Two submarines, both likely carrying nuclear missiles, apparently nudge each other in the ocean and some people aren’t happy about it. I’m not sure what the fuss is.
HMS Vanguard being tugged back to Falsane by random civilians.
The first thing I’m annoyed about is why are we even hearing about this? No one was harmed, there’s no nuclear fall out. The subs took a bit of damage, and so I suppose that they’ll need to find some reason as to why they crashed in order to get insurance, or at least explain why they need another few million to fix it up.
I expect that’s what France was doing when they said they “hit a container of some sort”. They didn’t want to tell us they hit another nuclear ship, we don’t need to know that. Then England come up and was like “oh, btw, it wasn’t a container, it was actually us that hit you!”
The reason I think it’s dumb to admit that two ships collided is that now even a stupid person can find out where our nuclear ships hang out. We know how long it took the ship to get back to Faslane, we know the speed the ship can travel. That doesn’t help us much, but add that to us knowing where the French base is, and how long it took them to get back to base, and it’s just simple trigonometry to find out where they were (and where they’re likely to end up again).
We shouldn’t even know what ocean their in, let alone their rough location to within a few miles.
Lib Dem defence spokesman Nick Harvey has called for an immediate internal inquiry with some of the conclusions made public.
“While the British nuclear fleet has a good safety record, if there were ever to be a bang it would be a mighty big one,” he said.
This man is an idiot.
What does he expect an inquiry to deliver? There was nothing either party could have done to avoid this, short of handing over their route plans. There’s no way to update procedures to take accidents like this into account. The submarines can’t, and shouldn’t, see each other. They’re both “cloaked” from each other. This is just a huge accident that’s not likely to happen again, ever.
But the designers of the ships probably realised that likelihood and put precautions to stop the nucs from detonating every time someone pokes them. They’re designed to be safe at a time of war, a friendly nudge is hardly going to be enough to cause colossal problems.