Target: Lakenheath

From END Info 32 | DOWNLOAD

During the 1980s and the last great wave of anti-nuclear activity, there existed a real sense of individuals, towns and cities being a ‘target’. The deployment of US nuclear missiles across Europe and similar deployments by the USSR created a sense that the continent could become an actual nuclear battlefield. As Ken Coates of the Russell Foundation wrote at the time: “If the powers want to have a bit of a nuclear war, they will want to have it away from home.” We can see a similar process to one Coates described unfolding forty years later. The deployment of ‘useable’ and ‘steerable’ US nuclear bombs and the advanced fighter-bombers which carry them to the UK and elsewhere in Europe will, no doubt, be matched by similar deployments by Russia. The only conceivable use for such weapons would be in a Europe considered disposable by the ‘great powers’. A Europe where nuclear deployments and expansion render the continent a potential nuclear battlefield.

To illustrate the ways in which individuals and the villages, towns and cities in which they live are still a ‘target’ for such weapons or may become victims of a nuclear accident, we have used Alex Wallerstein’s ‘NUKEMAP’ (see nuclearsecrecy.com) to model the potential effect of a nuclear detonation at Lakenheath.

The model is for the ground detonation of just one B61-7, 340 kiloton, nuclear bomb. This bomb, currently in service, is approximately 23 times the power of the atomic bomb dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Lakenheath is in a rural area of England and, as such, does not have a large population density. In this particular version of the model, the wind takes radioactive fallout away from major population areas into the North Sea.

The ground detonation of one such bomb would result in the deaths of 7,290 people and injury to more ten thousand more. Most of the immediate deaths would take place within the blast area. This is the closest model to an accident resulting in the detonation of a nuclear bomb similar to those that look set to return to Lakenheath. By way of comparison, if the same weapon was detonated under the same conditions in Nottingham (UK), where END Info is published, the fatalities would total 136,200 and injuries 164,250.

Whatever the model predicts, it seems true to state that Lakenheath will become a nuclear target at the time it becomes a nuclear storage facility and home to nuclear-capable US aircraft. Has anyone asked the people who live in that area what they think about this prospect? It seems doubtful, in the same way that no British parliamentarian, let alone citizen, has been consulted on the matter.