US NAVY submarines ''took advantage of the people of Scotland'' by
dumping radioactive material in the Holy Loch throughout the 1960s,
according to a former nuclear submarine commander.
In a television documentary to be shown on Channel Four tonight,
Captain James Bush, former commander of the Polaris ballistic-missile
submarine Robert E. Lee, admits he has been ashamed of his actions ever
since.
He says radioactive primary coolant was dumped in the loch by his
submarine and others, despite the fact that American submarines never
discharged coolant in US waters.
He adds: ''I think we should have done it in our own country and not
taken advantage of the Scots who were so wonderful, and here we were
discharging radioactivity into their harbour. I'm quite frankly
ashamed.''
Last night Labour MP George Foulkes said he planned to question
Defence Secretary George Younger and Scottish Secretary Malcolm Rifkind
on the affair in the Commons next week.
He said the revelations in the programme, which was made by Scottish
Television, were extremely worrying, particularly because the
information had come out so long after the event.
''This reinforces and confirms the fears we have had. We have been
getting particularly worried about the Clyde and the north part of the
Irish Sea because of nuclear discharges from the Sellafield plant and
from other sources,'' said the MP.
''This is the kind of thing we have been suspicious about and asked
questions about, and been given assurances on in the past.
''We need some kind of assurance that this kind of thing is not
continuing and building up contamination.''
However, the US Navy in London yesterday insisted that all of the
discharges referred to by Captain Bush were well within environmental
guidelines.
Lieutenant Michael Brady said: ''A record check has confirmed that the
radioactivity level of any and all releases referred to by Mr Bush would
have been well within national and international environmental
standards.''
He added that monitoring carried out in the Holy Loch and the
surrounding area by British scientists had shown radioactivity to be at
normal background levels.
Lt. Brady said every effort was made to minimise discharges, although
they might happen from time to time. He added: ''If there are discharges
they are still within national and international environmental
standards.''
There was no difference in the standards operated by the US Navy in
American or international waters.
The Ministry of Defence said it could not comment on the matter until
it had seen the programme.
A Royal Navy source confirmed that recent and past monitoring of the
waters around the nuclear submarine base in Faslane and elsewhere in the
Clyde area had not shown levels of radioactivity to be above normal,
although it was ''certainly not'' normal practice for nuclear-powered
subs to discharge radioactive coolant.
Bush is now working for the Centre For Defence Information, a pressure
group made up of former military men, based in Washington DC, and which
campaigns for an end to excessive secrecy in military matters.
The documentary also looks at the possibility of a nuclear accident at
Faslane, Rosyth or the Holy Loch bases, and a physicist interviewed for
the programme says an accident on a nuclear submarine would be of the
same scale as the Chernobyl disaster.
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