Trident

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JohninMK
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Trident

Post by JohninMK »

Couldn't find another place to put this, as there is no UK general discussion topic.

This is on Sputnik today, so there is an angle on it, know nothing about the journalist.

The United Kingdom's nuclear weapons Trident program has provoked a lively debate ahead of the British general election, UK journalist Jake Wallis Simons remarked, pointing to the astonishing fact that "the UK does not even own its Trident [nuclear] missiles, but rather leases them from the United States."

Indeed, although Trident is presented as "a purely domestic matter," the point is that British nuclear weapons as well as sophisticated Trident technology are provided directly by Washington or manufactured in accordance with American designs. Furthermore, Britain's nuclear sites are controlled by the US companies Lockheed Martin and Halliburton.

"British [nuclear] subs must regularly visit the US Navy's base at King's Bay, Georgia, for maintenance or re-arming. And since Britain has no test site of its own, it tries out its weapons under US supervision at Cape Canaveral, off the Florida coast," the journalist narrated.


The rest is at: http://sputniknews.com/military/2015050 ... z3ZCfYBufo

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The Armchair Soldier
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Re: The future of the Trident System

Post by The Armchair Soldier »

Just to clarify for everyone, this thread is for the discussion of the nuclear deterrent as a whole. Everything (mostly) boat-related should be kept in the Vanguard and Successor threads. Cheers.

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SKB
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Re: The future of the Trident System

Post by SKB »

There is also a 'Successor' class thread in the 'Equipment' section.

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Re: The future of the Trident System

Post by JohninMK »

Thanks.

It didn't seem to fit the way the Successor topic was evolving.

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The Armchair Soldier
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Re: The future of the Trident System

Post by The Armchair Soldier »

Yeah, the Successor thread seems to be more for the new SSBN's than for Trident renewal.

Feel free to continue using this thread.

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Phil R
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Re: The future of the Trident System

Post by Phil R »

Good idea to spit the Trident system from Successor SSBN.
D5LEP is progressing well and should ensure the system out to 2040.

Phil R

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SKB
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Re: The future of the Trident System

Post by SKB »

Sputnik are wrong. The warheads are British. The missiles themselves are US built.

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Re: The future of the Trident System

Post by FiringOrder »

JohninMK wrote:"British [nuclear] subs must regularly visit the US Navy's base at King's Bay, Georgia, for maintenance or re-arming. And since Britain has no test site of its own, it tries out its weapons under US supervision at Cape Canaveral, off the Florida coast," the journalist narrated.[/i]

The rest is at: http://sputniknews.com/military/2015050 ... z3ZCfYBufo
The article is wholly wrong.

The BNs travel to Kings Bay before overhaul in Devonport to offload UK missiles without any warheads (they'll have been in the tubes for more than 10 years) and after to pick up re-lifed Missiles (less warheads), they also use this time to conduct a Demonstration And Shakedown Operation using US resources. No planned maintenance is done by US staff.

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ArmChairCivvy
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Re: The future of the Trident System

Post by ArmChairCivvy »

Phil R wrote:Good idea to spit the Trident system from Successor SSBN.
D5LEP is progressing well and should ensure the system out to 2040.

Phil R
A good idea from the timing perspective, too, as we could not afford to pay for both at the same time.

Issues elsewhere seem to be no different: defencetalk reports on the nomination of the new Chief for the USN and what he will have to grapple with

""If confirmed by the US Senate, Richardson will face a budget battle over the funding of the next class of ballistic missile submarines, which cost an estimated $4.9 billion a piece.

To avoid disrupting other ship-building plans, officials have already suggested new submarines will need to be paid for partly outside of the annual Pentagon budget and will need a special long-term funding plan."
- the candidate is well qualified, having been in charge of the reactor programme, until this nomination (which supposedly will sail through)

Simple though: No (serviceable) boats, no Trident (or its successor), so the cost should be evaluated as one programme, with supporting shore facilities combined. What do we get by doing the sums that way?
I will be just guessing (RUSI has written accurate stuff on the overall topic, but read it a long time ago):
- boats (D&B) £ 25bn?
- boats (D&B and operate) £40bn?
- everything else, to make it a system and to support ongoing: double that?

Apologies again for not having the time to go back to the source materials.
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Tiny Toy
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Trident dependence on US

Post by Tiny Toy »

The UK depends on the US to manufacture and maintain the missiles, so it's unlikely that we would decide to strike a target proscribed by the US in any case since they would withhold the missiles in the future. But could we if we wanted to? Or, more to the point, could the US prevent a Trident missile launched from a Vanguard from hitting a UK designated target?

Trident is guided using a combination of inertial guidance and celestial navigation. However the celestial component is dependent on a star tracker that can be easily confused by meteorological conditions and other environmental effects, and its ephemeris is highly limited making it only possible to track a single star. Thus the celestial navigation is only used for minor error correction to the inertial guidance and cannot be used as a primary guidance system. Inertial guidance works on dead reckoning and therefore is entirely dependent on knowing very precisely where the launch platform (the Vanguard) is at the time of launch.

In The Defence Select Committee's report The Future of the UK’s Strategic Nuclear Deterrent: the Strategic Context, there are two telling pieces of evidence:
  • "The high accuracy of the Trident D5 missile depends on the submarine’s position being precisely determined. This is achieved using two systems: GPS, which relies on satellites, and the Electrostatically Supported Giro Navigation System (ESGN), which uses gyroscopes. In both cases, UK Trident submarines uses the same US system as the US Navy submarines. The USA has the ability to deny access to GPS at any time, rendering that form of navigation and targeting useless if the UK were to launch without US approval."
  • "The US Navy supplies local gravitational information and forecasts of weather over targets, both of which are vital to high missile accuracy, to US and UK submarines.”
The Vanguards primarily use GPS as the canonical navigation source and then use their own inertial navigation to compute location whenever GPS is interrupted. In addition to the potential that the US could deny GPS availability as stated in the report, they are also in a position to provide selective erroneous information to make the Vanguard believe it is in a completely different place than it is, and therefore of course to ensure that any Trident fired from them is out by the same relative distance, assuming that it worked at all and the celestial component didn't raise enough doubt to the inertial component to abort the fire.

The Government 2006 White Paper The Future of the United Kingdom's nuclear deterrent states: "The UK’s nuclear forces must remain fully operationally independent if they are to be a credible deterrent. It is essential that we have the necessary degree of assurance that we can employ our deterrent to defend our vital interests. The UK’s current nuclear deterrent is fully operationally independent of the US". That's clearly not the case, though, is it?

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The Armchair Soldier
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Re: UGM-133 Trident II

Post by The Armchair Soldier »

Merged the two Trident threads together and moved them into the Equipment section.

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Tiny Toy
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Re: UGM-133 Trident II

Post by Tiny Toy »

The Armchair Soldier wrote:Merged the two Trident threads together and moved them into the Equipment section.
Except that my post is not specifically about the missile as much as it is about the entire system including the submarines and non-equipment issues.

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The Armchair Soldier
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Re: UGM-133 Trident II

Post by The Armchair Soldier »

Tiny Toy wrote:
The Armchair Soldier wrote:Merged the two Trident threads together and moved them into the Equipment section.
Except that my post is not specifically about the missile as much as it is about the entire system including the submarines and non-equipment issues.
Your post almost entirely relates to the Trident missile, however, if it helps, I will rename this thread "Trident" and we can use it to discuss the wider system (whilst keeping boat-related discussions in the Successor and Vanguard threads).

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Cooper
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Re: Trident dependence on US

Post by Cooper »

Tiny Toy wrote: The UK’s current nuclear deterrent is fully operationally independent of the US". That's clearly not the case, though, is it?
The point is, would you risk tackling a man with a gun pointed at you, gambling that it wasn't loaded?

..I wouldn't.

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Tiny Toy
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Re: UGM-133 Trident II

Post by Tiny Toy »

The Armchair Soldier wrote:Your post almost entirely relates to the Trident missile, however, if it helps, I will rename this thread "Trident" and we can use it to discuss the wider system (whilst keeping boat-related discussions in the Successor and Vanguard threads).
I see it really as just one example of an overall major issue with some kinds of missile guidance and navigation - obviously the most important one. But yes, renaming the thread would help.
Cooper wrote:The point is, would you risk tackling a man with a gun pointed at you, gambling that it wasn't loaded?
As I understand it the Russian roulette approach is certainly not considered a credible deterrent by those who believe that we must have a four boat solution.

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ArmChairCivvy
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Re: Trident

Post by ArmChairCivvy »

GPS a problem? What problem https://support.garmin.com/support/sear ... 0000000%7D

And the Chinese will soon have another system, so you can triple-check
- btw: the density of satellites over the Arctic is better with GLONAS, so we will need to keep our boats in those cold waters
Ever-lasting truths: Multi-year budgets/ planning by necessity have to address the painful questions; more often than not the Either-Or prevails over Both-And.
If everyone is thinking the same, then someone is not thinking (attributed to Patton)

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ArmChairCivvy
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Re: Trident

Post by ArmChairCivvy »

And none of them will be the primary means for very much longer for those who can afford to pay:

"" But GPS is also limited with regards to submarines – when they dive underwater it no longer works.
This means that when a submarine eventually resurfaces, efforts to locate it can be out by more than half a mile (one kilometre).
A quantum compass would, apparently, reduce that inaccuracy down to just three feet (one metre).
That’s according to the scientists behind the project at the UK Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) in Porton Down, UK.
And the breakthrough is all the more impressive for being impregnable, unlike GPS, ensuring that no outside interference can disrupt it.
‘There is nothing in physics that could be used - given the knowledge we have now - to disrupt one of these [new] devices,” Bob Cockshott at the National Physics Laboratory, who are also involved in the research, said in the Financial Times."


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... z3aEMsxrm3
- see, even the daily flail can be useful
Ever-lasting truths: Multi-year budgets/ planning by necessity have to address the painful questions; more often than not the Either-Or prevails over Both-And.
If everyone is thinking the same, then someone is not thinking (attributed to Patton)

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Tiny Toy
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Re: Trident

Post by Tiny Toy »

Yes. That's what the quantum accelerometer people in Cambridge are saying as well. If we can perfect this technology then there would be no need to use satellite trilateration at all, we could simply use dead reckoning from the port. In the meantime though GPS is a security vulnerability in the system (we don't use GLONASS or Galileo and the latter is too imprecise anyway, but they would suffer from the same problem). Another possibility is that we could set up our own hyperbolic navigation system (like the old US LORAN system). I'm sure this has been looked at and someone has decided it would be too expensive.

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Pseudo
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Re: Trident

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Tiny Toy wrote:Another possibility is that we could set up our own hyperbolic navigation system (like the old US LORAN system). I'm sure this has been looked at and someone has decided it would be too expensive.
That all sounds perfectly reasonable, not hyperbolic at all. :)

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WhitestElephant
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Re: Trident

Post by WhitestElephant »

Pseudo wrote:
Tiny Toy wrote:Another possibility is that we could set up our own hyperbolic navigation system (like the old US LORAN system). I'm sure this has been looked at and someone has decided it would be too expensive.
That all sounds perfectly reasonable, not hyperbolic at all. :)
:lol: Now where is that like button!
Cooper wrote:The point is, would you risk tackling a man with a gun pointed at you, gambling that it wasn't loaded?

..I wouldn't.
Neither would I! I think for all intents and purposes, Trident is operationally independent of the US. I cannot see the US standing in our way if our vital national interests were at stake. I suspect even if they did try and prevent us, there must be ways to work around it... perhaps with the French?
Though we are not now that strength which in old days moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are. - Lord Tennyson (Ulysses)

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Tiny Toy
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Re: Trident

Post by Tiny Toy »

Pseudo wrote:That all sounds perfectly reasonable, not hyperbolic at all. :)
How about: Yo mama so owned by the US, she got Made In South Korea tattooed on her butt? ;)

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Re: Trident

Post by Pseudo »

Tiny Toy wrote:
Pseudo wrote:That all sounds perfectly reasonable, not hyperbolic at all. :)
How about: Yo mama so owned by the US, she got Made In South Korea tattooed on her butt? ;)
I'm guessing that you don't appreciate wordplay. :(

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Tiny Toy
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Re: Trident

Post by Tiny Toy »

Pseudo wrote:I'm guessing that you don't appreciate wordplay. :(
I absolutely do. It's obligatory to make a Yo Mama joke whenever anyone mentions hyperbole. Sorry if it wasn't a very good one.

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Pseudo
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Re: Trident

Post by Pseudo »

Tiny Toy wrote:
Pseudo wrote:I'm guessing that you don't appreciate wordplay. :(
I absolutely do. It's obligatory to make a Yo Mama joke whenever anyone mentions hyperbole. Sorry if it wasn't a very good one.
Well, I've learned something new. And now I'm thinking about all those Yo Mama jokes I've missed the chance to make over the years.:cry:

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Re: Trident

Post by IrishT »

WhitestElephant wrote:Neither would I! I think for all intents and purposes, Trident is operationally independent of the US. I cannot see the US standing in our way if our vital national interests were at stake. I suspect even if they did try and prevent us, there must be ways to work around it... perhaps with the French?
The French don't even maintain their own warheads, they get the Germans to do it :/

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