HMS Vanguard hovered under the surface of the Atlantic as it prepared to launch a Trident missile from a Royal Navy boat for the first time in nearly a decade.
After performing all the necessary checks, Commander Ben Smith, the commanding officer of the boat, one of Britain’s four nuclear-armed submarines, told his crew: “Missiles for strategic launch.” It was time for the weapons engineer officer, normally a lieutenant commander, to press the red trigger, modelled on a Colt 45 Peacemaker handgun.
In the event of war, the boat would have been carrying up to eight Trident missiles armed with nuclear warheads capable of killing hundreds of thousands of people. However, this was a test and the missile was fitted with dummy warheads. Grant Shapps, the defence secretary, and Admiral Sir Ben Key, the first sea lord, watched from the boat in daylight hours as the missile was propelled vertically into the air by compressed gas in the launch tube. James Cartlidge, the minister for defence procurement, was also present.
However, much to the dismay of those onboard, the first stage boosters did not ignite and rather than soar beyond the earth’s atmosphere at speeds of up to Mach 18 (about 13,300mph), the 58-ton missile crashed into the Atlantic ocean and sank, just yards away from the boat itself.
A mission to recover the missile, with its highly classified technology, was swiftly under way with experts deployed to retrieve it from the seabed at Port Canaveral, Florida.
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It was the second failed test since 2016, when a Trident fired from HMS Vengeance veered off course and self-destructed in what sources said was a separate issue.
Shapps spent 17 hours on the boat before heading back to the UK, where details of the failed test remained secret for several weeks, until Tuesday night.
The Ministry of Defence blamed the incident, which took place on January 30, on an unexpected “anomaly” and insisted it would not have happened in a “real-world situation”, adding that there was no need to do another £17 million test to prove that fact.
Tobias Ellwood, a former defence minister, said the missile had failed to reach its target because of the test equipment strapped to it. “I’ve done some investigations here. I understand it was some equipment that was actually attached to the missile itself that prevented the firing of the rocket system after the missile had left the submarine,” he told GB News.
He said that the protocols all went according to plan but then the missile did not fire because of testing equipment. “Now of course were this to be fired in anger you wouldn’t have that testing equipment strapped on to the missile itself and therefore, yes, of course, this is embarrassing. We don’t like to see this happen,” he said, adding there must have been a fault with the equipment that was designed to monitor the testing that took place.
Military chiefs and ministers had expected the launch to be successful. The MoD said the reasons for the “anomaly” were classified.
However, a defence source said the point of the nuclear deterrent was that it was designed to deter countries such as Russia, suggesting the test left that in doubt. “If I was defence secretary I would insist on another test fire. It has to show it would deter. It costs more to let the Russians think we have a deterrent that doesn’t work,” they said.
One former senior RAF commander suggested it was time to consider bringing back an additional method of deploying nuclear weapons, such as using aircraft to deliver them.
The test, known as a demonstration and shakedown operation, is normally conducted after a period of refit or refuelling of the submarine’s reactor. In this case, HMS Vanguard only recently came out of a seven-and-a-half-year refit.
Matthew Savill, director of military sciences at the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi), said that overall Trident had a “good record”. The US, which has the same system, announced there had been 191 successful test firings since 1989 and “single figure” number of failures. He said this compared with a reported 50 per cent failure rate for the Russian Bulava missile recently accepted into service. A US submarine successfully fired a Trident missile as recently as October.
In previous years, Russia sent an intelligence gathering ship to monitor such launches, although it is unclear whether this happened last month. Savill said that nuclear powers monitored each others’ tests closely, and the “demonstration of a credible, ie functioning, capability is an important part of deterrence”.
“The fact that it didn’t go as intended in this case is embarrassing for the UK, following the previous failure, but unlikely to be a surprise to Russia or China, and on its own unlikely to radically change how they think about Trident’s capabilities,” he said.
Nicholas Drummond, a defence industry analyst, said any failure did not reflect badly on the underlying reliability of Trident. “It is by far the most capable system in use with any nuclear power,” he said.
A senior Whitehall source said that if the missiles were used in anger, the commanding officer would be asked to fire many weapons, and that there was “literally nothing to see”. “Vanguard is back and ready to report for duty,” the source said.
Yet Tom Sharpe, a former commander of a navy warship, said that the problem with the missile contributed to a wider picture of a British military that had problems with its ships, submarines and aircraft and that President Putin would view the UK as “soft around the edges”.
“He won’t care that 6 per cent of every Trident missile fired at him doesn’t work, that’s still quite a lot of explosions, but what he will notice is the UK has boats that are going brown as they are having to stay out on patrol for so long and now they can’t fire.”
