D O G,
I'd understood your reference to 50 yrs of experience of the technology to refer to DESIGN/DEVELOPMENT experience, going hand in hand with your remarks about the cost of developing a replacement, and contrasting it, as you did, with the supposed lack of experience developing airborne weapons.
No-one would dispute experience of OPERATING experience, just as no-one would deny 50 years experience operating air-dropped nukes.
I was careful not to suggest that there was not a notional autonomous national capability with Polaris and Trident - but it is not optimised for such use, and there are doubts as to the practicalities and limitations that might be encountered had we ever needed to use them autonomously.
As to Blue Steel, it's best compared with what else was around AT THE TIME, when many strategic bombers still relied on freefall weapons. In any case, BS was due to give way to BS 2 (and later Skybolt).
Had we had Skybolt instead of Polaris, we may have had a marginally less credible strategic deterrent, but our conventional war-fighting capabilities would have been much better - as nuclear bombers are much more readily used in conventional roles, as the V-Force demonstrated.