A British nuclear missile test fails again

The British government confirmed on Wednesday that the test launch of an unarmed Trident missile from a Royal Navy submarine had failed last month, raising questions about the state of Britain's nuclear deterrent capability.

It was the second consecutive failure of such a launch, almost eight years after another Trident flew off course at sea, an incident that sparked criticism at the time over the government's failure to make it public.

Once again, the failed launch was reported for the first time, not by the Ministry of Defense, but by a London tabloid. The sun, who said the rocket's boosters failed and it landed in the water not far from the submarine, HMS Vanguard, which had just come off a seven-year refurbishment.

British Defense Secretary Grant Shapps and the most senior officer in the Royal Navy were both aboard the Vanguard for the Jan. 30 test. In a written statement to the House of Commons, Mr Shapps said: “An anomaly occurred” during the test launch, but that it was “event specific”.

“There are no implications for the reliability of the wider Trident missile systems and stockpiles,” Mr Shapps wrote. “Nor are there any implications for our ability to fire our nuclear weapons should the circumstances arise where we need to do so.”

The British Navy has suffered a series of problems with its fleet in recent months. One of its flagship aircraft carriers, the H.MS. Queen Elizabeth withdrew from her deployment to a NATO exercise off the coast of Norway earlier this month due to a problem with one of the propeller shafts.

Its sister ship, HMS Prince of Wales, took its place in the exercise, but its deployment was also briefly postponed before departing on 12 February. In 2022, the Prince of Wales broke down off the Isle of Wight, also due to a propeller problem, and required nine months of repairs.

Military analysts said it was difficult to say exactly what went wrong on the latest launch. Britain has four nuclear-powered submarines equipped with the Trident missile system, manufactured by the American firm Lockheed Martin. The missile was not armed with a nuclear warhead during the test.

“Whether the problem can be fixed, or even what it is, is not clear,” said Malcolm Chalmers, deputy director general of the Royal United Services Institute, a think tank in London. “But the Vanguard is getting very old, its intended lifespan is over, and it has just completed a seven-year repair and refueling.”

Mr Chalmers criticized the government's handling of the incident, noting that it had announced the test in advance but then failed to report that it had failed.

“Sooner or later, someone would notice this,” he said, “and they should have come out for the story.”

The last failed launch, in June 2016, became a political headache for Prime Minister Theresa May's government when news of it first leaked several months later. Mrs May was initially unwilling to acknowledge the incident, even as she appealed to Parliament to invest in new Trident-armed submarines.

As concerns grow about an aggressive Russia under President Vladimir Putin, British military preparedness has once again become a political hot potato. The opposition Labor party has accused successive Conservative-led governments of bleeding the armed forces through years of budget cuts.

“Over the past thirteen years our military has been reduced to its smallest size since the time of Napoleon,” John Healey, Labour's defense policy officer, and the party's chief foreign policy official, David Lammy, wrote last fall in a column. in the Daily Telegraph.