We know the love and pride the British have for their fleet. The scandal that splashes the latter is therefore all the more painful. In fact, the reasons why the HMS Vanguard submarine has surfaced in the UK news in recent days, ever since the case was revealed by the Sun Monday – they are nothing glorious. The tabloid reported that some of the repairs recently carried out on the aircraft by a contractor commissioned by the Ministry of Defense were initially made with glue.
For this reason, the Royal Navy has launched an investigation whose objective is to establish who is responsible for this failure and understand how it could have occurred.
In the reactor chamber
The ship’s profile is at the heart of the proceedings and explains the particularly sensitive nature of the case. HMS Vanguard: 150 m long, 15,900 tons of force and capable of pushing at 25 knots, as detailed West of France – It is a nuclear propulsion device. The submarine is notably one of the aircraft (the British navy has a total of four HMS Vanguard) carrying Trident ballistic missiles. The device can carry up to 16 missiles of this nature. And each one can contain multiple warheads.
The problem was located in the chamber that housed the submarine’s nuclear reactor. Originally, as the BBC mentions here, the Babcock company had to fulfill a triple objective: replace systems that had become obsolete, update the communications tools and weaponry of the ship, and install new equipment.
It was during this work that some company workers decided to glue broken bolts, used to fix the insulation on the reactor’s cooling pipes, with glue. The pot of roses has just been discovered, it says again West of Francewhen Babcock employees wanted to use the full power of the reactor for the first time after this poor thing renovation.
exceeding budget
If the error comes from Babcock, the company is also the source of the alert which is immediately transmitted to the Ministry of Defense. The subcontractor, phlegmatic in his dismay, expressed his “great disappointment” in a statement broadcast by the BBC.
His client was no more talkative in his. Only the Ministry of Defense explained to British television on Wednesday that the “defect came from work carried out in the past” and that it had been “quickly identified and repaired”.
Therefore, we will not know more about the circumstances surrounding this bankruptcy until the conclusions of the investigation. We do know, however, the context in which it occurred. Therefore, the submarine was dry-docked in Plymouth in 2015 for maintenance. If five years later he had to put to sea again, he finally did not rejoin the fleet until July 2022. Furthermore, and despite the stingy savings made by some unscrupulous Babcock workers, the budget was happily exceeded: 300 million pounds according to Sunapproximately 337.5 million euros.
fear of more mistakes
But before the financial question, of course, the danger of such a glue repair arises. The press, however, echoes a controversy between sources on this issue. While a member of the Navy denounced a “shame” to the SunReferring to “compromised nuclear standards”, the Defense Ministry assured that the failure did not represent “any nuclear security problem”.
Proof of this, he continued, is that the tests were able to continue “safely and without any impact on the program” after the discovery of the deception. However, in addition to the investigation, the ministry demanded “guarantees for future work.”
Captain Ryan Ramsay, a former submariner, took his arbitration to the Sun:
“The Royal Navy and Babcock have a major trust issue to resolve. One wonders what other job could have been done in such a woeful way.”
He also expressed concern that the error was caught so late in the process: “QA should have caught damage like this long before such a late stage of inspection.”
Regarding the explanation for the failure, the ex-soldier pointed out a clue: “The pressure that aroused the delay in the program could have caused this behavior.”
Source: BFM TV
