RRW to supersede Trident

While Prime Minister Blair insists that no decision has been reached over a replacement for the Trident ballistic missile system, it emerges that Britain has been secretly working with the U.S. on a replacement for over a year.

Blair's government has been pouring hundreds of millions of pounds into the Atomic Weapons Establishment near Aldermaston in Berkshire to develop a new generation weapons system to replace the Trident ballistic missiles.

Trident-armed submarines are the ultimate weapons of mass destruction and the most sophisticated nuclear weapons in the world. Superheated steam can eject a missile from a vertical launch tube, thrusting it at 2,750mph so that it reaches 18 miles above the Earth's surface within 30 seconds. Onboard computers and internal guidance systems can adjust the trajectory of the missile and aim it at a target. Each missile is armed with a 100-kilotonne Trident warhead whose radiation would kill nearly every person within a mile of the blast and 50% of people and most buildings between one and one-and-a-half miles.

Trident missiles do, however, contain some components, such as plastic seals, the plutonium trigger and the berrylium that surrounds it, which deteriorate with age. While the U.S. Navy is planning to extend the life of its Trident missiles to 2042, Britain's fleet of four trident submarines, each armed with 48 nuclear warheads, will come out of service in 2024.

Under the nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty Britain is committed to preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons and pursuing disarmament. The testing of nuclear weapons is also banned.

The British government will attempt to bypass international law by developing the so-called Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW), a Trident upgrade which will be powerful and flexible. The RRW will require less maintenance and can be manufactured quickly and easily on a production line. It will not require full-scale testing - the research facility developing the RRW has just invested £20m in a Cray XT3, one of the world's most powerful supercomputers, which will be used to model nuclear explosions.

Development of the RRW will contravene the Non-Proliferation Treaty and will encourage other states to develop nuclear weapons rather than act as a deterrent.