Filed for The Guardian, 22 September 1991

A nuclear weapon was lost in the South Atlantic by a British ship in the Falklands war, according to a report by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The report, prepared for an inter-governmental conference on marine pollution in London in November, also says that the British Navy mislaid a Polaris missile in the sea off Florida in 1985. Altogether it lists 31 accidents at sea between 1950 and 1991 which have involved the loss of nuclear material, 15 of which are said to have been confirmed.

In addition to the two from Britain,18 were from America, nine from the Soviet Union, and one each from France and Japan. A total of about 50 nuclear weapons have been lost, as well as eight submarine reactors, four spacecraft with nuclear generators, two nuclear test devices and a whole cargo of uranium hexafluoride in the North Sea.

The total amount of radioactivity involved in the seven cases where information is provided is huge (over seven million gigabecquerels). The IAEA, a United Nations organisation which represents 112 countries, concludes that for the majority of cases it has not been possible to verify whether or not any radioactivity was released into the sea and calls on individual states to provide more information.

The report, a draft dated 23 July 1991, has been sent to the International Maritime Organisation in preparation for the next meeting of the London Dumping Convention. The convention’s member states had requested the IAEA to draw up an inventory of radioactive wastes entering the marine environment from all sources.

The agency says that a nuclear weapon went missing near the Falklands on 10 May 1982 when HMS Sheffield, a type 42 destroyer, sank after being holed by an Argentine missile. The Polaris missile is said to have been lost by the submarine HMS Resolution in the Atlantic ocean off Florida on 19 May 1985.

Although both incidents are listed as “unconfirmed”, a spokesman for the IAEA in Vienna insisted that the information had come from the British government. The Ministry of Defence yesterday was not offering any confirmations.

An MoD spokeswoman reiterated a 1982 ministerial statement in the wake of the HMS Sheffield sinking which stated that “there has never been any incident involving a British nuclear weapon leading to its loss or the dispersal of radioactive contamination.” She pointed out that in 1985 an unarmed Polaris missile had been successfully fired by HMS Resolution at the Cape Canaveral testing range off Florida. Dr Paul Rogers, a defence analyst at Bradford University, said that the IAEA report seemed to give the first official indication that nuclear weapons had been carried by British ships during the Falklands conflict. “What on earth were we doing taking nuclear weapons into a war zone against a non-nuclear country and then losing them?” he said.

Janet Convery, a nuclear campaigner with Greenpeace, described the revelations as alarming. “Once radioactivity has poisoned the sea it can enter the food chain and will remain active for at least a quarter of a million years,” she said.

Greenpeace is also claiming today that official Soviet estimates of the impact of a serious accident aboard a nuclear powered vessel are much worse than the British government’s published accident scenarios for the nuclear submarine bases at Faslane and Rosyth in Scotland.

A worst-case accident at the naval nuclear port of Murmansk on the Kola Peninsula would expose 26,000 people to harmful doses of radiation and create a radioactive cloud which could drift 1,000 kilometres, according to Soviet local authorities. The British government’s emergency plans for the Faslane nuclear submarine base on the Clyde only allows for a health hazard up to five kilometres downwind.