Posted on 10/18/2010 10:10:01 PM PDT by ErnstStavroBlofeld
Britain's defence chiefs were said to have been deeply unamused when a Russian nuclear submarine slipped away from the gaze of our military spies.
I wrote this morning about how the "layer cake" of surveillance lost the submarine last summer as it left the headquarters of the old Soviet northern fleet in Severomorsk near Murmansk. It was picked up three weeks later on patrol in the Atlantic.
Does this matter? Rob Hewson, editor of Jane's Air-Launched Weapons, thinks not. This is what he told me:
The fact that we cannot track a Russian missile submarine, of which there are very few not doing very much...Is that the big deal that it used to be?
Liam Fox, the defence secretary, would disagree. He obviously thinks it is important to monitor the Russians with Britain's "spy in the sky". This is the Nimrod MR2 plane, operating from RAF Kinloss, that was due to be replaced by the Nimrod MRA4.
In his famous letter to the prime minister, leaked to the Daily Telegraph, Fox warned that scrapping the Nimrod MRA4 could jeopardise Britain's Trident nuclear deterrent
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
“Don’t tell me you’ve lost another sub!”
Yet Americans keep buying their products.
There was a Norwegian company involved in that affair too.
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