Crew Member Kills Officer During Tour оf British Sub By JOHN F. BURNS Published: April 9, 2011

LONDON — One of Britain’s mass-circulation tabloid newspapers, The Mirror, had already dubbed the country’s newest nuclear submarine the S.S. Calamity over a series of mishaps since the $2 billion missile-carrying vessel began sea trials early last year.


And that was before an episode on Friday when a crew member who was posted as a sentry while the submarine, the H.M.S. Astute, was moored in Southampton, England, opened fire with an automatic weapon in the control room and killed its weapons engineering officer. The victim was identified on Saturday as Lt. Cmdr. Ian Molyneux, 36, a father of four; another officer was wounded and was listed in stable condition.


The weapon was wrestled from the gunman by a City Council member who happened to be on a tour of the submarine, the authorities said. The suspect was arrested by the Hampshire County police and held on suspicion of murder. The 318-foot-long, 7,400-ton vessel was declared a crime scene, and all 30 crewmen aboard at the time were being questioned by the police.

A police statement gave no motive for the attack, but some reports published in Britain quoted crewmen as saying it followed a dispute over the use of a submarine toilet. A Royal Navy spokesman refused to comment on Saturday, saying that no further details would be released because the matter was under police investigation.

At the time of the shooting, Southampton’s mayor, Carol Cunio, was aboard the vessel with members of the City Council, and a dozen schoolchildren were waiting dockside. None of the children were injured.

The councilman who grabbed the weapon, Royston Smith, a former Royal Air Force flight engineer, said he decided as the fusillade began that “the best form of defense was to disarm” the gunman. He said he and another man wrestled the man onto a bulkhead, then to the floor, before Mr. Smith seized the weapon and threw it under a table.

The submarine was the pride of the Royal Navy at its launching in 2007.

Only one other Royal Navy vessel, a World War II submarine, has borne the same name. Built at a British shipyard with technology licensed from the Electric Boat division of General Dynamics, the American company that builds United States nuclear submarines, the Astute is the first of a new class of seven attack submarines, to be known as Astute class, that are the heart of the Royal Navy’s future.

The Royal Navy was central to Britain’s acquisition of its empire, and it built a legend that generated a line, “Britannia rules the waves,” that is sung lustily on days of national celebration. But recent decades have seen a sharp contraction, with the once-mighty fleet reduced to barely 80 vessels and less than 35,000 regular personnel.

Under defense cuts by Prime Minister David Cameron’s government, manpower is to be reduced by a further 5,000 positions, and the Royal Navy’s only aircraft carrier, the Ark Royal, has been ordered to the scrap yard, along with all of the Navy’s Harrier jump-jets.

The Astute, Britain’s most expensive military vessel in history, is designed to fire Tomahawk cruise missiles and to engage in covert landings of the British commandos and intelligence agents on enemy shores.

But its new technology caused major problems, with a $1.5 billion cost overrun on the Astute-class program and a 43-month delay in the Astute’s launching. Further technical problems occurred during sea trials, including one with part of the power system designed to allow the submarine to circumnavigate the earth without surfacing.

But the biggest setback, and the biggest embarrassment to the Navy, came when the Astute ran aground in September while the crew was testing its ability to navigate in shallow waters.

Although not damaged in the grounding, the Astute was struck by a rescue tug, causing millions of dollars in damages. The vessel’s captain, one of Britain’s most experienced submarine skippers, was relieved of his command, but a review board decided against a court-martial.

A version of this article appeared in print on April 10, 2011, on page A8 of the New York edition.