The United Kingdom carried 31 nuclear weapons to the Falklands war, according to declassified secret document

The United Kingdom deployed 31 nuclear weapons during the war against Argentina for the control of Falkland Islands in 1982, indicates a declassified government document accessed by the British investigative journalism website Declassified UK.

The text, collected in the National Archives, specifies for the first time the number of weapons, after the British Ministry of Defense already admitted in 2003 that its fleet in the South Atlantic carried nuclear weapons, the journalist Richard Norton explains on the web. Taylor, formerly of “The Guardian.”

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The article is published on the 189th anniversary of the British occupation of the Falkland Islands and before the next April 2 marks the 40th anniversary of the Argentine invasion to claim sovereignty, which led to the war that ended on June 14, 1982 with the defeat of the American country.

Declassified UK says that the deployment of weapons created tensions between the British Defense and Foreign Ministries, fearing that they would violate international non-proliferation treaties, and the former refused the Foreign Office’s request to land them at the British base on Ascension Island .

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Instead, the weapons were transferred to the larger ships, HMS Hermes and HMS Invincible, where Prince Andrew, son of Queen Elizabeth, served as a helicopter pilot. As of May 1982, the Invincible carried 12 nuclear weapons and Hermes 18, while the Royal Fleet auxiliary ship had one, according to the article.

According to the document collected by Declassified UK, the ships were at all times within the “total exclusion zone” imposed by Great Britain around the Falkland Islands, without the weapons entering other territorial waters.

However, as the author of the information points out, the official document does not specify whether some of these nuclear warheads were “inert” and were transported to check the wear they suffered and how they would function if their use were required.

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Deshawn