Cleaning up contamination from Britain's nuclear weapons programme will cost the taxpayer £10billion - almost half the Ministry of Defence's annual budget- according to an investigation by the MoD itself.

Officials ordered to tot up the MoD's assets and liabilities have been shocked by the sum, which includes the cost of decommissioning old nuclear weapons and submarines. The amount is far greater than any previous MoD estimate.

The value of the MoD's entire assets- ships, tanks, weapons, land, buildings and equipment- is only put at about £95billion.

In a briefing to industrialists, Colin Balmer, the MoD's director of finance, gave the figure, adding: "We found that the value of our assets was rather less than we had expected and the amounts of our liabilities, such as the nuclear legacy, rather more."

A total of £10billion will have to be spent over a period of years to make safe old nuclear submarines, now mothballed in dock at Rosyth, Scotland, & Plymouth. The cost of decommissioning nuclear warheads from out-of-service weapons such as the RAF's free-fall WE-177 bombs and, eventually, Trident, is also included.

All Britain's submarines are powered by nuclear reactors. At least 10 are currently awaiting disposal- and the Government's radioactive waste management committee estimates that up to 25 will need to be disposed of by 2020.

Hundreds of tons of waste from nuclear weapons and from the nuclear research and manufacturing plant at Aldermaston will also need to be safely dispensed with. Britain's nuclear weapons programme has been running for more than 40 years.

The high-level nuclear materials involved will remain dangerous for centuries and there is as yet no consensus on how to deal with them.

Fierce opposition always arises whenever the Government proposes a new waste disposal site.

Plans for a giant deep-level depository at Sellafield, Cumbria, were postponed for at least 15 years in 1996 by the then Defence Secretary Michael Portillo.

Recently, a report from the House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology said that Britain would soon run out of space for its nuclear waste.

William Peden, a spokesman for CND, said that the £10 billion figure might even be an underestimate. "This has to be taken as an initial figure, not the true cost" he said.

"Britain has hundreds of tonnes of nuclear waste that no one knows what to do with and nothing short of a crystal ball can provide us with a final figure."

The estimate is part of a Treasury-sponsored initiative which requires all government departments to establish their exact assets and liabilities.

The MoD has recruited an extra 100 accountants and discovered that it had thousands of pounds worth of assets that it never knew existed, including three obsolete rifles for every soldier, sailor and airman.

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