Comment by KineticLensman

There was no need to run a scorched-earth policy to prevent the Nimrod project from being revived. The plane that caught fire, killing 14 people, in mid air was a flying deathtrap. It had leaky internal fuel pipes that ran past a different (extremely hot) pipe that allowed exhausts from one engine to be used in restarting the other engine after an intentional in-flight shutdown (they used to shut down one engine to loiter more fuel efficiently when they reached their mission's surveillance area). The leaky fuel pipes were the aftermath IIRC of an air-to-air refuelling system that was retrofitted to allow long range flights down to the Falklands islands. The devastating official post-crash report (the Haddon-Cave review) is at [0]. It was one of the classic 'normal accidents' situations - they got away with multiple routine internal fuel leaks up until the day when they didn't.

Separately, the planes were all very old, and had been constructed over several years so were all slightly different. Projects that tried to do fleet upgrades usually went massively over-budget because each airframe had to be treated as a special case, even for things that you would expect to be standardised like the basic fuselage and wing dimensions.

[Edit] The Haddon-Cave review was exceptional in that it actually named and shamed those in the MOD and industry who helped develop the bodged safety case. People in the MOD and industry lost their jobs after the crash.

[0] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...