Trident whistleblower: nuclear 'disaster waiting to happen' (2015)

Can you go into further detail? Not asking to reveal what you don't want to, but I am of course curious what you mean.

This rant pretty much falls into what every sailor that hates their job dreams about doing. Though they normally end up sadding out before it gets to this point (using real or fake psychological issues to disqualify themselves).

"they would deviate from set procedures because the procedures can be “long and winding.” He said “sometimes you just know that you can adjust a valve slightly and that would solve the problem. Following the procedures might take you down a long and winding path.” You might think that's no big deal, just an engineer using his engineering skills; if he was caught doing this kind of action on an American submarine it would cost him his job and possibly his freedom. If you work on the Strategic Weapon System you must follow the procedures, mistakes can be catastrophic."

What I read is just that he doesn't understand the issues. The engineers make something and make the consoles sounding "alarm" for many various reasons. They also make the documents of the "standard procedures" to follow.

Now some alarms are in use observed to happen too often. That's a clear problem in how the thing was designed. The cleanest response would be to redesign the devices, or at least the documents of the standard procedures to include the "shortcut checks."

But in his specific case it's just the people on duty that passed their knowledge from one to another. Maybe they even tried to initiate change in the documents or even asked for the redesign and failed.

So they are not wrong for doing what they are doing, it's just that the system doesn't care enough for the feedback from "the trenches."

Which happens everywhere.

In that light, all non-engineers or people not being "in the trenches" with the technical equipment really have too idealized understanding that the things "just work." No they don't, everything fails all the time.

Which is why we really should press the politicians to reduce the number of nuclear weapons. Sooner or later there will be some very nasty failure, an unintended accident, and it's a big difference if that failure doesn't destroy the whole civilization at once.

Yes, in the "test" last year (that is, the missile luckily didn't carry the real nuclear bomb) the missile was launched to arrive around the coast of Africa but it flew toward Florida! There's no more obvious miss than that.

That's the very "Trident "accident" which May did not disclose to Parliament" from the top post of this thread.

And the reason we should really press all the politicians for the reduction of nuclear weapons. It's not the question of if but when and what the consequences will be of the "accidental" detonations.

The best protection is to have at least a very limited number of weapons. The balance of power can be held even with a little of them.

If you hear anything else, it's from those that don't want the balance but to "win."