Trident missile test fails for a second time in a row | Hacker News Reader

Trident missile test fails for a second time in a row

bbc.co.uk

25 pointsshaftoe44456 comments

- So it comes back to Trident? - When it comes. - If it works. - If it wor... - What do you mean? - Normally, when new weapons are delivered, the warheads don't fit the ends of the rockets. That's what happened to Polaris. You know the sort of thing, wiring faults, microchip failure. We couldn't fire Polaris for some years. Cruise is probably the same. Trident might be too.

A timeless TV show.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKQlQlQ6_pk&t=70s

"Some of the technology is so new, we had no idea how much it would cost'

1988 'Mockumentary' - This is David Lander, contains some 'adult' content, well, adult for Britain in 1988...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_ucx1MTEO4&list=PL1B297DE78...

For context September that year; 'It marked the second time in the last three launchings that one of the $23.7 million missiles had to be destroyed by the safety officer.

The Navy reported about 20 minutes after the 1:45 P.M. launching that the Trident 2 had developed a problem in the second stage and that the range safety officer had sent a signal to blow up the missile to prevent it from veering into populated areas.'

"The Red Hot Nuclear Button" - https://youtu.be/P7YR6WICIAI

> "The issue that occurred during the test was specific to the event and would not have occurred during a live armed fire," the source said.

Right! That's what I keep telling our QA engineers, too.

This seems hugely destabilizing.

Is one of the US nuclear triad non-functional? — how would we know?

Edit:

Apparently the US can successfully launch them — and lets everyone know.

https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2023/09/u-s-navy-ssbn-u...

https://www.stratcom.mil/Media/News/News-Article-View/Articl...

The US tested successfully in October 2023, I think, and regularly before - this was the UK. The US has something like close to 200 successful launches so far on D5.

The UK and US missiles come from the same stockpile though - mind you it does rather remind me on Beatty at Jutland "There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today".

The US seems to get the missiles to work consistently. On the whole, the UK's nuclear deterrence is kind of "ish" anyway.

Yes - it does rather look like the problem is at the UK side of things.

Edit: regarding the "ish" comment one thing that makes the UK deterrent a bit more credible is that they don't have PALs - the crew have everything they need to launch should they decide to.

What I meant by "ish" is that having a few submarines isn't a particularly strong way of creating a nuclear deterrence against a large and capable adversary (there is a reason triads evolved) - not that the individual launch capability might not be there.

Well, in the case of the UK its going to be submarines or nothing....

Now you could question whether it is worth it - but that's a completely separate question.

That is what the UK has now.

If you mean by "worth it" is it sufficiently effective and robust, yes, that is indeed a question to ask.

The "Nuclear Triad" is more of a historic artifact; the result of several years of organizational rivalries that eventually ossified in this form, rather than something which was deliberately engineered to be this way from the start. The necessity of strategic nuclear bombers is particularly suspect, but for a time they were the only option to get the job done and for that reason SAC was very politically powerful. Furthermore, the deterence factor from land-based ICBMs is relatively weak (although this can be improved by making the missiles mobile, overbuilding silos, then playing a shell game with them.)

If what you need is a credible "we'll ruin you from beyond the grave" threat, then the UK's four SSBNs get that job done well enough (presuming the chance of the missiles working is high enough to not take the risk.)

The problem with only having a few SSBNs is that they need to be around for the "beyond the grave". The canonical example here is an adversary picking them up one by one (perhaps just rendering them inoperable) in a low level conflict, and at every stage, you get to a "use them or lose them" situation that would mean total destruction when there is a limited conflict. Large, dispersed forces are much tougher to sabotage that way and leave you with more options (if there are a lot of submarines that changes it a bit, too, but having a small fleet is not a great position to be in).

Simply not possible to fit a large, dispersed force on a small island. Hence the submarine approach.

Personally, I think that if we get into a war where SSBNs are being sunk then they have already failed.

Of course, we have to behave like they work and that we'd actually use them - which is why this test result is so damning for the UK.

A small SSBN fleet is less of a concern for the UK because their submarines are very good, and the only navy that might have better is one of their strategic allies. You've got to remember each nuclear power is playing a different game; the strategies they choose are informed by their national strengths and weaknesses and who their allies and adversaries are.

The quality of the submarines might not matter at all.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/26/us-planning-... Maybe related? From a month ago.

The thing is mission critical. The test is extremely expensive so test will not conducted regularly. The whole process is highly sensitive but opaque at best.

Why do I see a recipe for utter failure?

> The Ministry of Defence said the "nuclear deterrent remains safe, secure and effective".

The test that we did to show that it would work, didn't work but that doesn't mean that it wouldn't work. Of course!

> "The issue that occurred during the test was specific to the event and would not have occurred during a live armed fire," the source said.

OK, so, this might be the kind of thing you'd say, but that is also entirely plausible.

well it's very easy for them to say that, right? Because they'll never have to prove this in detail to anyone that could hold them accountable because SECRETS and COMPLICATED TECHNOLOGY.

Famously, the USN had the reverse problem with torpedoes in WW2: they worked in testing but were extremely unreliable in live situations, and it took a while before HQ believed that the problem was real.

With Trident, either there will be no live usage, or there will be no UK left to do anything about the failure of the second strike weapons.

> Famously, the USN had the reverse problem with torpedoes in WW2: they worked in testing but were extremely unreliable in live situations, and it took a while before HQ believed that the problem was real.

IIRC, this was a problem for Germany as well. It was the magnetic detonators on both sides .. ?

> With Trident, either there will be no live usage, or there will be no UK left to do anything about the failure of the second strike weapons.

.. in the event of trident failures, you mean. The third possibility is that they do work, and there still is no UK, but at least there is less of everyone. So fun to think about /s

It's suppose to be a deterrent, the other side just needs to believe it will work at least some of the time.

When you make a change to a complex software/hardware system, you should expect something to go wrong the first time you test it.

Clearly they changed something for this test in particular and it broke the system. It is likely something fairly minor that just doesn't work when part of it is removed.

Also, if it just went through a retrofit and has actually never fired a missile, then it's not unlikely for something to have been not quite placed back where it was supposed to be.

This is the difference between doing a release with a QA process that takes some time and testing versus doing development and just launching the new version into production.

They changed the code or hardware for this particular test. That not working does not prove that the system has fundamental flaws or that other systems that have been tested and not modified will have the same issue.

Most people do not understand the inherent brittleness in engineered systems. Even those that are designed to be fault tolerant. That can cause confusion about outcomes and the necessity of testing every release.

It does depend on the approach, though. If you're SpaceX and switched on to this stuff, and testing is part of development that's one thing. If you've done your real testing already and this is more like a demonstration sort of test, that's different.

My theory is that they should have done a development test before the demo, but because it's so expensive , the higher ups just told the engineers to skip it.

They probably just said "Well, it was _only_ a retrofit, and you just changed a couple of minor things for the test. Are you sure we need to spend $17 million on another throwaway test?" And the engineer said he's not 100% sure it's necessary, but it would be advisable. So the higher up, not understanding how brittle and complex systems are or how development works, decided that meant it wasn't necessary.

I think the main issue might be that there is no way to do a good test without spending millions of dollars. Which I think might be because of structural issues in the defense industry.

Disclaimer: I'm no missile tech expert.

As far as I understand, these things have self-test routines and "dry-runs" which go through all the states in test mode and simulates a firing.

With my limited knowledge, this validates all the electronic systems on the missile or what it is, sometimes creating synthetic data during the test, so the missile can "navigate on the bench" by "wiggling it fins like a dreaming puppy".

Maybe this particular one passed that test, and something chemical failed along the way, I don't know.

That sounds extremely plausible. Maybe one of those tests had a || true still in its GitLab pipeline (-:

Or, more practically, they may be using pytest-vw (https://github.com/auchenberg/volkswagen).

About once a year I remember that package and laugh spontaneously.

I don't understand your motivation to type this many words in order to make, what amounts to, generic excuses (1) for people that take a huge chunk of your paycheck in order to balance the world on the knives edge of nuclear deterrence and somehow managing to fuck up the one thing that is the whole point of the exercise.

Mind you, I am not even taking a moral stance here, I am just saying that if we have nuclear weapons can we please not lower the bar on competency in their handling.

1) maybe the reasons you give are plausible but they are essentially based on no real information about what happened here

I'm not making excuses I am trying to give my theory on their error which was simply to not spend the money to do a real test before doing a demo.

This was a real test. They have done this 192 times. It failed two times. The last two times. So it's not that this is inherently impossible, it's just that they can't do it anymore. I think, given the stakes, it's probably best not to just give them a pass.

Source for the number of tests: https://news.sky.com/story/trident-missile-misfired-and-cras...

> you should expect something to go wrong the first time you test it.

This was the second test-firing since 2016; that one failed too. I think that means they haven't done a successful test-firing in eight years. That doesn't inspire confidence (or awe, depending on who it's supposed to impress).

I'm usually a fan of government transparency. But I'm not sure it helps with deterrence to be public with this. Maybe it wasn't possible to cover it up?

Think of the second order effects of what you're proposing.

I've thought about it. I still can't see a good reason to broadcast that our deterrent isn't as effective as we have been making out.

Off topic: usually british websites are pretty good but apparently the bbc website has become absolute garbage. I had to confirm 5 or 6 times that no thank you I don't want cookies, at which point the fine site is still constantly nagging me in a third of the display to accept them or go configure them in yet another page, which fixes nothing. People accepting to implement such bullshit should be ashamed.

Seems somewhat related to the miserable paint and preservation on the hull.

(former US Boomer sailor here)

A little digging suggests that photo was taken at the end of a six month deployment. Which probably explains the state of the hull - it’s absolutely covered in barnacles & other marine growth.

The crew must have been shattered. Six months is a long time to spend at sea.

Links: https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/navy-ships/a452796... https://www.navylookout.com/royal-navy-nuclear-deterrent-sub...

There's some real staffing and morale problems around Trident, which nobody wants to look too closely at because that would be actual governance. The real purpose of Trident is to threaten left-wing MPs with.

I guess the left-wing MPs have nothing to worry about

Regrettable from a PR perspective but realistically, there are going to be some dud rockets.

I assume in a real nuclear war, some number of US ICBMs fail in boost and come down the US, likewise for Russia. These have been sitting in silos for decades.

In the real Cold War some number of US bomb delivery systems did fail and live bombs did fall down on mainland US soil (and a few off shore).

See: broken arrows.

At least one came so close to exploding it's a case study on the question of why it didn't ...

Presumably the 1961 Goldsboro incident:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Goldsboro_B-52_crash

190 UK tests, only 2 failures, and those failures are on the 2 most recent launches. Something is obviously wrong.

yes it's time for more funding, nothing gets funding better than a burning platform ...

But for the UK this is our only nuclear weapon, if it fails there are no planes or land based missiles to back it up. Different for the US.

Somebody stole the fuel to boil tea /s ?

Say Trump wins in 2025 - he pulls the US out of NATO, Putin threatens the EU with nukes, and only the UK and France can offer any kind of resistance.

If the UK is out that leaves France, and if Le Pen wins France will be in the Putinist camp.

My guess is Putin would nuke some US cities too just to make a point, and his fans in the US will be very surprised when that happens.

I mean, that's a "fun" little fantasy scenario to think through, but it doesn't change the fact that it's absolutely insane. Russia and US are not nuking each other no matter what. I can see Russia nuking a target in Ukraine in a "what are you going to do about it" kind of way, but again, Nato countries would not be attacked, US support present or not.

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