Vaults of enriched uranium and plutonium to make nuclear bombs are dotted about a secure site in Berkshire along with Anglo-Saxon burial mounds and a couple of lakes.

Surrounded by metal fences topped with barbed wire, much of the nuclear weapons facility at Aldermaston in Berkshire looks frozen in time from the 1950s rather than ready for war in the 21st century.

But a renewed focus on the importance of the UK’s nuclear deterrent means the government is giving much of its nuclear infrastructure a facelift as it races to build a new warhead by the 2030s when the old stock goes out of service.

Sky News was among a group of news organisations given rare access to the largest of Britain’s nuclear weapons locations run by AWE.

The acronym stands for Atomic Weapons Establishment – but a member of staff organising the visit told me that the public body, which is owned by the Ministry of Defence, no longer attributes the letters that make up its name to those words.

“We are just A, W, E,” she said.

She did not explain why.

Perhaps it is to avoid making AWE’s purpose so immediately obvious to anyone interested in applying for a job but not so keen on weapons of mass destruction.

For the scientists and engineers, working here though, there seems to be a sense of genuine purpose as they develop and ensure the viability and credibility of the warheads at the heart of the UK’s nuclear deterrent, this country’s ultimate security guarantee.

“It’s nice to wake up every day and work on something that actually matters,” said a 22-year-old apprentice called Chris.

Sky News was asked not to publish his surname for security reasons.

The workforce at AWE is expanding fast, with 1,500 new people joining over the past year.

The organisation has some 9,500 employees in total, including about 7,000 at Aldermaston, where the warhead is developed and its component parts are manufactured.

Designing and building a bomb is something the UK has not needed to do for decades – not since an international prohibition on testing nuclear weapons came into force in the 1990s.

It means the new warhead, called Astrea, will not be detonated for real unless it is used – an outcome that would only ever happen in the most extreme of circumstances as explained in a new podcast series by Sky News and Tortoise called The Wargame.

The last time, Britain test-fired a bomb was at a facility in Nevada in the US in 1991.

With that no longer an option, the scientists at AWE must rely on old data and new technology as they build the next generation of warhead.

This includes input from a supercomputer at the Aldermaston site that uses 17 megawatts of power and crunches four trillion calculations per second.

Another major help is a giant laser facility.

It is built in a hall, with two banks of long cylinders, lying horizontal and stacked one of top of the other running down the length of the room – these are part of the laser.

The beams are then zapped in a special, separate chamber, onto tiny samples of material to see how they react under the kind of extreme pressures and temperatures that would be caused in a nuclear explosion.

The heat is up to 10 million degrees – the same as the outer edge of the sun.

“You take all those beams at a billionth of a second, bring them altogether and heat a small target to those temperatures and pressures,” one scientist said, as he explained the process to John Healey, the defence secretary, who visited the site on Thursday.

Looking impressed, Mr Healey replied: “For a non-scientist that is hard to follow let alone comprehend.”

The Orion laser facility is the only one of its kind in the world, though the US – which has a uniquely close relationship with the UK over their nuclear weapons – has similar capabilities.

Maria Dawes, the director of science at AWE, said there is a sense of urgency at the organisation about the need to develop and then build the new bomb – which is a central part of the government’s new defence review published in early June.

“You’ve probably read the strategic defence review,” she said.

“There’s very much the rhetoric of this is a new era of threat and therefore it’s a new era for defence and AWE is absolutely at the heart of that and so a sense of urgency around: we need to step up and we need to make sure that we’ve got what our customer needs. Yes, there’s very much that sense here.”

It means an organisation that has for years been purely focused on ensuring the current stockpile of warheads is safe and works must shift to becoming more dynamic as it pursues a project that will be used to defend the UK long into the future.

In a sign of its importance, the government is spending £15bn over the next four years alone on the programme to build the new warheads.

Part of the investment is going into revamping Aldermaston.

Driving around the 700-acre site, which was once a Second World War airbase, many of the buildings were constructed into the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.

The construction of new science and research laboratories is taking place.

But bringing builders onto one of the UK’s most secure nuclear sites is not without risk.

Everyone involved must be a British national and armed police patrols are everywhere.

No one would say what will be different about the new bomb that is being developed here compared with the version that needs replacing.

One official simply said the incumbent stock has a finite design life and will need to be swapped out.

The family of a father shot dead in a suspected case of mistaken identity in north London have said he “deserves justice” as they appealed for information.

Mahad Abdi Mohamed, 27, died from a gunshot wound to the head in hospital after he was hit with bullets fired from a stolen Mitsubishi Outlander, which was later found burnt out.

Detectives believe those responsible for his murder had set out to hurt someone else in a “pre-meditated and targeted attack” in Waverley Road, Tottenham, at 8.45pm on Thursday 20 March.

Mr Abdi Mohamed’s younger sister, Amal Abdi Mohamed, 23, said he was a “loving father” to his five-year-old son, who “looked up to him like a superhero”, and was planning to get married in the summer.

“He was taken away from us through gun violence,” she said.

“A bullet didn’t just take his life, it tore through our family, through our heart, and it’s truly shocking, it’s devastating, and it’s so senseless, because this type of violence should never be normal.

“It should never be something a family ever has to expect, prepare for, or live with.”

Mr Abdi’s 26-year-old friend, with whom he had been breaking his Ramadan fast, was also shot in the leg and was treated in hospital for a wound police said was not life-changing.

The Metropolitan Police arrested four men on suspicion of murder, who have been released on bail pending further investigations.

Detectives are appealing for witnesses who saw a silver Mitsubishi Outlander in the area, which was found burnt out in Runcorn Close, the following morning.

“This tragic event and Mahad’s death, has had a profound impact on the community and all those who loved him. Someone out there knows what happened. And that person, or people, must come forward,” said Detective Chief Inspector Rebecca Woodsford.

“Regardless of how small you think your information is, please share it with us. It could be the missing link we need to secure justice for Mahad and his family.”

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‘To stay silent is to be complicit’

Many of Mr Abdi Mohamed’s family members were in tears as they visited the scene of his murder as part of the appeal for information.

“My sweet Mahad was the kind of person who could light up a room without even trying,” said his sister.

“His laugh was so loud, and it still echoes in our memories.”

Ms Abdi Mohamed said her brother “was funny, he was honest, and overall he was just a good man” but “wasn’t perfect”.

She said he had “made mistakes but turned his life around” working at Waterloo Station, and part-time at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium and Royal Ascot as a security guard.

“How do you look at a child who adored him day and night, and tell them that he’s gone and you don’t have the answers why? That boy will have to grow up with no dad,” she said.

“If you think you may know anything or have seen anything – you may think it doesn’t matter, but it might be the key to giving us an answer, and it might be the thing that finally lets our family take a breath.

“To stay silent is to be complicit.

“To stay silent is to let a grieving mother suffer in confusion. To stay silent is to let a little boy grow up not knowing what happened to his father.

“If you know something and you haven’t come forward, please think about that. Think about a family that cannot begin to heal because the truth is still hiding in the shadows. My brother deserves better. He deserves justice.”

Sir Alan Bates has called for those responsible for the wrongful convictions of sub postmasters in the Capture IT scandal to be “brought to account”.

It comes after Sky News unearthed a report showing Post Office lawyers knew of faults in the software nearly three decades ago.

The documents, found in a garage by a retired computer expert, describe the Capture system as “an accident waiting to happen”.

Sir Alan said the Sky News investigation showed “yet another failure of government oversight; another failure of the Post Office board to ensure [the] Post Office recruited senior people competent of bringing in IT systems” and management that was “out of touch with what was going on within its organisation”.

The unearthed Capture report was commissioned by the defence team for sub postmistress Patricia Owen and served on the Post Office in 1998 at her trial.

It described the software as “quite capable of producing absurd gibberish” and concluded “reasonable doubt” existed as to “whether any criminal offence” had taken place.

Ms Owen was found guilty of stealing from her branch and given a suspended prison sentence.

She died in 2003 and her family had always believed the computer expert, who was due to give evidence on the report, “never turned up”.

Adrian Montagu reached out after seeing a Sky News report earlier this year and said he was actually stood down by the defending barrister with “no reason given”.

The barrister said he had no recollection of the case.

Victims and their lawyers hope the newly found “damning” expert report, which may never have been seen by a jury, could help overturn Capture convictions.

Read more: Post Office scandal redress must not only be fair – it must be fast

‘These people have to be brought to account’

Sir Alan, the leading campaigner for victims of the Horizon Post Office scandal, said while “no programme is bug free, why [was the] Post Office allowed to transfer the financial risk from these bugs on to a third party ie the sub postmaster, and why did its lawyers continue with prosecutions seemingly knowing of these system bugs?”

He continued: “Whether it was incompetence or corporate malice, these people have to be brought to account for their actions, be it for Capture or Horizon.”

More than 100 victims have come forward

More than 100 victims, including those who were not convicted but who were affected by the faulty software, have so far come forward.

Capture was used in 2,500 branches between 1992 and 1999, just before Horizon was introduced – which saw hundreds wrongfully convicted.

The Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), the body responsible for investigating potential miscarriages of justice, is currently looking at a number of Capture convictions.

A CCRC spokesperson told Sky News: “We have received applications regarding 29 convictions which pre-date Horizon.
25 of these applications are being actively investigated by case review managers, and two more recent applications are in the preparatory stage and will be assigned to case review managers before the end of June.

“We have issued notices under s.17 of the Criminal Appeal Act 1995 to Post Office Ltd requiring them to produce all material relating to the applications received.

“To date, POL have provided some material in relation to 17 of the cases and confirmed that they hold no material in relation to another 5. The CCRC is awaiting a response from POL in relation to 6 cases.”

A spokesperson for the Department for Business and Trade said: “Postmasters negatively affected by Capture endured immeasurable suffering. We continue to listen to those who have been sharing their stories on the Capture system, and have taken their thoughts on board when designing the Capture Redress Scheme.”