Royal Navy whistleblower William McNeilly leaked details
about a number of serious test fire issues aboard Britain’s Trident
nuclear submarine fleet a whole year before the June 2016 misfire
that sent a missile careening towards the US.
McNeilly published a dossier highlighting a range of
safety and security failures aboard Trident submarines in May 2015 –
more than a year before the latest mishap.
The Royal Navy submariner was detained and quietly
discharged in June of that year. Senior officers even sought to
discredit McNeilly’s claims by portraying him as an ill-informed
junior sailor.
Speaking exclusively to RT on Tuesday, McNeilly said he
now feels vindicated.
“I warned about this exact event over a year before
it happened. I was in the MCC / Missile Control Center during the end
of patrol tests in early 2015 and I witnessed with my own eyes the
Trident system fail its simulated missile launch tests.”
McNeilly claims to have seen Trident “fail 3 out of 3 WP 186
Missile Compensating Tests” first-hand. He also says a “Battle
Readiness Test (BRT) was not even attempted due to seawater in the
hydraulic system.”
The whistleblower’s comments come a day after the
British government faced questions over a misfire incident that
occurred in June of 2016, just weeks before a crucial Parliamentary
vote on Trident’s renewal. The US government apparently requested
that news of the defective missile be kept secret to prevent mutual
embarrassment.
Citing his extensive technical training as a submarine
weapons engineer, McNeilly said it was his job “to learn about
missile tests, conduct missile tests, pass tests on missile tests, be
in the Missile Control Center during missile tests…”
“I had missile tests signed off in my task book.
They wouldn’t have been signed off in my task book if I didn’t
know anything about them, and clearly I was proven to be right.”
“The government attempted to cover up the failed
missile test and they covered up all the other information in my
Trident report.”
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