4 ms·
It was before the vote to renew, and was not disclosed to people making that vote.
by fidget 10y ago
It was before the vote to renew, and was not disclosed to people making that vote.
- dingaling 10y agoBut the test and its result was orthogonal to the issue before Parliament. It's like an executive team discussing whether to adopt a mobile-first strategy and then someone blurts 'but Galaxy 7 phones caught fire!'.
- lostlogin 10y agoIt's more like discussing the Galaxy 7 strategy whist hiding that they are malfunctioning.
- PaulKeeble 10y agoIf the missles don't work I would argue that is pertinent information! Its all well and good discussing a strategy but if its based on a range of options where some are proven to work and some are apparently not working but its being covered up so they appear to work its subverted the entire process of oversight of government.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoThe question is, whether they were covering it up a real problem there, or they just wanted to avoid some idiot higher-up completely overblowing the importance of a single incident. I can somewhat understand their thinking if the latter was the case, given that overblowing stuff way beyond their importance is what politicians do as a part of their jobs.
- XorNot 10y agoExactly - the point of a nuclear deterrant is to be credible, but never used. In a situation you need to launch, whether all the missiles work properly is irrelevant - you just need the majority of them to be assured to.
- touristtam 10y agoThat is so disingenuous. It's part of the Trident system that malfunctioned. Not just a specific consumer device.
- zigzigzag 10y agoHow is the correct and safe functioning of the system they are voting to renew "orthogonal"?
- onion2k 10y agoIt's like an executive team discussing whether to adopt a mobile-first strategy and then someone blurts 'but Galaxy 7 phones caught fire!'. It's more like an executive team discussing whether or not to equip the entire company with Galaxy Note 7 phones, and the CEO not mentioning the fires.
- arethuza 10y agoOnly if your expectation is that missiles work 100% of the time - which nobody really expects an individual component of any weapons system to work 100% of the time and is explicitly allowed for in the way nuclear weapons are targeted.
- onion2k 10y agoI don't expect anything to work 100% of the time. I do expect a missile to fail in a way that wouldn't mean accidentally obliterating tens of thousands of people in the wrong country though. I would also expect a politician to mention that failure mode is a possibility when politicians are considering spending £30b on renewing it.
- arethuza 10y agoPersonally I'm actually against the UK having nuclear weapons - but I can't get too excited about this particular incident. Missiles will go wrong, Trident actually has a fairly reasonable level of success and probably is far more reliable than equivalent weapons from other countries. It's a political mess not a military/technical one.
- rys 10y ago"probably" isn't a good enough standard when the weapon system can end hundreds of thousands of lives and is paid for by the taxpayer. And really it's the second thing that people are upset about. If renewing Trident cost a few hundreds of millions say, it'd likely be a non-issue. But it doesn't, so it isn't. That it might be unsafe is worth investigating given what's on the line.