No plain sailing

Bruce Skivington is wrong when he says that Trident 
could be moved to Devonport almost immediately (Letters, 31 
October).

I have copies of the Ministry of Defence’s risk assessments for docking an armed Trident submarine at Faslane.

Scientists at Aldermaston have modelled an accident where the detonation of one missile leads to the explosion of all the missiles on a submarine and to the dispersal of the plutonium from all the nuclear warheads.

They ignored the risk of a nuclear yield but did consider the effects of alpha radiation. They calculated that the risk of an unacceptably high number of people being exposed to radiation would be within limits, but not by a large margin.

If the same calculations were carried out for Devonport then the results would be much different. There are only a few thousand people living within five miles of Faslane, but 250,000 within the same distance of 
Devonport.

The Plymouth site would 
almost certainly fail this risk 
assessment. The MoD would have to throw out its nuclear safety rule-book before it could operate Trident from the middle of a city.

John Ainslie

Scottish Campaign for 
Nuclear Disarmament

Southpark Avenue

Glasgow