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A Royal Naval Armament Depot (RNAD) is an armament depot (or a group of depots) dedicated to supplying the Royal Navy (as well as, at various times, the Royal Air Force, the British Army, and foreign and Commonwealth forces). They were sister depots of Royal Naval Cordite Factories, Royal Naval Torpedo and Royal Naval Mine Depots.[citation needed] The only current RNAD is RNAD Coulport, which is the UK Strategic Weapon Facility for the nuclear-armed Trident Missile System, with many others being retained as tri-service 'Defence Munitions' sites.
Historically, several of these depots played a key role in Britain's military history. In the early modern period, Britain's national defences were developed along different lines than those that emerged on the continent of Europe. Rather than focusing on having a large army and heavily fortified cities, England (and then Great Britain) built up its navy. In this period, Britain's principal ordnance stores were planned with ease of access for the Navy in mind.[1] Whereas on the continent, guns and gunpowder were kept in fortified strongholds where they were accessible to the field armies and garrisons based there, in Britain they were stored as close as possible to the Royal Navy Dockyards, to facilitate the transfer of armaments between the depots and warships, but not too close to minimise the risk of any accident or explosion in the depot causing damage to warships.