D O Guerrero,
You claim that we have "almost 50 years experience of SSBN technology."
I had thought that Polaris was essentially an American missile - using US-supplied missiles, launch tubes, ReBs, and fire-control systems, and with British-built (US designed) warheads.
And though the subs were Brit-built, wasn't it a matter of Vickers and Cammell Laird bolting their bows and sterns on to the 'clever bit' - the American-designed missile compartment?
And though the consent of the British Prime Minister has always been required for the use of British nuclear weapons, I'd understood that operational control was under SACEUR/SACLANT.
The UK Chevaline upgrade (which added multiple decoys, chaff, and other defensive countermeasures) was not a great example of the UK's 'command' of technology, as it was a complete cluster that experienced gargantuan cost overruns and that didn't achieve what it set out to.
The lease of pooled Trident D5s (even with a massive 5% research and development contribution) does not seem to put the UK at the forefront of SSBN technology, either.
They are smart submarines that carry Trident, I know, but the clever bit is again not of our design, since the missile compartment is based on the system used on the US Ohio class.
There may be plenty of reasons to poke fun at Blue Steel (though it wasn't as big a cock up as Chevaline, I'd suggest) but it did provide a genuinely autonomous national capability, and elements of it were impressive. Wasn't the Blue Steel's nav/guidance system more advanced than that in the aircraft that carried the missile, for example? And it did give the V-Force a stand off capability, even at low level.