Trident Nuclear Weapons

This is a tricky one to write.  Trident, is the nuclear weapon system that we have to defend ourselves from a nuclear attack and launch missile, if need be.  Again, this is not about what I think, or believe.  This will be written as neutral as I can.  So what can we find out about Trident?  What are some of the issues that people are looking at?  Let’s have a look!

Now this is an interesting FoI request. It asked what statistical models have been made to look at the fall out patterns of the warheads. Would you have thought of this:

Trident is a ballistic missile system. In short, the missile is tossed up into the air in the hope that it will descend to land on the target... In practical terms it is an equivalent computational problem to discharging a 12-bore shotgun into the air in a way that each pellet will fall into a designated egg-cup 500m away.

The request wasn't answered, BUT, doesn't it make you think about the way in which the warheads make targets and what modeling has been done!  This is one of the more clever request that you can see.  

This one is about the psychological effect of people using the nuclear weapons . This is a pretty interesting one.  You think about it.  The people who would launch the missiles need to have psychological tests on them to ensure that they are using the system correctly.  It does make you think that people really do look at some issues in a lot of depth.  Again, would you have thought of this?

What about this!  Just to copy a little bit from the request:

While the UK does hold nuclear weapons, it does not ‘purchase’ them and therefore the direct answer to your question is that no money has been spent on purchasing such weapons. We maintain in the UK our own capability to build, maintain and ultimately decommission UK nuclear warheads at two main Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) sites based in Berkshire. This capability, along with a longstanding arrangement with the United States that covers both the title to a number of D5 Trident missiles and a contribution to missile-processing facilities based in the US, allows us to maintain the UK’s nuclear deterrent.

Interesting, again eh?

What about the fallout effect?  The humanitarian effect, of fallout, has been studied but there was over 100,000 files on the matter and was therefore not able to answer.  Darn.  Shows that they are looking into the matter. The same question was asked about nuclear submarines and how they would act.  This information was refused purely because it is available for public consumption.  

Now this is a massive topic, and I am only scratching the scratch of the surface.  There is endless possibilities on this matter.  Makes me wonder what the depth of this can go to?