COMMENT

SIR JEREMY BLACKHAM THE furore over the malfunction of a Trident missile during a test shows yet again the folly of politicians trying to suppress “bad news”.

It has no bearing on the case for Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent. It simply tells us that one missile out of several hundred failed to perform correctly.

But the chances of the details being leaked were always extremely high, and hiding the problem has allowed opponents of Trident to put a weight on the incident and impugn the Government’s motives in a way that the facts do not support.

The purpose of a trial is to test the entire system – decision making, communications, firing drills and the missile – to find out what does and does not work and fix it.

Work will have started immediately to find out what caused this problem and how to rectify it.

There have been about 150 successful firings – a record of reliability unmatched by most other technology.

Moreover, the test missile did not have a nuclear warhead but a “dummy” warhead of similar ballistic characteristics. Test missiles have a self-destruct facility so can be destroyed in flight.

The Americans use these same well-tested missiles… and ours are fitted with nuclear warheads built in England.

The incident tells us nothing about the effectiveness of the whole deterrent system or the UK’s submarines, except that we have a method of uncovering rare problems safely.

The whole incident demonstrates again the folly of trying to bury bad news. It could have made securing the replacement deterrent more difficult.

It is rather depressing our political leaders never seem to be able to learn this important lesson.

Sir Jeremy is editor of The Naval Review and former Deputy Commander-in-Chief Fleet.