RNAD Coulport

RNAD Coulport is the Royal Navy's storage, maintenance and loading facility for the nuclear warheads of the United Kingdom's Trident programme. The depot stands on the eastern shore of Loch Long in Argyll, Scotland, near the village of Coulport, and forms part of HMNB Clyde, whose main submarine berths at Faslane lie on the opposite side of the Rosneath peninsula on the Gare Loch. It is the last establishment in Britain to retain the Royal Naval Armaments Depot designation.

The depot handles the warheads carried by the Royal Navy's Vanguard-class ballistic missile submarines. Weapons are embarked before patrol and removed on return to Faslane. Coulport does not service the Trident missiles themselves; these are drawn from a shared pool at the Trident Refit Facility, Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay, Georgia, under mingled-asset arrangements with the US Navy. The warheads are designed and manufactured by the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston, Berkshire, and are owned by the UK government; batches move between Aldermaston and Coulport several times a year by road convoy of Truck Cargo Heavy Duty carriers escorted by Ministry of Defence Police under a Chief Inspector, with crews of up to 50 including first aid, fire and radiological monitoring personnel.

The site covers 648 hectares and includes up to 16 reinforced concrete bunkers cut into the hillside. Two berths lie on the shoreline at the foot of the hill: the older Polaris Jetty, and the covered explosive handling jetty used for Trident warheads. The latter is a covered floating dry dock built at Hunterston in Ayrshire and moved to Coulport in 1993, one of the largest floating concrete structures in the world.

Coulport is owned by the Ministry of Defence and is one of four Atomic Weapons Establishment sites. Under a fifteen-year contract agreed in 2012, the ABL Alliance of AWE plc, Babcock and Lockheed Martin UK Strategic Systems manages and operates the depot, while Naval Base Commander Clyde retains overall control and responsibility for security and activities. Regulation falls to the Office for Nuclear Regulation and the Defence Nuclear Safety Regulator. Exercise Bowline is the annual test of emergency response arrangements for a nuclear weapon accident on the site.

The depot was built between 1963, when Faslane was selected as the Polaris base, and 1968, when the first Polaris patrol began. Safety rules required a separate berth at least 1,300 m from the main base, and operational requirements an hour's sailing time, conditions Coulport met. Planning for conversion to Trident began in 1982, the Trident Works Programme at Coulport and Faslane taking thirteen years at an estimated cost of about £1.9 billion at 1994 prices.