Calculating Disaster

Accidents at Puget Sound's Trident installation cast doubt on Navy and Lockheed safety claims

by Glen Milner

The below article was first offered to the Seattle Times and Bremerton's Sun newspaper, but these two dailies were apparently uninterested in printing it. Because this article has extreme importance for the welfare of the region, the WA Free Press is filling in where the mainstream papers are amiss. --ed.

There is no weapon system in the US arsenal with the operational risks of a Trident submarine. No weapon has as much explosive material, in the form of solid rocket propellant, and the number of nuclear warheads tightly packed in a confined vessel.

On November 7, 2003 a missile handling crew at Bangor, WA hoisted a Trident C-4 missile into a ladder that was left inside the launch tube. A nine-inch hole was made in the nose cone as the ladder came within inches of a live nuclear warhead.

All missile handling operations at the Strategic Weapons Facility were stopped for nine weeks until Bangor could be recertified for handling nuclear weapons. The top three commanders were dismissed.

When the accident became public in March 2004, many acknowledged the Navy's concern for safety but failed to recognize one critical fact--the design of the missile is inherently flawed.

The critical issue at the Bangor Explosives Handling Wharf in November 2003 was not how close the ladder had come to the nuclear warhead, but instead, how close it had come to the third stage rocket motor. Lockheed Martin and the Navy consider the Trident propellant to be 1.25 percent more explosive than conventional TNT. Some tests show it to be twice as volatile at TNT. The propellant is capable of detonating upon impact.

Had the ladder struck the third stage rocket motor with sufficient force, the resultant explosion would have detonated the much larger first and second stage rocket motors and spread the plutonium across Puget Sound.

Safety studies of the Trident missile system have been conducted through a process of "fault tree analysis", in which every identified hazardous event in deployment operations were analyzed. Based upon analysis by Lockheed Martin and the Navy, the chance of an accident leading to the dispersal of plutonium is better than the acceptable number of "one in a million." The analysis, however, is dependent upon correctly identifying every causative event that could lead to a catastrophic failure.

In July 2003, a federal lawsuit, Milner v. US Department of the Navy [of which the writer is the plaintiff], brought the public release of the Navy's Trident missile accident review and propellant hazard analysis. While issues such as tornadoes and crane failure were considered in the safety reviews, no mention was made of missile technicians leaving for coffee break and forgetting the ladder in the missile launch tube. A number of other causative events, such as falling objects and electrical fires, were not studied because the chances of such an event at the Explosives Handling Wharf at Bangor were considered too remote.

The Space Shuttle program is similar in complexity to the Trident submarine system. NASA, with the assistance of Lockheed Martin and other prime contractors, had concluded the chances of a catastrophic accident involving a Space Shuttle to be 1 in 100,000. Actual operations resulted in two tragic accidents in 113 launches, giving the program a 1 in 57 failure rate.

The cause of the last Shuttle disaster, light-weight foam on an external fuel tank, had never been considered a potential problem.

A Freedom of Information Act response in September 2003 brought the release of documents from the Bangor Submarine Base safety office showing three accidents at Bangor involving Trident missiles. One accident, in November 2001, involved a cover that was pulled off the side of a Trident first stage rocket motor in a scenario the Navy had not thought was possible. The report concluded, "...we need to understand how the contact could have happened..."

One Trident submarine, loaded with the newer D-5 missile, has enough solid rocket propellant to equal 3.7 million pounds of TNT. This conventional explosive is equal to a small 1.8 kiloton nuclear bomb. Add to this the nuclear reactor and up to 192 nuclear warheads on one Trident submarine.

In June 2001, a coalition of two environmental and three peace organizations filed a federal lawsuit against the D-5 missile upgrade at Bangor. The case, focusing on the risks involved in missile handling operations at Bangor, is now in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. The risks of a catastrophic accident at Bangor are enormous. The Navy could lose the operational base for approximately 25 percent of our nation's deployed nuclear arsenal. Citizens of Puget Sound could lose their homes and their lives.

Glen Milner lives in Seattle and is a member of the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action in Poulsbo, Washington. Please see www.gzcenter.org .