US & UK Managing Trident Missiles: Some Secrecy & Facts.

Gessler on January 9, 2022 interestingly linked reactor characteristics with SLBM numbers. Gessler's reactor linkage prompted me to also look at some little explored aspects of shared US and UK management of their SLBMs. The following is necessarily disjointed and incomplete due to the absence of all the answers.

Pete Comment

Whole Life of Type reactors will certainly boost the availability of Trident II silos/launch tubes on the future UK Dreadnought-class and US Columbia-class SSBNs.

I don't know whether there will be the same number or fewer Trident II (aka D5) SLBMs (hereafter just called "Tridents") on these future SSBNS. This is due to secrecy that includes:

1. the current US Ohio SSBNs and UK Vanguards might not go to sea with the maximum number (16 UK and 24 US) Tridents possible. Considerations include increased numbers of warheads per missile that have greater survivability during their flight to hit their targets and with greater accuracy. Hence less redundancy (doubling up) of missiles and their RVs are required to hit the same target. The US doesn't spell out plainly how many Tridents and warheads go to sea for any given Ohio. The UK, with only 4 Vanguards performing the same Royal Navy patrol is more forthcoming. The UK states, from 2010, that only 8 Tridents are carried with a total of 40 warheads per patrol.

2. the unknown balance of US warheads being allotted to the US bomber and land ICBM arms of the Triad which influence the numbers of US Tridents (with their warheads) which need to go on patrol.

3. the uncertainties of how many Trident SLBMs are extracted from UK and US SSBNs when not on patrol. An unknown number of Tridents might then be shifted to the SSBNs about to go on patrol. Also some of the extracted Tridents undergo checking and deep maintenance at the Kings Bay, Georgia, US SSBN Base. The Tridents are placed in a common/rotating UK/US Trident store (UK angle details below) at Kings Bay's Strategic Weapons Facility Atlantic. 

USS Tennessee (SSBN-734) enters drydock at Kings Bay SSBN Base Trident Refit Facility in 2021. Note the yellow overhead crane equipment – well placed to extract and inject Trident missiles from/into US and UK SSBN silos. (Photo courtesy US Navy via wiki)
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Also of interest is the following information about Kings Bay’s Trident Refit Facility (TRF):

"The Trident Refit Facility (TRF) is the largest tenant command at Kings Bay and has kept a significant portion of the United States Fleet Ballistic Missile submarines at sea since 1985. TRF provides quality industrial-level and logistics support for the incremental overhaul, modernization, and repair of Trident submarines. It also furnishes global submarine supplies and spare parts support. In addition, TRF provides maintenance and support services to other submarines, regional maintenance customers [which can be assumed to mean UK Royal Navy], and other activities as requested.[citation needed]"

"The Trident Refit Facility possesses the largest covered drydock in the world, [citation needed] measuring [210m) long, 30m wide, and 20m deep. [large enough to extract and place Tridents in US and UK SSBN silos, covered from prying satellite or other aerial viewing] A state-of-the-art Magnetic Silencing Facility (MSF) provides degaussing services, including ranging and the removal of permanent magnetism for submarines of the U.S. Navy and the British Royal Navy…”

Of associated interest is that at the UK’s Faslane SSBN base complex is the UK Royal Naval Armaments Depot (RNAD) Coulport that also extracts/injects Tridents from UK SSBNs. Coulport would also inspect and conduct some maintenance of those Tridents. Probably Coulport maintenance is not at such a deep level at Coulport's Kings Bay “sister depot”. This is noting “The [Trident] missiles are not owned outright by the UK, which has "mingled asset" ownership rights to 58 missiles from a pool shared with the US Navy.”

4. The possibility that Trident IIs on the UK SSBN on Atlantic patrol (currently targeted at Russia) may have some influence on the unknown number of Trident IIs on an unknown number of US SSBNs on patrol in unknown oceans with unknown country targets.