A submariner in the British Navy, Able Seaman William McNeilly, 25, has royally outed the Royal Navy by publishing a 19-page statement detailing grave security lapses, both at its giant Faslane submarine base and onboard the giant nuclear-armed Trident subs. Faslane maintains Britain’s four Trident nuclear submarines on the Firth of Clyde, located in Scotland about 25 miles west of Glasgow. Like their US Navy prototypes, the British Tridents are over two football fields in length.
McNeilly’s allegations were first reported in the Guardian May 17, and include details of 30 safety breaches involving broken security code systems, failure to follow standard security requirement, and guards routinely failing to check ID badges. McNeilly claims he was repeatedly waved through guard posts flashing nothing but a motel door key card. In his lengthy accounting, McNeilly says it was “harder getting into most nightclubs” than for him, carrying large unchecked baggage, to get onboard the ballistic missile submarine with nuclear warheads, and into control rooms onboard.
In his report titled “The Secret Nuclear Threat,” McNeilly wrote, “I brought things of all shapes through and none of it was checked. Before sailing, I brought my own stuff onboard in a huge grip bag; it wasn’t checked. There were 31 BSQ’s [sailors with Basic Submarine Qualification] and ship’s staff and civilians -- over 180 people -- bringing huge unchecked bags onboard.” He was on patrol with the trident sub HMS Victorious from January to April this year.
During his duty aboard Victorious, McNeilly says, “I could sometimes hear alarms on the missiles’ Control and Monitoring Position while lying in bed. I would’ve been hearing them more often they didn’t mute the console just to avoid listening to the alarms. This is the positon that monitors the condition of the missiles, and they muted the alarms. … If you work on the Strategic Weapons System, you must follow the procedures. Mistakes can be catastrophic.”
About blowing the whistle on the vulnerability of one of the three most heavily armed nuclear weapons depots on earth (the other two are at Bangor, Washington, and at King’s Bay, Georgia), McNeilly said he wanted “to break down the false images of a perfect system that most people envisage exists.”
McNeilly claims in his report that, “In a Base security brief, we were told that thousands of Royal Navy IDs go missing every year.” The lapses routinely leave the UK’s nuclear weapons program open to attacks by enemy infiltrators. All of England’s are on four Trident submarines, each of which carries 16 missiles with as many as eight nuclear warheads on each missile. “All it takes is someone to bring a bomb onboard to commit the worst terrorist attack the UK and the world has every [sic] seen,” he wrote on WikiLeaks.
McNeilly wrote that he spent a year preparing his report, went Absent Without Leave or AWOL in order to release it publicly, which he did May 17 via WikiLeaks, and told the London Guardian that he was willing to risk imprisonment in order to bring his warning to the British people. McNeilly turned himself in to police May 20 and is reportedly being held by the Navy in Scotland.
Among McNeilly’s revelations is one about official disinformation and cover-up of submarine accidents. He recounts the underwater collision, on the night of Feb. 3, 2009, of a nuclear-armed British and a French counterpart. Somewhere in the Atlantic, the French sub Le Triomphant struck the British sub HMS Vanguard while both were presumably carrying 16 ballistic missiles with multiple warheads. In a jointly prepared, narrowly worded statement at the time, both British and French governments minimized the collision; they mentioned only inconsequential “scrapes” to the Vanguard and damage to the sonar dome on the French sub.
But McNeilly reports he was told by a Navy chief who was on the Vanguard that, “We thought, ‘This is it. We’re all going to die.’” The chief told McNeilly that Le Triomphant “took a massive chunk out of the front of HMS Vanguard and grazed down the side of the boat.” On a separate and equally harrowing occasion McNeilly wrote, the Vanguard dove to a depth of 300 meters, over four times the sub’s 65-meter limit. “The submarine was extremely close to being lost.”  
The Seaman says simply the submarine program is “a disaster waiting to happen,” and he says he is hoping for a pardon from Britain’s Prime Minister “for alerting the people and the government to a major threat.”