Norway leads on missile. UK takes a back seat

Amazing news that the Telegraph has published today under the heading: Royal Navy tests new 'ship busting' missile.

This might suggest (it would seem intentionally) that the ship busting missile had been developed by the Royal Navy or at least a mainly British corporation such as BAE systems.

But the missile was developed by Norwegian Kongsberg, who it would seem, rightly, can claim to be a cutting edge arms manufacturer.

This is of course not the first time that we have relied on a Norwegian missile and the owners and manager of the football club Manchester City would probably be the first to state this. Watching Erling Haaland in action, one might easily conclude he is an excellent soccer missile who can shoot close up or at distance. It doesn't matter, he is successful at decimating opponents.

Reading the Telegraph article reminded us seriously of similarities.

Replace the word "British" or "Britain", with "Germany "or "German" and replace "Daily Telegraph" with "Bild Zeitung" and it would be a typical nationalistic slant on some topic. "Bild" were and still are masters at this game. If for example Kai Havertz scored the winning goal in a cup final for Arsenal then Bild would almost certainly print "German centre forward wins the English FA cup".

But it gets worse.

The Telegraph does write that the super missile is already in service with Norwegian, United States and Polish navies (do the poles have access to the sea?)

They leave out Australia, the Netherlands and Germany.

The missile was announced even previous to the Kongsberg success story and published a mere decade ago on the 29th June 2005 by the armaments company. They stated that tests had been carried out in France. In 2011 they even had another successful live firing test. The reports on their web-site are very detailed.

Where were we?

A fair bit down the line on this one.

It could be of course that the Telegraph editors had been sleeping or they were just waiting for a newsless day to pounce this amazing story on us.

Maybe, likely, they will claim that they were under strict secrecy orders (no other paper knew or had been informed), not to publish such vital defence information.

You couldn't make it up.....