British Rapper ‘Potent Whisper’ Takes on Trident Nuke Program

Posted on January 24, 2017

by Richard Edmondson

Potent Whisper is a London-based playwright, rapper and spoken-word artist, who fuses art with community activism. In the above video, he takes on Trident, the UK’s nuclear-submarine-based program which, according to recent reports, suffered a major failure last year when test-firing a missile off the coast of Florida.

Reportedly the missile, after firing, was supposed to have traveled in an easterly direction, more or less toward Africa, but instead it veered back toward the US. The test fail occurred just a month before the UK Parliament voted to renew the Trident program at a cost of £40 billion, and controversy has erupted over whether Prime Minister Theresa May knew about the botched launch at the time of the vote. On four different occasions during a BBC interview on Sunday, she refused to answer questions on the matter.

May strikes me as your basic, typical incompetent Western leader. The West has become so corrupt, with massive kickbacks between the defense industry and politicians, we certainly shouldn’t be surprised seeing both the US and the UK shelling out billions in taxpayer funds for weapons systems that routinely malfunction. That’s just the nature of things under a declining empire.

Whose idea it was to allow the Brits to test a malfunctioning piece of technology off the coast of Florida is not clear, although I guess it stems from the “special relationship” we have with the UK–which of course is not as “special” as the “special relationship” we have with Israel, but significant nonetheless. Speaking of which, I sometimes find myself wondering if the Brits don’t feel a tiny bit affronted over the fact that their own “special relationship” with the US is subordinate to the “specialness” enjoyed by Israel. (Perhaps it has already led to a British inferiority complex. Who knows?) At any rate, here is a bit more from rapper Potent Whisper. The piece is from 2014 and is entitled, “Just Wondering” (h/t Janis Hetherington).

If you want to read the full lyrics to the song, you can find them here. The same page also includes another video, also produced by Potent Whisper, that includes extensive comments on the foolhardiness of war by a number of different speakers, including Jeremy Corbyn. You can also go here to visit Potent Whisper’s website, “Changing the world one rhyme at a time.”

UPDATE

The following was posted today by RT:

Royal Navy whistleblower William McNeilly leaked details about a number of serious test fire issues aboard Britain’s Trident nuclear submarine fleet a whole year before the June 2016 misfire that sent a missile careening towards the US.

McNeilly published a dossier highlighting a range of safety and security failures aboard Trident submarines in May 2015 – more than a year before the latest mishap.

The Royal Navy submariner was detained and quietly discharged in June of that year. Senior officers even sought to discredit McNeilly’s claims by portraying him as an ill-informed junior sailor.

Speaking exclusively to RT on Tuesday, McNeilly said he now feels vindicated.

“I warned about this exact event over a year before it happened. I was in the MCC / Missile Control Center during the end of patrol tests in early 2015 and I witnessed with my own eyes the Trident system fail its simulated missile launch tests.”

McNeilly claims to have seen Trident “fail 3 out of 3 WP 186 Missile Compensating Tests” first-hand. He also says a “Battle Readiness Test (BRT) was not even attempted due to seawater in the hydraulic system.”

The whistleblower’s comments come a day after the British government faced questions over a misfire incident that occurred in June of 2016, just weeks before a crucial Parliamentary vote on Trident’s renewal. The US government apparently requested that news of the defective missile be kept secret to prevent mutual embarrassment.

Citing his extensive technical training as a submarine weapons engineer, McNeilly said it was his job “to learn about missile tests, conduct missile tests, pass tests on missile tests, be in the Missile Control Center during missile tests…”

“I had missile tests signed off in my task book. They wouldn’t have been signed off in my task book if I didn’t know anything about them, and clearly I was proven to be right.

“The government attempted to cover up the failed missile test and they covered up all the other information in my Trident report.”

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