The Silent Deep

by James Jinks

  The policy to equip the target submarines E14 [Explorer] and E15 [Excalibur] with H.T.P. engines was adopted because of the comparatively advanced state of the technique in using this oxidant, the plans made for the supply of their H.T.P. and of the need to get these submarines to sea at the earliest practicable date, to prove British-made H.T.P. machinery, and to study the handling of fast submarines and the anti-submarines involved.132

  The Navy had decided its future was nuclear. However, events in the Middle East overshadowed any further steps towards resolving the legislative roadblock that prevented increased collaboration with the United States as the Suez Crisis caused the Anglo-American political relationship to deteriorate to new lows. Following Anthony Eden’s resignation in the aftermath of the crisis the new Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, was determined to use his close wartime relationship with President Eisenhower to rebuild the Anglo-American alliance. Eisenhower, too, was anxious to make amends for in effect pulling the plug on the Anglo-French assault on the Suez Canal. He was conscious of the need to repair the Anglo-American relationship in order to counter the growing threat perceived from the Soviet Union. In January 1957, he invited Macmillan to a conference in Bermuda where Eisenhower demonstrated that he was determined to play a more active part in achieving closer Anglo-American nuclear cooperation. On 5 February, the President, no longer constrained by an impending election, ordered the AEC, Department of Defense and the State Department to implement the June 1956 agreement concerning nuclear propulsion with Britain.

  The Royal Navy’s Submarine Service had reached the rim of a new nuclear age – of the true submarine with immense endurance and great agility – perhaps the most transformational technological moment since the development of the first submersibles. It was also a very special moment in the history of US–UK relations.

  THE SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP

  With the legal obstacle to collaboration removed, the British finally had access to the US nuclear-propulsion programme. ‘We opened up to them more of our information and facilities than we had ever opened up to any other group,’ said Rickover.133 But relations between Rickover and the British quickly deteriorated as he became concerned that collaboration would distract his own team from their main task of advancing the US Navy’s own nuclear programme. He explained:

  We would give them blueprints, complete design information for something, where they could have gone and manufactured the item, if they wished, or to buy it from the United States, but that is not what they wanted. They wanted to come over here and have us come over there, and they would say, ‘Why did you make the gasket this dimension?’ or ‘Why did you make this bolt of such and such a dimension?’ So the net results would be, if we acceded to any extent to requests of that kind, we would be tying up our people and we would not be able to do our own work.134

  Rickover was so angry that during a meeting with British officials on 8 April 1957 he ‘made an extraordinary intervention expressing anger at the detailed questions, and at the great interference with U.S. work involved in answering them’ and accused the British of ‘fouling up his helpful intentions’.135

  In May 1957, when Rickover visited the UK to inspect the British nuclear-design team at Rolls-Royce, based in the nuclear-research laboratory at Derby Old Hall, he was, according to the Head of Advanced Research at Rolls-Royce, Sir Alex Smith, ‘at his obnoxious worst, Corinthian in his execrations of standards in the engineering industry, and all but spat upon the design efforts of the Old Hall team, so critical was he’.136 When Rickover was shown some of the British reactor designs, his withering comment was ‘That’s not bad for a high school design.’137 It took a lot of calming interventions from Rickover’s Chief Technologist, Dr Harry Mandil, to prevent the meeting from collapsing in disarray. After one particular morning of strained meetings the Chief Engineer at Rolls-Royce, Adrian Lombard, introduced Rickover to the company Chairman, Lord Hives. ‘A lord eh? Chairman eh? And what are you then, a banker or a lawyer or what?’ said Rickover. ‘What, me? No, no, no, no, no! Me, I’m just a mechanic, just a bloody plumber,’ said Hives, with a big broad smile on his face. Rickover was thrown, he had not expected that kind of answer. When Hives explained that he had known Henry Royce himself, had worked for him, and had absorbed from him his passion for engineering excellence Rickover’s mood and attitude started to improve. Hives spent the lunch telling a captivated Rickover about Royce’s obsession with achieving perfection. He then took Rickover on a personal tour of the works, not in a Rolls-Royce or a Bentley, but in a very modest Hillman.

  This seemed to impress the volatile American Admiral. Hives was the type of Chairman who knew where the shop floor was, who could show a guest around, and who would be recognized by and interact with the workforce. According to Smith, when Hives returned after showing Rickover around the Rolls-Royce works the Admiral was ‘a changed man, subdued, pleasant, cooperative, uncritical, and no further put-downs or denigrations of British engineering escaped his lips’. Smith felt that he had witnessed something important:

  It is my view that that hour of dialogue between Rickover and Hives, followed by the short tour of the works, changed everything in the British nuclear submarine programme, even though nuclear submarines were never mentioned. Rickover began to realise the great strength of Rolls-Royce, in which he undoubtedly saw a company with a superb tradition of engineering excellence, a company which could reach the very high standards which he saw as essential in nuclear submarine engineering. He made up his mind on that day that, if there were to be established a form of cooperation between his organisation in America and Britain, then Rolls-Royce was the company to which it should be entrusted.138

  When Rickover returned to the United States, he cancelled arrangements for a second UK technical mission and replanned the visit to suit what he thought would be to UK advantage.

  When a combined team of Admiralty, UK Atomic Energy Authority and contractors’ representatives, led by Rear Admiral Wilson, arrived in the US in June 1957, Rickover ran the team ‘into the ground by arranging a series of visits that covered about 30,000 miles, with a typical visit beginning at 10pm, and finishing at 3.30am to enable [the British team] to get 2 hours sleep before going off on another trip, continuing in that vein for some 3 weeks’. ‘We stood the strain quite well,’ recalled the senior Admiralty scientist on the tour, Professor Jack Edwards. Rickover quickly developed an ‘innate and unfair dislike’ of Rear Admiral Wilson – a man who was easily offended – as well as other officials on the British team, whom he repeatedly undermined. Eventually it became obvious that Rickover was attempting to ‘expose any weaknesses in our nuclear programme and personnel, and determine whether or not the UK could be trusted to observe both secrecy and advance the state of the art of nuclear propulsion in the UK’.139 During tours of various facilities associated with the US nuclear programme, US officials and companies continued to protect their interests zealously. When a naval architect from the Admiralty’s Royal Corps of Naval Constructors, Jack Daniel, attended a meeting at the Electric Boat Company, ‘one of the firm’s people giving a brief talk strayed into forbidden material and was literally pulled off the stage by two other men while in mid-sentence!’140

  Despite these underlying difficulties, the UK team acquired some valuable information. When it returned to the UK, Mountbatten wrote in his monthly First Sea Lord’s newsletter, which was distributed throughout the fleet, that:

  Rickover was as good as his word and laid on an extremely good series of presentations at all these places. From what I hear, no questions were barred. The general opinion is that the visit was of great value in corroborating that the lines on which we have been working in the design of our plant have been basically sound and the extent to which our calculations line up with there is very reassuring. Nevertheless, we have learned a great deal from their experience, particularly in installational design and we now need time to collect our thoughts and to take a number of decisions on possible changes which c
ould do much to improve the final ship at the expense of some delay.141

  By the end of 1957 the British programme had advanced considerably. A site on the northern tip of the Scottish mainland at Dounreay had been selected for the prototype and a full-scale wooden mock-up of the plant was nearing completion at Vickers-Armstrongs Limited Works at Southampton. At Harwell, 160 professional staff were directly employed on R&D, and Neptune, a zero energy reactor used to check the design calculations for the Dounreay prototype, was taken critical at Harwell on 7 November 1957.142

  Meanwhile, the Russians too were demonstrating their appreciation that the future was nuclear. On 9 August 1957, as the Admiralty had long feared, the Soviet Navy launched its own nuclear-powered submarine, the Project 627 ‘November’ class, K-3. Commissioned in July 1958, the K-3 was the first in a series of Soviet nuclear-powered submarines produced beginning in December 1959 and running through to 1964. In 1958, the Soviet government had taken the decision to mass-produce nuclear-propelled submarines and during a 1958 meeting in Moscow, dedicated to the future development of the Soviet Navy, Khrushchev ‘spoke in favour of creating about 70 nuclear submarines with ballistic missiles, 60 with anti-ship cruise missiles, and 50 with torpedoes’.143 Using the ‘November’ design, the Soviet Navy soon commissioned ‘Hotel’ class nuclear-powered submarines, equipped with submarine-launched ballistic missiles, as well as ‘Echo’ class nuclear submarines carrying anti-ship cruise missiles.144 Together, these first-generation, twin-reactor, double-hulled nuclear submarines were known in the West as the ‘HENs’ and between 1958 and 1968, just as the Royal Navy was constructing its first nuclear submarines, the Soviet Navy deployed a total of 13 Novembers, 8 Hotels and 34 Echos.145 These came to be known to the Royal Navy as ‘Type I’ Soviet nuclear submarines.

  Two days before the launch of the first Soviet ‘November’ class submarine, the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, asked the First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Selkirk, for a short paper on the history of the British nuclear-submarine programme.146 In a memo Selkirk urged Macmillan (wrongly, as it turned out) to think of the nuclear submarine not as ‘an isolated project’ but as ‘the beginning of as revolutionary a development for ships as was the transition from sail to steam. Within 25 years the conventional warships of to-day will have largely given way to nuclear-propelled warships of much greater speed and endurance. An entirely new type of Navy lies ahead of us.’147 While Selkirk acknowledged the ‘need to avoid extra calls on the Defence Budget, especially in the years ahead’, he urged Macmillan to ‘remember, however, that the development is, in effect, an investment in the interest of the country as a whole’:

  I am convinced that the capital expenditure involved, which will be spread over six years, is a small price to pay for what is offered in return: the building of the first nuclear-propelled ship to go to sea; the first experience for the shipbuilding industry of the problems of applying nuclear techniques to the field of marine engineering; the achievement of the first stage towards the gradual introduction of nuclear propulsion into the fleet as a whole.148

  However, by October a ‘major controversy’ was raging behind the scenes between the proponents of the nuclear submarine and those who supported the development of a nuclear-propelled surface ship. The latter argued that the Admiralty should redirect its limited resources away from the nuclear submarine and concentrate instead on surface propulsion.149 One of the biggest sceptics of the nuclear-submarine programme was the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Peter Thorneycroft. On 14 October he wrote to Macmillan:

  I think we shall be bound to consider very carefully whether we ought to go on with this project. One important role envisaged for our submarines is, I understand, anti-submarine warfare. Even if we accept that we must have submarines for this purpose in addition to other anti-submarine measures, the nuclear submarine seems to me a very doubtful proposition. The cost is prodigious – £14½m. for research and development and £12½m. for production of the fleet submarine. How many of these are we likely to be able to afford? How soon can we get them? When they arrive, will they be already obsolescent as compared with American or Russian versions? We need satisfactory answers to these questions before we can decide that this is a sensible way of deploying our scarce technical and financial resources.150

  The Admiralty Board, now deeply committed to the Dreadnought programme, was alarmed that it was in danger of cancellation. A worrying number of articles appeared in the press with headlines such as ‘Atomic Sub Plan May be Scrapped’, ‘Check to British A-Ship Plans’ and ‘Navy to Lose I-Sub’.151 What was it to do?

  OPERATIONS ‘RUM TUB’ AND ‘STRIKEBACK’

  In October 1957, the USS Nautilus arrived in the UK to take part in Operation ‘Rum Tub’, an exercise that would mark the first time that the Royal Navy’s anti-submarine ships, submarines and aircraft, fitted with the latest equipment, were matched against a nuclear submarine. Mindful of the controversy over the UK nuclear programme, Mountbatten arranged a tour for Duncan Sandys, now Minister of Defence, to impress on him the extraordinary capabilities of the American vessel. Sandys was indeed impressed. ‘I believe it has tipped the scale in the minds of our Government for the need to press on with Dreadnought,’ wrote Mountbatten after the visit. ‘The main result is that we now appreciate that we are in the presence of a revolution in Naval warfare; in some ways more far reaching than the transition from sail to steam.’152 But Mountbatten was also deeply worried that Sandys had been far too impressed with Nautilus. He later told the Commander-in-Chief of the Home Fleet that ‘there is a very real danger that he [Sandys] may decide that the nuclear-propelled submarine has made our present Navy completely obsolete’.153

  ‘Rum Tub’ revealed that the Royal Navy’s air and surface anti-submarine defences were incapable of protecting a surface force against a high-speed nuclear submarine. Nautilus’s mobility and speed were terrifying, typified by one occasion when a helicopter jumped to a position within 500 yards of a green grenade fired by Nautilus, which was then already 3500 yards away. In all respects Nautilus was able to operate with immunity from any form of enemy action. The CO of Nautilus later said that the very considerable Navy and RAF air opposition ‘simply never entered his calculations, and as far as he was concerned they might just as well have stayed on the ground’.154 Nautilus also proved to be an effective anti-submarine platform, successfully attacking the US Navy submarine USS Quilback and HMS Auriga.155

  On board Nautilus throughout the exercise was John Coote, the first non-American to spend more than a few hours at sea in a US nuclear submarine. He witnessed Nautilus carry out an attack on the Royal Navy aircraft carrier HMS Bulwark, with devastating results:

  She then went about 50 miles to the eastward to await the final run of this carrier force back to Londonderry. She heard them coming, positioned herself head on, and she made what you might call the only classical approach of the 24 she carried out in the exercises … She turned in and got in two very good undetected attacks on BULWARK and then started following her sitting underneath. One hour later BULWARK – again BULWARK – gained contact and started to shake her off. This time BULWARK used her speed but did not in fact succeed in shaking her off. She knew she was sitting there, and we have a signal sent by BULWARK to everybody saying – ‘Will somebody for God’s sake come and take this bloody submarine away from under me’. The reaction to that was that at one time she had five escorts within two cables [a nautical unit equal to one tenth of a nautical mile, approximately 185.32 metres] of BULWARK at night trying to pick it out from underneath – without success. The exercise closed with NAUTILUS having the last say with a final salvo at BULWARK.156

  In order to salvage at least some of the Royal Navy’s pride Coote asked the medical team on board HMS Sea Eagle to ‘shoot some X rays’ at the small dosimeter he was made to wear while on board Nautilus which measured any unusual exposure to radiation from the submarine’s reactor.157 Coote returned the dosimeter, which indicated that he had
been exposed to dangerously high levels of radiation, to Nautilus’s sickbay. The surgeon had the last laugh, when a priority signal was read out at the end of a presentation to several hundred of those who had been involved in ‘Rum Tub’. It read, ‘Analysis of dosimeter worn by Commander Coote reveals unacceptable levels of radiation exposure. Please arrange one gallon sample of his urine to be shipped to USS Nautilus for further checks.’158

  Nautilus’s performance during Operation ‘Strikeback’ only confirmed the Navy’s worst fears. With its unlimited power and endurance Nautilus conducted simulated attacks against sixteen different ships: two aircraft carriers, one heavy cruiser, two oilers, two auxiliary cargo ships and nine destroyers. On one occasion she detected a carrier group steaming almost directly away from her at 20 knots. To carry out an attack on the group Nautilus travelled 219 miles in 10¼ hours at an average speed of 21.5 knots. Sixteen hours later she carried out another attack against a lone destroyer 240 miles away from the previous attack. From the start of the exercise until the conclusion Nautilus remained submerged, steaming 3384 miles over a ten-day period at an average speed of 14.4 knots.159