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SPECIAL BULLETIN
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Outrageous behaviour on Dave Wright's part. The Charterhouse conference is not his personal property. However, if he quickly reflects on the possible consequences and withdraws his veto this matter can end here. Those readers wishing to register their disapproval with Dave Wright directly can find him here: brohp2@aol.com Those readers who want to know more can read on. Dave Wright was an academic historian at Manchester University specialising in aviation related issues. He is the organiser of an annual conference on nuclear history at Charterhouse School. His wife is treasurer. Around 2000 he, his wife (an academic at John Moores University, Liverpool), and one other, a schoolteacher presented a paper on an early nuclear weapon at a conference in Stockholm. It wasn't based on proper research because little was known or declassified then. So instead he speculated, speculated, and built further on that speculation. Then their speculations and assumptions were presented as fact. One speculation presented as fact was that the Interim Megaton Weapon was grotesquely unsafe because it contained enough fissile material to be supercritical at everyday temperatures and pressures. That information appears nowhere in declassified literature even today, ten years later. We know it was untrue then because declassifications unearthed recently by Dr Richard Moore of Southampton University shows conclusively that the Interim Megaton Weapon contained less fissile material than the Little Boy weapon used at Hiroshima; and had less than a supercritical amount of HEU. But in truth Wright's Stockholm paper read as a political polemic, masquerading as an academic paper. In seven short pages there were over ten denuciations of various UK governments for their nuclear weapons 'vanity project'. A copy still exists. There is a place for politics and polemic. However it doesn't mix well with supposedly impartial academic research. The Stockholm conference was attended mainly by European engineers in the business of nuclear waste disposal from civil power projects. How they must have sniggered at an English historian using their conference to make juvenile propaganda about allegedly unsafe British nuclear weapons and his own government. No mention of course about Uncle Sam's or Ivan's weapons. I said that the paper was dishonest and wrote a detailed rebuttal of it for Wright's university. They held an inquiry. More recently the schoolteacher wrote online on WikiLeaks to say he had not contributed to that paper; that he was unaware that it was partly attributed to him, or that his name was printed on it. I say that the schoolteacher's identity was dishonestly used to give credibility to a paper that it did not deserve. Although the online statement by the schoolteacher wasn't known at the time of Manchester University's inquiry, which applied liberal amounts of whitewash. Although there were possibly words of advice about damage done to Manchester's reputation. But it was ten years ago for heaven's sake. Dave Wright needs to move on. Get a life. Do something useful. Instead he still bears a grudge. Urged by two other regular conference attendees to register I believed I should show willingness, although I didn't really want to make the effort to attend at Charterhouse. I'm over 70 now and my health is poor. It's an effort just to get to the end of the street; and to misquote Marx (Groucho), I don't really want to belong to a club (mainly of academics) that has tried to blackball me.
Back down? Quietly accept the blackball? |
So if there is collateral damage that's just tough!
English Heritage and other publicly-funded bodies are asked to withdraw all their people from the Charterhouse event until this blackballing issue is resolved, and the charitable tax status of the public school host is resolved.
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This website is intended to be a source of reliable material never before catalogued in one place. Almost all will be based on research in archived official documents now declassified after the end of the Cold War and assistance provided by other researchers, for who's help and encouragement I am grateful; especially Dr Richard Moore of the Mountbatten Centre for International Studies at the University of Southampton, Alex Wellerstein of the History of Science Department at Harvard University, and Chris Gibson. Without their generous help and encouragement, and the encouragement offered by Professor Jack Harris MBE, FRS, a former editor of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, this website would not exist. Thanks are also extended to the helpful staff at The National Archives, London; and for their permission to use my photographs of their copyright material. Thanks to their generosity, in most cases readers can see the original source material at footnote. Re-users should assiduously attribute the copyright of those documents to The National Archives. Published material on nuclear weapons has been bedevilled by secrecy, disinformation and in the absence of hard evidence, misplaced speculation. Material included here is supported by hard evidence from archived official sources. Material that cannot be backed by hard evidence will be identifiable as opinion or speculation. This site is not intended as an account of delivery systems, aircraft, missiles, submarines etc. Readers seeking that information should look elsewhere, although some nuclear weapons projects were so closely identified with specific delivery vehicles that they cannot properly be considered in isolation. There will be numerous entries for American weapons and projects, it being impossible to catalogue British projects without reference to the material and information provided to the British under the various Anglo-US treaties. After 1958 almost all British projects were influenced by these data-sharing agreements, and almost all British projects incorporated US technology to varying degrees. Many Royal Air Force aircraft were adapted to carry US-supplied and owned weapons, and the British Army in Germany was also equipped to use US-owned nuclear weapons supplied from NATO stocks. All will be included here. The format is alphabetical, an A-Z of projects. A chronological format results in a confusing jumble of entries that often overlap in time. An attempt at a timeline will possibly be added later. |
 WE.177A inert operational round at former AWRE test site, Orfordness. Photo: flicr Training rounds at IWM Duxford. Photo: Andy Leitch |
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