Weapons of mass destruction get five times as much public research cash in the UK as renewable energy. Time for a rethink, says Stuart Parkinson

The scale of a nation's public spending on different areas of research and development can be very revealing. For example, what sort of a nation would spend five times as much on developing weapons of mass destruction – including delivery systems – than on the R&D for renewable energy that is so central to tackling climate change? Figures just published reveal one such nation to be the UK.

Using data from freedom of information requests, campaign group Scientists for Global Responsibility (SGR), of which I am executive director, has pieced together recent R&D spending by the UK government on a series of major weapons systems and compared them with public R&D spending on measures to tackle major drivers of armed conflict, such as resource depletion, social and economic injustice, and climate change. This is the first time such an analysis has been carried out – for the UK or indeed anywhere else. What we have uncovered is deeply disturbing.

During the three financial years spanning 2008 to 2011, annual R&D spending on all aspects of UK nuclear weapons systems was over £320 million per year. This included: over £100m a year on warheads; over £120m a year on early development work for new submarines planned to carry the nuclear-armed Trident missiles; and over £90m a year on R&D for new nuclear reactors to propel those submarines.

Only about £12m a year of the total was focused on nuclear disarmament. Since the end of this period, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has moved on to the next stage of developing these new submarines, so more recent spending, which is not yet publicly available, is likely to have risen significantly.

According to Stuart Parkinson - executive director of the UK campaign group Scientists for Global Responsibility in a New Scientist report.

Full story Nukes over wind turbines? UK R&D policies are warped