by James Jinks
Moral and ethical debates about Britain’s status as a nuclear-weapons state intensified in the mid- to late 1980s. In 1983, CND successfully captured Labour’s policy-making apparatus and influenced the party’s 1983 manifesto, memorably described by Gerald Kaufman as ‘the longest suicide note in history’.135 In 1983, Labour’s then Defence Spokesman, John Silkin, said that a Labour Government would begin ridding Britain of its nuclear weapons within days of coming to power, with the ultimate aim of removing every nuclear base, British or American, from the United Kingdom within five years. The new Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, was equally clear about his attitude towards the UK nuclear deterrent. ‘There are no circumstances,’ he wrote in 1983, ‘in which I would order or permit the firing of a nuclear weapon.’136 Two years later he reportedly told a group of American Congressmen that if he ever became Prime Minister he would ‘never authorize the use of nuclear weapons even if Britain itself was under nuclear attack’.137
The prospect of an anti-nuclear Labour Government obtaining power echoed that of 1964, when Harold Wilson’s Labour Opposition campaigned on an apparent pledge to cancel Polaris. Once again, the Conservative Government considered making it as difficult as possible for a future Labour Government to cancel the programme should they win office. The Cabinet was told that ‘it would not be possible to devise penalty arrangements which would preclude a future Government from abandoning’ Trident, ‘But politically it might not prove disadvantageous that comparatively little would have been spent on the programme by the time of the next General Election; the Government could not be accused of pre-empting the issue and in practice many of their opponents in Parliament would if they came to office be forced to recognise that the decision now being taken was the only possible one.’138 The Conservatives won the seat of Barrow in both the 1983 and 1987 general elections.
How would the Chiefs of Staff have reacted to a Labour victory? The veteran BBC broadcaster Sir Robin Day asked Mrs Thatcher that very question in the run-up to the 1987 general election. ‘What do you think is the duty of the Chiefs of Staff?’ he asked. ‘To resign if they disagree? Or obey orders of the democratically-elected first Minister?’ ‘The Chiefs of Staff have to make up their own minds,’ replied Thatcher:
Each person is responsible for what he decides. It would be for the Chiefs of Staff to decide whether, in their view – it would certainly be mine – that the damage done to NATO; the damage done to liberty, because Britain has always stood for liberty; the damage done to Britain’s defences would be so deep, so fundamental that they could no longer be responsible for carrying the burden of defence, or for being in charge of our Armed Forces without a nuclear weapon of any kind, when those Armed Forces faced an adversarial attack. I know what I would do. I just could not be responsible for the men under me under those circumstances. It would not be fair to put them in the field if the other people have nuclear weapons. I know what I would do, but they are free to make their decisions. That is the fundamental part of the way of life in which I believe.139
The Prime Minister was very clear that a Labour Government following through with its policy of nuclear disarmament ‘would do untold damage’:
Britain is not just another country; it has never been just another country. We would not have grown into an Empire if we were just another European country with the size and strength that we were. It was Britain that stood when everyone else surrendered and if Britain pulls out of that commitment, it is as if one of the pillars of the temple has collapsed – because we are one of the pillars of freedom and, hitherto, everyone, including past Labour Prime Ministers, have known that Britain would stand and Britain had a nuclear weapon.140
The electorate, it seems, agreed. Throughout much of the early phase of the Trident programme, the Labour Opposition remained committed to unilateral nuclear disarmament. By the time of the 1992 election, the Labour leadership had reversed its position and adopted a clear commitment to multilateral rather than unilateral disarmament. The party leadership pledged to keep Britain’s independent nuclear capability and continued to advocate multilateralism, despite Annual Conference votes in favour of scrapping Trident in 1993 and 1994.
THE TRIDENT PROGRAMME
The particular responsibility for managing the Trident programme fell to Rear Admiral John Grove, CSSE. A former submariner, Grove was one of the first Electrical Officers to serve in submarines in the 1950s, on board HMS Tally Ho, HMS Turpin, HMS Porpoise and HMS Dreadnought. He was appointed Chief Polaris Executive with responsibility for running the ‘Resolution’ class submarines and the original Polaris system, but also the continuing development of Chevaline, which would maintain the credibility of the UK’s nuclear capability until the new ‘Vanguard’ class submarines and the Trident system entered service. When the Trident programme was announced in July 1980 Grove sought permission to change his title to Chief Strategic Systems Executive, or CSSE, a generic term that was more reflective of his responsibilities for Polaris, Chevaline and Trident. He also looked at how Polaris had been managed and structured his management system accordingly.
A top-level body, known as the Trident Group, comprising the Chief of the Naval Staff, Chief of Defence Procurement, Chief Scientific Adviser, Controller of the Navy, the Chief of Fleet Support and Deputy Under Secretary Programmes, was heavily involved in the early days when major policy decisions were taken. It met fairly regularly every two months, but as policy decisions were taken it became clear to the Controller that as the project management task grew in importance it was sensible also to have a lesser group, known as the Trident Watch Committee, consisting of the Controller of the Navy, the Chief of Fleet Support and the Controller R&D Establishments, Research and Nuclear. Close liaison was also intensified with the US Special Projects Office in Washington. Grove and the then Director of the Strategic Systems Project Office (SSPO), Admiral Glenwood Clark, together supervised a jointly agreed programme. ‘I have to say that the cooperation and the support we get from the Americans’ Strategic Systems Project Office is very good indeed. They regard our programme as their programme almost as much as their own and I get tremendous support from them,’ said Admiral Grove.141 A small Royal Navy team had a permanent office within the Strategic Systems Project Office, headed by a Royal Navy Captain reporting to both Admiral Clark and Admiral Grove. An American cell was also established in London.
The foundations of Britain’s Trident submarine programme were laid by Ministry of Defence staff in Bath in preparation for the award of the contract for developing the ‘Vanguard’ class as a whole to Vickers in July 1982. Unlike the ‘Resolution’ class, the ‘Vanguard’ class was designed from the outset as a purpose-built ballistic-missile submarine, incorporating a number of successful design features from other British nuclear submarines. At 149.9 metres long, with a 13-metre beam and a 15,980 tons submerged displacement, the ‘Vanguard’ class are almost twice the size of the ‘Resolution’ class, most of which is attributable to the sixteen-tube Trident D5 missile compartment. The increased size allowed the ‘Vanguard’ class to be fitted with a fourth deck, which (together with a reduced complement of 132) allowed more spacious living quarters and better working conditions for the crew. The hull contains approximately 21,000 lengths of electrical cable totalling some 300 miles and around 1.5 miles of ventilation trunking.
Aside from the D5 missile compartment, the most significant other improvement was a new pressurized water reactor, known as PWR2, built by Rolls-Royce and Associates. By the mid-1970s, it was apparent that the PWR1 plant had reached the limits of its development and future improvements would require a radically new design. In April 1976, Rolls-Royce began to define a new reactor plant, known as PWR2, with improved military characteristics – increased power, lower noise, improved shock resistance and increased core life. The Admiralty Board also placed heavy emphasis on enhancing safety margins and improving the plant design for in-service inspection. Although the design and safety criteria used in the mid- to late 19
50s and early 1960s represented the state of the art at the time, the original PWR, based on the US S5W plant, did not allow for easy inspection and by the 1980s plant experience, major advances in mechanical engineering design processes, and a greater understanding of the mechanism of crack initiation, as well as knowledge gained from land-based PWRs and successive refits of submarine plants, demonstrated that inspection of components vital to safety was possible as non-destructive testing and remote control techniques improved.142
To meet the design objectives, Rolls-Royce proposed a plant that was significantly bigger than the PWR1 with a larger reactor pressure vessel and pressurizer, and more powerful main coolant pumps. Manufacturing the plant presented a number of challenges as all the major components, including the reactor pressure vessel, the steam generators, the pressurizer, and the main coolant pumps, as well as the reactor core and the control and instrumentation systems, were new designs. Operational proving was therefore necessary before the PWR2 entered service in a submarine. A second shore test facility was built on the same site as the existing Dounreay Submarine Prototype, in time to provide sufficient testing before the first core for HMS Vanguard was ordered.143 Given the large size of the ‘Vanguard’ class a new secondary propulsion plant compatible with PWR2 was also required. The design evolved from the machinery used in the ‘Swiftsure’ and ‘Trafalgar’ classes, but took maximum advantage of the latest technology to meet requirements of increased power density, weight reduction, longer operational life between overhauls, improved equipment reliability, improved access for maintenance and operation, and reduced noise.144
Alongside significant improvements in safety, stealth, reliability, and ease of operation and maintenance, the ‘Vanguard’ class was also the first Royal Navy submarine equipped with an advanced computerized Submarine Command System (SMCS). This multi-screen command system employed eleven highly advanced computers, tied together by a high-capacity fibre-optic link, and would eventually replace the DCB system on all Royal Navy submarines. SMCS had more than twenty times the processing power of previous submarine combat systems, at lower cost and with greater reliability.145 The class was also fitted with Sonar 2054, a system unique to the ‘Vanguard’ class, employing an array of hydrophones and transducers twice the size of any others in operation with the Royal Navy at that time.
The Vanguard construction programme was the biggest, most complex and expensive construction programme in Western Europe. All four submarines were pieced together in a new purpose-built indoor shipbuilding facility – the largest in Europe – situated at the northern end of the Devonshire Dock in Barrow-in-Furness. Construction of the Devonshire Dock Hall, as it is known today, started in 1982. The land on which the Hall stands was reclaimed by filling in the existing Devonshire Dock with 2.5 million tonnes of sand from Morecambe Bay, creating a barrier on which concrete foundations were laid. The hall, which is approximately 269 metres long, 67 metres wide and 51 metres high – twice the size of Manchester United’s Old Trafford ground – dominates the Barrow-in-Furness skyline and, with its associated workshops and amenities, covers an area of 25,000 square metres. Breaking with the tradition of ship construction on exposed slipways, the hall provides a warm, dry environment which contributes towards improved standards in work quality and efficiency. The facility also contains a 24,300-tonne capacity ship lift – the largest of its kind in the world – capable of lowering completed submarines into the water as well as returning them either to the hall or sideways to an adjacent hard standing.146
To aid the submarine designers a one-fifth-scale model of the submarine was built in a dedicated storage facility and model human figures were used for basic ergonomic evaluations. The Chairman of Vickers, Lord Chalfont, compared Vanguard as a piece of engineering as ‘something like putting a man on the moon in terms of advanced concepts and engineering’.147 Construction of HMS Vanguard began in September 1986 at a special keel-laying ceremony attended by the Prime Minister. ‘HMS Vanguard is important,’ said Mrs Thatcher. ‘It’s important to the defence of our country and when you judge the strength of a country, when you judge its spirit, one of the tests you use is to say, well are those people willing to defend their country if they believe in it? Yes, we are willing to defend it. We have to be right up front in nuclear technology because if a potential aggressor has that technology we could not possibly deter him unless ours was as good as his and preferably better. My generation is constantly grateful for the fact that at the end of the last war it was the free world that got the secret of the nuclear weapon first because had it been Hitler who had got it first we perhaps would not be here today enjoying the freedom of life we do. So yes, we have to have nuclear submarines, we have to have the nuclear weapon because that is the very latest technology and we must have it for that reason. So that we may continue to enjoy in future years the peace we have enjoyed for the last forty years. And so I come to HMS Vanguard. I have had the privilege of going on the Polaris submarine for a short time. The people who command them, the people who go to sea in them are quite outstanding. They take their duties to us seriously, we take our duties to them equally seriously. And so I am glad and proud to be associated with laying the keel of this first HMS Vanguard ship which will carry Trident because I believe that it will keep the peace which is the greatest desire of all of us.’148
Construction of two further submarines, HMS Victorious and HMS Vigilant, started in December 1987 and February 1991, with a decision on the fourth postponed until after the 1992 general election.
In order to accommodate Trident, a major works programme was required to expand, enhance and modernize facilities at the Clyde Submarine Base. The Trident Works Programme, like the Polaris Works Programme in the 1960s, became one of the largest and most complex building tasks ever undertaken by the Ministry of Defence and the Government’s Property Services Agency, and one of the biggest construction projects in Europe. Redevelopment of Faslane and Coulport began in 1985 at a final cost of £1.9bn. The overall scheme consisted of some 110 individual projects, many of them linked, and created more than 4000 jobs, with Scottish firms providing much of the planning and technological expertise. At Faslane a covered ship lift, the height of an eleven-storey building and as long as Wembley Stadium, was constructed to raise a ‘Vanguard’ class submarine clear of the water for repairs and routine maintenance. A new power generator facility, with the capacity to serve a town of 25,000 people, was built. At the Royal Naval Armament Depot in Coulport a new floating explosives-handling jetty, as tall as Nelson’s Column, as long as two football pitches, and weighing four times more than the aircraft carrier HMS Invincible was built to load and unload Trident missiles and warheads. A new refit facility in Rosyth dockyard, outside Edinburgh, to refit and refuel the ‘Vanguard’ submarines was also planned but later abandoned on cost grounds.
The infrastructure programme was beset with problems. Plans for the facilities at Faslane changed radically following the Chernobyl incident in Ukraine in April 1986 as MOD officials worried about the impact of an earthquake on the west coast of Scotland. Many of the new facilities were at that point redesigned to even more rigorous standards in order to withstand earthquakes and other extreme environmental conditions. The sudden changes put the Ministry of Defence in a weak negotiating position with contractors and building work was allowed to begin before designs had been finalized. The ship lift alone required 7200 alterations and at the peak of its construction programme 1000 consultants from sixty-seven firms were engaged on it, many on open-ended contracts. A hardhitting 1995 report from the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee heavily criticized the Ministry of Defence for its management of the refurbishing of Faslane, where costs increased from an initial budget of £1.1bn to £1.9bn.149
New facilities were also required at the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston, where warhead production facilities built in the late 1950s and early 1960s were approaching the end of their life. The UK purchased the Mark 4 re-entry vehic
le from the US for the Trident D5 missiles. As with Polaris, AWRE was responsible for designing a warhead that met the specifications of the re-entry vehicle in terms of weight, size, shape, centre of gravity and centre of inertia. The Trident warheads, known as Holbrooke Mark 4s, were based on the US-designed W76 warhead and were tested three times at the US Nevada test site. The warheads were to have been manufactured in a series of new facilities at AWRE, but costs spiralled from initial estimates of £250–£300m to over £1bn because of deficiencies in planning, control and liaison with the main Trident programme. Manufacture of the first warheads began in 1987, initially in AWRE’s existing facilities to supplement capacity until the new facilities became available.150
Debates about the fourth submarine continued into the late 1980s and early 1990s. In 1992, Grove’s successor as Chief Strategic Systems Executive, Rear Admiral Ian Pirnie, told the House of Commons Defence Select Committee that it was possible to show ‘on paper’ that three submarines could be sufficient to keep one on patrol at all times, but three submarines would allow for ‘no contingency at all or insurance against any form of material defect, refit delays, or anything else’. Opponents of the fourth submarine seized on Pirnie’s evidence and the Admiral was forced to return to the Committee and explain that his remarks had been misinterpreted. Pirnie’s advice to ministers had always been that four submarines were needed and that cancellation of a fourth boat would only save around £400m, around 4 per cent of the total cost of the Trident programme. ‘For that 4 per cent we increase our submarine availability by 50 per cent,’ said Pirnie.151
By the early 1990s, the fourth submarine had become tied up with the Labour Party’s retreat from unilateral nuclear disarmament. It featured heavily in the 1992 general election campaign, where the Prime Minister, John Major, declared during a speech in April that a future Conservative Government ‘will order, build, deploy and arm that fourth Trident submarine that our armed forces tell me they need’: ‘We will not take any risk with that crucial shield. But I tell you who would. Labour would. They don’t say, can’t say, won’t say what their attitude on Trident would be. Because they don’t know. First Labour say they will build it. Then they say they won’t build it. They even say they might build it and send it floating round the world devoid of arms. What would they call it? HMS Spineless? HMS Witless? HMS Clueless?’152