A missile that failed during a test launch from a Trident nuclear submarine “behaved absolutely correctly”, according to naval expert Rear Admiral Chris Parry.
He was commenting on a report in The Sun newspaper which claimed that Defence Secretary Grant Shapps was on board HMS Vanguard when a missile mis-fired during a test and landed in the ocean just yards away.
The retired Royal Navy officer told GB News: “The good news is the missile itself behaved absolutely correctly. I understand this was a procedural or calibration anomaly, which fed the wrong information to the safety team and they command-detonated a perfectly serviceable missile.
“It is similar to something that happened in 2016, where the data fed to the missile had it heading the wrong way. For safety reasons they aborted the launch, so I think we can be confident the missile and the system itself operated OK, but I'm afraid there's some human or other error in there that has caused the test to be abandoned.”
In a discussion during Breakfast with Eamonn Holmes and Isabel Webster, he went on: “It's such a shame really, because it's a very sophisticated piece of technology.
“It's pretty much reliable the rest of the time, and we can have a lot of confidence that it would work if, heaven forbid, we had to use it.
“With any new technology, I can tell you, even with conventional missiles, there's a proportion of them that are not going to work well either because the guidance system has failed, or the information to them is faulty, or indeed they're faulty components in them.
“You can never guarantee 100%, but that's why we've got 16 missiles in each submarine. If one of the missiles doesn't work, its buddies can do the rest of the job.”
He added: “The devastation that a single Trident-armed nuclear submarine can deliver is enough to deter people like Putin and Xi Jinping.
“Let's face it, one of Vanguard’s sisters right now is sitting in the North Atlantic with those missiles ready to go as our strategic deterrent 366 days this year, 24 hours a day.”
