The Royal Navy’s Dreadnought-class ballistic missile submarines share a missile compartment design, a propulsion technology exchange and a missile with the American Columbia class now taking shape at Groton, a set of dependencies laid out in a Congressional Research Service assessment of the US programme.
Both programmes are past the point of no return. All four British boats, Dreadnought, Valiant, Warspite and King George VI, are under construction at BAE Systems in Barrow-in-Furness, and the government confirmed £8.4 billion for Delivery Phase 4 at the end of July, funding that carries the lead boat through sea trials and into service in the early 2030s. On the American side, the lead boat District of Columbia was around 65 per cent complete when the Navy’s programme executive officer for strategic submarines spoke at the WEST conference in February, with delivery estimates ranging from late 2028 in General Dynamics’ assessment to March 2029 in the Navy’s own budget documents.
What ties the two classes together most directly is the Common Missile Compartment, the middle section of each boat housing the launch tubes. Both navies are building to the same general design, with a modular arrangement that accommodates the difference between sixteen tubes on the American boats and twelve on the British ones, of which current plans call for eight to carry Trident II D-5 missiles. Britain provided some of the funding for the compartment’s design, including a large portion of the initial money.
Propulsion is the second thread as Naval Reactors, the joint Department of Energy and Department of the Navy organisation responsible for American naval nuclear propulsion, runs a technical exchange with the Ministry of Defence under the 1958 Mutual Defence Agreement.
In a statement to congressional researchers, the US Navy described the arrangement in these terms: “Under this agreement, Naval Reactors is providing the UK Ministry of Defence with US naval nuclear propulsion technology to facilitate development of the naval nuclear propulsion plant for the UK’s next generation SUCCESSOR ballistic missile submarine.” A British-based office of around forty American personnel provides full-time engineering support, and the work is reimbursed by the Ministry of Defence.
Reporting on the design concept has described the Dreadnought plant as based on an American design while using next-generation British reactor technology in the form of PWR3.
Wow 40 American engineers out of a total of 30,000 people working on the Dreadnaught class, its practically an American boat 😂
No mention of all the bits on Columbia being designed and manufactured in the UK then? 🤦♂️
Time to change that loadout to 12 SLBMs and load each with a maximum number of MIRV’s.
Send mad Vlad a very clear message that we can send a good few buckets of sunshine in his direction.
This underlines the most worrying aspect of this program due to the shifting sands of UK/EU and US relations. Much depends on the direction of US politics.
Not much the US could do to scupper Trident in the short-term. The impacts would be felt in a 5-10 years, though, and whilst I’m confident that the UK could produce a Trident knock-off in that timeframe if funded, I’m 50/50 on if it actually would be funded.
The US can’t directly force the UK to disarm, but forcing the UK to spend a significant chunk of money on developing its own SLBM might be enough for the government (and the general public) to throw in the towel.
Indeed even though we have only heard the hints of it from Carney over the weekend, the US has effectively seen Canada so desperate to retain trade with the US market that they, especially at the last minute tried to blackmail them into agreeing unexpected and damaging terms. It seems one aspect of this was restricting their trade with China and trying to tie Canadian sanctions and tariff policy to that of the US thus making them more US reliant and which as we know is as predictable as a rodents quest for food, you know what the aim basically is but have no idea of how it intends to get there and what turns and particularly U-turns will take place along the way.
One can only imagine (because we are unlikely to learn much) what pressures of a similar nature will be applied to us and cooperations of this nature could be a serious target.
DNE costs are crippling conventional forces, absorbing >40% of the overall equipment budget. The result- a handful of SSNs unable to go to sea because of maintenance backlogs and a single SSBN on CASD. Now we are building even larger SSBNs with fewer missile tubes of which we aim to use just 8.
This is a nonsense. AUKUS will exacerbate the problem- Australia and the USA need a large boat to operate mainly in the Pacific. UK doesn’t. Indeed for many of the areas of operations, smaller boats, perhaps even non nuclear, would be better suited. Contrast the ability of the Japanese navy to keep boats operational with the availability of the Astutes.
The Dr Strangelove argument for SSBNs is that they deter a nuclear attack by being able to survive it. But does a single boat with 8 missiles really achieve that? Might an adversary with a developed ABM system calculate that it could neutralise just 8 incoming missiles? If so, the huge sums spent on Dreadnought achieve nothing.
There must be better, more affordable ways of providing a credible deterrent.
To be fair, it’s not 8 missiles the enemy has to worry about, it’s the warheads they can carry. The Trident missiles can carry 8-12 warheads depending on the size of warhead. They also carry a lot of decoys. The UK as policy never deploy more than 40 warheads per sub, the rest of the slots carry decoys of various types. So if 200 blobs come raining down on Moscow, which of them are the 40 real ones when only a couple need to hit to wipe out the city?
So is that enough? I don’t know. Arguably we should be able to fire from a second sub as well, somewhere near Faslane.