It's like an executive team discussing whether to adopt a mobile-first strategy and then someone blurts 'but Galaxy 7 phones caught fire!'.
It's more like an executive team discussing whether or not to equip the entire company with Galaxy Note 7 phones, and the CEO not mentioning the fires.
Only if your expectation is that missiles work 100% of the time - which nobody really expects an individual component of any weapons system to work 100% of the time and is explicitly allowed for in the way nuclear weapons are targeted.
I don't expect anything to work 100% of the time. I do expect a missile to fail in a way that wouldn't mean accidentally obliterating tens of thousands of people in the wrong country though.
I would also expect a politician to mention that failure mode is a possibility when politicians are considering spending £30b on renewing it.
Personally I'm actually against the UK having nuclear weapons - but I can't get too excited about this particular incident.
Missiles will go wrong, Trident actually has a fairly reasonable level of success and probably is far more reliable than equivalent weapons from other countries.
It's a political mess not a military/technical one.
"probably" isn't a good enough standard when the weapon system can end hundreds of thousands of lives and is paid for by the taxpayer. And really it's the second thing that people are upset about. If renewing Trident cost a few hundreds of millions say, it'd likely be a non-issue. But it doesn't, so it isn't. That it might be unsafe is worth investigating given what's on the line.
Is there any evidence whatsoever that the missile could fail in a way that would mean "obliterating tens of thousands of people in the wrong country"? SSBNs carry more than one missile for a reason - currently the UK sails with up to 8 missiles and 40 warheads, not every one needs to work perfectly.
It's also worth pointing out that if the UK ever needed to use Trident then the resultant nuclear fallout would probably cause that anyway.
> Is there any evidence whatsoever that the missile could fail in a way that would mean "obliterating tens of thousands of people in the wrong country"?
Yes, in the "test" last year (that is, the missile luckily didn't carry the real nuclear bomb) the missile was launched to arrive around the coast of Africa but it flew toward Florida! There's no more obvious miss than that.
That's the very "Trident "accident" which May did not disclose to Parliament" from the top post of this thread.
And the reason we should really press all the politicians for the reduction of nuclear weapons. It's not the question of if but when and what the consequences will be of the "accidental" detonations.
The best protection is to have at least a very limited number of weapons. The balance of power can be held even with a little of them.
If you hear anything else, it's from those that don't want the balance but to "win."
I think that's an argument for replacement, rather than continuing with what we have at the moment? If the failure rate becomes too high they may need replacement.
It's just the submarines that are being replaced - not the missiles. The UK draws Trident missiles from a pool owned by the US and missiles are picked at random for use in UK boats.
If the missles don't work I would argue that is pertinent information! Its all well and good discussing a strategy but if its based on a range of options where some are proven to work and some are apparently not working but its being covered up so they appear to work its subverted the entire process of oversight of government.
The question is, whether they were covering it up a real problem there, or they just wanted to avoid some idiot higher-up completely overblowing the importance of a single incident. I can somewhat understand their thinking if the latter was the case, given that overblowing stuff way beyond their importance is what politicians do as a part of their jobs.
Exactly - the point of a nuclear deterrant is to be credible, but never used. In a situation you need to launch, whether all the missiles work properly is irrelevant - you just need the majority of them to be assured to.
It's like an executive team discussing whether to adopt a mobile-first strategy and then someone blurts 'but Galaxy 7 phones caught fire!'.