MoD spends day clearing up after failed Trident missile test

The Ministry of Defence in London has spent the day clearing up after news broke of an unarmed Trident test missile fired from HMS Vanguard submarine crashing into the sea just yards away from the launch point back in January.

In what is seen as a hugely embarrassing moment for the Ministry of Defence, the Sun broke the news last night that the test firing of a Trident II D5LE missile maintained by Lockheed Martin Space Systems “plopped” into the sea. This was the second failure in a row after the 2016 HMS Vengeance flop off the coast of Florida. 

Defence secretary Grant Shapps was aboard the ship to witness the failure and today has come out backing Trident to the hilt. The British public is safe and the British Armed Forces are not a laughing stock, he insists. He added that Trident remained “effective, dependable, and formidable.”

The disappointment follows a seven-year and £500m refit of the submarine from which it was launched. The last successful test was in 2012. 

On the grounds of national security, details of what went wrong are not made public. That line certainly got health secretary Victoria Atkins out of hot water when Kay Burley asked for specifics.

It is, of course, not Atkins’s brief, but the publication Navy Lookout described the technicalities as follows:

“The Sun report states that the first-stage boosters did not ignite and the missile fell back into the ocean. When launching Trident, the SSBN ‘hovers’ just below the surface, the tube is pressurised to equal the pressure of the sea above and then the hatch opens. The missile is expelled vertically from the boat by very high-pressure steam. It rises rapidly to the surface and into the air where the first-stage booster rocket ignites just above the water and propels the weapon up to speeds of Mach 18 and eventually beyond the earth’s atmosphere.”

To show everyone and Atkins up, the article adds: “This sequence may sound simple but is a highly complex engineering challenge, both in terms of the missile and submarine design.”

According to the same source, this was the 192nd test of the Trident system since its development in the 1990s. It has only failed on 10 occasions before.

The British nuclear deterrent is operationally independent, although the US and the UK share technology. The four boats are based at Faslane base on the Gare Loch near Helensburgh, with one boat on rotation always at sea.

The MoD is midway through a replacement of the boats, with four new Dreadnought class boats due to enter service from the early 2030s.

A week after the Munich Security Conference, this test failure is not a good look for Britain’s defence capabilities.

However, the former head of the navy, Lord West of Spithead, voiced confidence in the existing system. While conceding that the failed test was “embarrassing”, he said: “The UK Trident is still fully operational and devastatingly accurate.”

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