The Diplomat
Four Royal Navy ships, one of them a nuclear submarine, are concentrating these days at the British base in Gibraltar, a circumstance that is being widely reported in the media in the Gibraltar region.
The Mayor of Algeciras, José Ignacio Landaluce, who is also a PP senator, links the concentration of British ships in the colony with the negotiations underway between the European Commission and the United Kingdom on the future of Gibraltar after Brexit.
Landaluce regrets that the British government “is asserting its position of strength through the Royal Navy”.
Last Friday the HMS Audacious, a nuclear submarine, arrived at the Gibraltar base. The environmental organisation Verdemar warned about its presence, and it joins three other Royal Navy warships that arrived earlier: the HMS Trent, the HMS Forth and the HMS Scott.
Last Sunday, the Europa Sur newspaper published a report in which it underlined that the United Kingdom has reinforced Gibraltar as a base for nuclear submarines with a hundred or so port calls since 2000.
According to the newspaper, the naval base on the Rock has hosted these submersibles for more than 600 days, often for repairs for which it is not prepared. It also highlights the fact that Spain has still not drawn up a nuclear emergency plan for the region, 23 years after the arrival of the submarine HMS Tireless, which suffered a fault in the primary cooling circuit of its nuclear reactor and remained in Gibraltar for 353 days until it was repaired.
