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Two Royal Navy officers who had an affair while serving on Britain’s nuclear submarines have been sacked for endangering national security with emails sent to each other as part of their ‘clandestine sexual relationship’.
Lieutenant Sophie Brook, 30, was considered a ‘trailblazer’ as the first female warfare officer on a nuclear sub. Women have only been allowed to serve on submarines since 2011.
She had even been tipped to become the first female captain of a Navy submarine.
But she and Lieutenant Commander Nicholas Stone, 37, put the secrecy of the UK’s Trident nuclear deterrent at risk by sharing classified submarine movements which could have been intercepted by an enemy, a court martial heard.
Their messages contained the departure time as well as the direction, speed and depth of travel of Vanguard-class submarine HMS Victorious. All of this ‘would have been useful to an enemy’ and risked weakening the ‘cornerstone’ of the nation’s nuclear deterrent, the hearing was told.
The messages – sent to a Yahoo account – were part of a ‘clandestine sexual relationship’ between the pair, despite Stone being married with two children.
Yesterday the highly respected officers’ careers and reputations were in tatters, with Stone dismissed from the military and handed a suspended prison sentence of four months. Brook, who resigned after the messages were uncovered and went to work at the family car dealership, was also formally dismissed and handed a suspended prison sentence of five months.
