Good thing you took such good care of the Tigs2. Weren't
at Bruggen were you....
.....Newly declassified documents obtained by New Scientist magazine detail the incidents in which the weapons were dropped or damaged while they were being moved.
The first accident happened on May 2, 1984, at the RAF base at Brüggen, Germany. A nuclear warhead was damaged in transit when its container slid off a wet trailer as it cornered. The warhead, still in its container, rolled on to the tarmac and was dented.
Brüggen base was shut down while the bomb was partially dismantled and scientists were flown from Britain to X-ray the warhead. It was eventually taken back to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermas-ton, Berkshire, to be decommissioned.
An MoD board of inquiry at the time concluded that the accident was caused by the “wrongful act” of failing to attach the bomb container to the trailer. It recommended that six ser-vicemen be disciplined.
The documents, obtained under freedom of information law, show that a regulation requiring bomb containers to be secured when being moved had been routinely ignored since October 1981.
Brüggen’s commander at the time, whose name has been removed from the released report, admitted that the breach had become almost a standard operating procedure, despite being an “outrageously high-risk practice”.