 nuclear train derailments in 1998. ibid. protest banner
BNFL are in consortium with Lockheed Martin who are the weapons manufacturer who had a stall at the Labour Party conference for the first time this year … to try and bid for the contractor status for Aldermaston Atomic Weapons establishment … 1997 May they start doing managed discharges into the Aldermaston stream without approval … Mark Thomas Comedy Product s4e4: Aldermaston Awe, Channel 4 2000
No, rubbish! Maps of Britain? Yeah, come on! Mark Thomas: Secret Map of Britain, rozzer, Channel 4 2002
This is where Britain assembles its nuclear weapons. ibid.
‘Two to three thousand sites across the whole country that are not on the maps. There’s also many other sites that are not named.’ ibid.
The biggest American arms dump in Europe. ibid.
Here at Greenham in the ’50s occurred a ‘dispersal of uranium’. ibid.
In whose interest does secrecy work? ibid.
The age that we have just left – the 45 years since the end of the Second World War, was overshadowed by a strange partnership between Science and Fear. It began with a weapon created by scientists that threatened to destroy the world. But then a group of men who were convinced they could control the new danger began to gain influence in America. They would manipulate terror; to do so they would use the methods of science. Out of this would come a new age free from the chaos and uncertainties that had led to terrible wars in the past. Adam Curtis, Pandora’s Box II: To the Brink of Eternity, BBC 1992
Research and Development: RAND was funded by the air force, but staffed by young academics who believed the scientific method could help bring the Cold War back under America’s control. ibid.
They were no longer advisers to the military, they had become the masters. ibid.
In a controlled nuclear war populations of cities would become like pawns in a game of bargaining with nuclear weapons. So the strategists persuaded America’s leaders to take civil defense seriously. ibid.
In the end President Kennedy ignored any idea of controlled war. Instead, he told the Russians that if they launched one missile from Cuba, he would retaliate with America’s entire arsenal. To the strategists, this threat was irrational and humiliating. ibid.
The systems and numbers approach dominated the Pentagon. McNamara’s wizz-kids were convinced that the battle against the Viet-Cong could be managed in a rational, scientific way. ibid.
What they [the Strategists] left behind was MAD – mutual assured destruction – a giant system of nuclear defence with the two sides locked together, watching each other for the slightest move. But by the mid-’70s it seemed to have become an end in itself. ibid.
The system of deterrents had begun as rational. It now seemed a dangerous trap. ibid.
In 1945 in the aftermath of War scientists were heroes, particularly the physicists who had built the atomic bomb. ‘They are men,’ said Life magazine, ‘who wear the tunics of supermen and stand in the spotlight of a thousand suns’. Adam Curtis, Pandora’s Box VI: A is for Atom, BBC 1992
In the late ’40s there was a growing belief that scientific methods could be used to solve social problems. ibid.
They had found that the closer they peered into the structure of the world the more complex and unpredictable it became. ibid.
Politicians began to look to Atomic power as more than just cheap electricity. It became the way to a better world. ibid.
Then in October 1957 there was a major accident in Britain. The core of the [Calder Hall] reactor caught fire and spewed high levels of radioactivity across north-west England. The radioactivity released was far worse than the public was told. ibid.
The idyllic picture of a nuclear Eden masked a [Soviet] reality in which safety was barely even considered. The reactors were built at great speed to cut costs and to fulfil the Soviet plan. Some had no protective containment at all despite the higher pressures of steam. ibid.
‘Under [Leonid] Brezhnev things started to fall apart. Theft and negligence were rife. In the late seventies the Brezhnev era reached new heights of corruption just as we were building more atomic plants than ever. Our efforts to solve this problem internally failed completely so we went public.’ ibid. nuclear scientist
In America the enormous nuclear plants ordered in the sixties were nearing completion. The engineers in charge were beginning to discover the trap they had set themselves by failing to redesign the containment. If a molten core could not be contained then the emergency systems to prevent a meltdown would have to work whatever happened. ibid.