The UK Ministry of Defence admitted for the first time on Friday that British ships carried nuclear weapons in the Falklands war.
The disclosure came as the British government was forced to concede -- after a long-running campaign by The Guardian daily -- that seven nuclear weapon containers were damaged during a series of wartime accidents.
But many of the details of these accidents are still being kept secret by the ministry.
It also refused to say whether any nuclear depth charges were on board the British warship HMS Sheffield, which was sunk during the war.
The ministry's admission confirms persistent rumors that the taskforce which recaptured the islands in 1982 was equipped with nuclear weapons.
The ministry insisted that there was never any intention to use the weapons during the war and that their presence did not break any disarmament treaties. But the admission has provoked concern from the Argentine government. The Argentine defense minister, Jose Pampuro, said he was worried in case the accidents had spread radioactivity and he wanted assurances from the ministry.
According to the limited information released by the ministry, the nuclear depth charges were already on board unnamed ships in the taskforce when it sailed to the South Atlantic at the outbreak of the war.
"A decision was taken to transfer them to other ships heading back home," a ministry spokesman said.
Seven containers were damaged "in some way" when they were transporting the weapons onto other ships.
The ministry claims that none of the actual weapons was damaged and that "in what was considered the worst case, a container sustained severe distortion to a door housing."
The ministry finally released information concerning the accidents after a six-year battle fought by The Guardian under the open-government code.
After the ministry had blocked a request for information, the parliamentary ombudsman criticized the ministry and ordered it to publish a list of 20 accidents and mishaps involving nuclear weapons between 1960 and 1991.
But despite the ombudsman's critical verdict this year, the ministry continued to conceal the Falklands accidents, and has only divulged their existence after further pressure from The Guardian.
Last night's admission by the ministry fails to clear up the most controversial allegation: that the nuclear weapons were sunk along with the HMS Sheffield after the ship was hit by an Exocet missile a month into the war. The crip-pled ship was towed for six days until it sank.
Faced with the ombudsman's refusal to support the ministry's policy of secrecy, the department yesterday opted for damage limitation, putting out a statement to all media in the traditional slot for unwelcome news: late on a Friday afternoon.
The ministry said the transfers of the WE177 depth charges took place at various times during April, May and June in 1982, "well away from other sea-going traffic, and the weapons were held in ships with the best-protected magazines before being returned to Britain."
The ministry insisted that the nuclear weapons never entered the territorial waters of the Falklands or any South American country.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack