How did the Trident test fail and what did Theresa May know?
This article is more than 7 years old
Ewen MacAskill looks at the details of the test off Florida last year and the political implications of its failure
Ewen MacAskill Defence correspondent
Mon 23 Jan 2017 13.03 GMT
What is at issue?
In June last year, the Royal Navy test-fired an unarmed Trident II D5 ballistic missile. The weapon is 13 metres long, weighs 60 tonnes and can carry nuclear warheads with up to eight times the destructive capacity of the bombs that hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the second world war. The navy likes to boast about the missile’s accuracy: it can hit a target 4,000 nautical miles away and be accurate to within a few metres.
The problem is that when HMS Vengeance, one of the UK’s four nuclear submarines, test-fired the missile off the coast of Florida, the missile was not out by a few metres but several thousand miles. It had been targeted at the southern Atlantic off the coast of west Africa. Instead, it was heading in the opposite direction, over the US.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jan/23/how-did-the-trident-test-fail-and-what-did-theresa-may-know