The British ships about to pick up a consignment of plutonium present one of the gravest of all threats to global security.
The world now faces two imminent nuclear threats. The first is the standoff between India and Pakistan, two nuclear powers vacillating on the brink of war. The second arises from a commercial deal between the United Kingdom and Japan.
At the end of this week, two British ships will pull into the port of Takahama, to collect enough plutonium to make 17 atomic bombs. While the transport of nuclear material within Japan has been halted during the World Cup, as there are not enough police to guarantee its safety, the power behind this shipment permits no such considerations. The plutonium will be transported 18,000 miles through some of the roughest and most dangerous seas on earth back to Britain, where it will be repacked and returned to Japan. Its security has been described by the definitive defence briefing Jane's Foreign Report as "totally inadequate". Britain and Japan are to launch, in the form of the two freighters carrying the material, a pair of floating dirty bombs, waiting for a detonator. And they are doing so for reasons which have nothing to do with economics and nothing to do with defence, but everything to do with a politics which is as mad and dangerous as their mission.
The world now faces two imminent nuclear threats. The first is the standoff between India and Pakistan, two nuclear powers vacillating on the brink of war. The second arises from a commercial deal between the United Kingdom and Japan.
At the end of this week, two British ships will pull into the port of Takahama, to collect enough plutonium to make 17 atomic bombs. While the transport of nuclear material within Japan has been halted during the World Cup, as there are not enough police to guarantee its safety, the power behind this shipment permits no such considerations. The plutonium will be transported 18,000 miles through some of the roughest and most dangerous seas on earth back to Britain, where it will be repacked and returned to Japan. Its security has been described by the definitive defence briefing Jane's Foreign Report as "totally inadequate". Britain and Japan are to launch, in the form of the two freighters carrying the material, a pair of floating dirty bombs, waiting for a detonator. And they are doing so for reasons which have nothing to do with economics and nothing to do with defence, but everything to do with a politics which is as mad and dangerous as their mission.