The Ministry of Defence is turning prevarication into an art form.

There are, it seems, few tricks, evasions and deceits that it won't deploy to try to avoid responsibility for cleaning up the radioactive mess it has made at Dalgety Bay in Fife.

As we reveal today, its monitoring of the contaminated foreshore in September missed more than 400 radioactive hotspots.

Like Admiral Nelson back in 1801, the MoD's modern-day commanders turned a blind eye in the hope that the problem would disappear.

MoD officials have also suggested that a decision to end monitoring could be kept quiet by the simple device of not telling the media. They have disputed evidence from the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (Sepa) that young children use the beach, with one MoD official telling a meeting in October that "a toddler would not be crawling about the bay".

At the same meeting, officials repeatedly refused to accept responsibility for paying for the clean-up.

One said: "The MoD needs to consider any cost benefit of any remediation. The cost-benefit analysis may suggest it is better to leave the beach closed."

The prevarication was continued by Conservative Defence Minister, Andrew Robathan, in response to a debate about Dalgety Bay initiated in the House of Commons last week by the former Labour prime minister and local MP, Gordon Brown. "We should not get this out of proportion," pleaded Robathan.

"The important thing is to know what the dangers are before getting into a great state about it. It is difficult to justify using taxpayers' money to remediate, while the current source, level of risk and remediation necessary remain unclear."

This is no more than stalling. The bay has got to be cleaned up, and the MoD must pay for it.

Whatever uncertainty there may be about precisely how that is to be done does not prevent ministers from making a commitment in principle to meet the cost.

It may be, as one former MoD radiation official has suggested this weekend that, given its track record, the MoD itself can no longer be trusted to carry out the work. It would be better, perhaps, if it funded Sepa to oversee the clean-up.

But if the MoD continues to prevaricate, things will get decidedly messy.

Sepa will begin the unprecedented legal process of formally declaring the area to be radioactively contaminated land.

That's a blight that no-one in Dalgety Bay wants, though it could force the MoD to act.

It would be much better, surely, to accept now the well-worn principle that the polluter pays, and for the MoD to cease its cavilling and agree to pay up.