The Silent Deep

by James Jinks

  2100, the Green House, pub, a few yards from the jetty

  As you walk through the door, there are all the crests of the Royal Navy submarines that have conducted DASOs since the 1960s. Beer flows. Mark Lister arrives to much congratulation. Captain James Hayes RN, in effect the inspector of the exercise with his US namesake on board, presents Mark with an already framed photo of his launch complete with commemorative medals. Hayes also gives him a framed picture of the Viktor Leonov which has scrawled upon it ‘Congratulations on a Successful Shot! Yrs, Ivan.’ In his reply to Hayes’s speech Lister says: ‘This is the greatest day of my life apart from the days when my children were born.’ His wife Mary is there as she had watched the launch from the Waters.

  The First Sea Lord, Mark Stanhope, is glowing with pleasure. He had been aboard Victorious in May 2009 on the day the test had been postponed because of an electrical storm. So he was witnessing it this afternoon for the first time.

  A successful DASO is a big rite of passage for the submariners and an experience that doesn’t fall to many. The WEOs who have done it join a small outfit called ‘The Trigger Club’, which actually meets for dinners. Does such a thing exist for COs? We’ll ask Mark Lister when we breakfast with him tomorrow.

  Wednesday, 24 October 2012, 8.00 a.m., breakfast, Double Tree Hotel, with Commander Mark Lister and fellow officers from HMS Vigilant

  In an understated, British way there is mild euphoria that things went so well yesterday. Lieutenant Commander Dave O’Connor, the latest recruit to the now ten-strong ‘Trigger Club’, tells us the launch was exactly at 1420. A manned Soyuz spacecraft had caused the twenty-minute delay. The D5 took thirty-four minutes to complete its flight. At the other end of the range, six re-entry vehicles were seen and the seventh one heard. Later we hear from American friends that Vigilant’s shot was among the most accurate ever of the D5 tests from both US and UK submarines.

  Also breakfasting is Vigilant’s newest officer recruit, Lieutenant Chris Poley, whom we had met on HMS Astute in Faslane during the summer of 2011. What did he make of the three week voyage across the Atlantic to Kings Bay and life aboard a ‘Bomber’? Above all, he said, it’s how ‘your life shrinks down into very small size and eventually a handful of rooms’.

  Also breakfasting with us is Julian Miller, number two in the Cabinet Office’s National Security Secretariat. Julian, who in the past ran the Assessments Staff in the Cabinet Office’s Joint Intelligence Organisation, was wondering if the AGI added to a pattern of increased activity by the Russians.

  Mark Lister knows about the Russians. He’s had a long naval career serving in SSNs, SSBNs and also the old conventional submarines. He talks about the differences:

  ‘In the diesel submarines the Captain was the only man who would order the submarine around … It was a reflection of his personality. I can’t do everything on my own on a “V” boat. The CO of an Oberon would instinctively know almost everything about the boat bar the engines.’

  Lister is deeply pleased to have this command. He’s fifty but plainly still at the top of his powers. He’s risen right up through the ranks starting off as an Able Seaman in 1978 and, with HMS Spartan, he was involved in the Falklands thirty years ago. Like pretty well all the COs, he confirmed that the boats he commands are (family apart) the loves of his life.

  How tense was he before the launch?

  ‘Not very because of two days rest before. I wasn’t fatigued yesterday. I was fresh and apparently from T minus 30, I stopped being my normal self and became quite serious. In the control room it was dealing with the fourteen VIPs while talking to Range Command that was the real challenge. But after a while you go so vacant that you are able to tune out the guests.’

  There were fifty-five extra riders on board the submarine, forty-five of whom were American.

  ‘[The relationship is] Very solid. They are very keen to say that the community ethos is so strong. A US Commander is in tactical command when we are using their range to test the missile. He is the one who controls the launch. I think I can do everything … but he’s the one who says that I can fire. The most gratifying thing is to hear an American who has been on eight or nine DASOs who says that this DASO was one of the best. I’m fortunate in that I’ve got a submarine in good condition and good people. The ship’s company that you join is like a family. Reputation matters and this contributes to the reputation.’

  What was it like in the Control Room once the missile was launched? Did they cheer?

  ‘We were bracing ourselves for all kinds of things. I have done hundreds of WSRT [Weapons System Readiness Tests] in the submarine. You go through the test and nothing happens. This was with a real key. After the launch, 16,000 tons of submarine shook and oscillated. You hear the compensation water coming into the tube and feel the boat steadying out on depth after about thirty seconds. Then we have a short period of checks before surfacing.’

  What about the Russians? How much of a bother was the AGI?

  ‘A lot. They were trying to get our signature. If I was him I’d be doing the same thing. I’m an old Cold War submariner and I don’t talk to the Russians. To call them the enemy is the wrong word … they were adversaries and they still are. They are still the greatest credible threat.’

  Mark Lister drives us down to Vigilant alongside a special jetty dully black in the bright Florida sun. Inside she looks bright and lived in and utterly transformed from the cold, dark, empty shell we saw in Devonport in February 2010 when the reactor was taken out to be fitted with its new core.

  We tell Lister we’d heard that when the VIPs were shown where the launch keys were kept in the outer safe on their tour of the boat on the way out to the launch site, Frank Miller had asked him where the Prime Minister’s letter was. Lister said he avoided getting into a discussion about that and had told Miller he couldn’t talk about it. In fact, David Cameron’s last-resort letter was placed in Vigilant’s inner safe only when she joined the patrol cycle in September 2013. We are delighted to find that that ironing board – the latest cause of tension in the long history of the US–UK special nuclear relationship, and quite unforeseen by the 1963 Polaris Sales Agreement – is still affixed to the missile tube.

  A few weeks on, a letter arrives from Frank Miller returning on paper the answer to the question Hennessy put to him at the DASO Dinner in the Double Tree:

  My dear Peter,

  You asked me for my views on the independent nature of the United Kingdom’s nuclear deterrent, and, specifically, whether I believed an American President had a technical capability to impede (or otherwise negate) the launch of a British Trident missile.

  Let me say at the outset that I exercised direct Policy oversight of the US strategic nuclear deterrent from 1981 to 2001. From early in 1982 onwards that brief included responsibility for the US/UK nuclear relationship. I was intimately familiar during those years with US nuclear-weapons plans, policies, procedures and weapons systems (and with most British ones as well). At no time was there ever any evidence (or even a suggestion) that a US ‘veto’ existed over a British Prime Minister’s ability to execute independently the UK’s Polaris or Trident force. Indeed, had such a capability existed, I would have become aware of it as part of the intrusive nature of my oversight responsibilities.

  I am therefore quite confident in assuring you that no such mechanism exists and that the UK’s independent nuclear deterrent is exactly that: independent.

  On returning from the USA, Hennessy spoke to David Young, a veteran of nuclear-weapons policy and procedures in the Cold War Ministry of Defence in the 1970s, about the letter and the question which prompted it. ‘I would be very surprised’ if the US President had the capacity to prevent the launch of a Royal Navy missile, he said. ‘But they could do slow starvation. Ingenuity couldn’t get you round the bend. It would be finito.’74

  Sir Kevin Tebbit, Permanent Secretary to the Ministry of Defence, 1998–2005, whose experience of nuclear-weapons policy goes back to t
he early 1970s, confirmed David Young’s view. If the United States decided it wished the UK out of the nuclear-weapons business, ‘It would take six months at least; could be a bit longer than that. Whatever the period, it’s irrelevant to the management of a crisis.’75

  But there was no sign of that in Florida or the ocean to the east of it in October 2012. Quite the reverse. Beyond the immediate DASO, all eyes – British and American – were on the ‘Successor’ programme.

  SUCCESSOR

  For a period of eighteen months or so, the question of the ‘Successor’ system to Trident seemed briefly to fracture the iron law that Britain’s nuclear-weapons decision-taking phases coincide with economic crisis and public spending stress. For when the Blair Cabinet met on 4 December 2006 and agreed, without a single dissenting voice, to authorize the construction of a new generation of missile-bearing submarines to sustain a UK nuclear deterrent over the period 2020–50, the magnitude of the financial crash of 2008 and the duration of the recovery period which followed was foreseen by few, and certainly not by the ministers gathered in No. 10. That morning they approved a White Paper, ‘The Future of the United Kingdom’s Nuclear Deterrent’, which was presented to Parliament that afternoon.76

  The White Paper declared that:

  We have … decided to maintain our nuclear deterrent by building a new class of submarines … A final decision on whether we require three or four submarines will be taken when we know more about their detailed design.

  We have also decided to participate in the US life extension programme for the Trident D5 missile which will enable us to retain that missile in service until the early 2040s. Our existing nuclear warhead design will last into the 2020s. We do not yet have sufficient information to know whether it can, with some refurbishment, be extended beyond that point or whether we will need to develop a replacement warhead: a decision is likely to be necessary in the next parliament.77

  Tony Blair, in a personal Foreword to the White Paper, primarily deployed the uncertain world, unpredictable future argument to explain why he was not going to take Britain out of the ranks of the nuclear-weapons states:

  We cannot predict the way the world will look in 30 or 50 years time. For now some of the old realities remain. Major countries, which pose no threat to the UK today, retain large arsenals some of which are recognised as being modernised or increased. None of the present nuclear weapons states intends to renounce nuclear weapons, in the absence of an agreement to disarm multilaterally, and we cannot be sure that a major nuclear threat to our vital interests will not emerge over the long term.

  We also have to face threats, particularly of regional powers developing nuclear weapons for the first time which present a threat to us … And we need to factor in the requirement to deter countries which might in the future seek to sponsor nuclear terrorism from their soil. We believe that an independent British nuclear deterrent is an essential part of our insurance against the uncertainties and risks of the future … I believe it is crucial that, for the foreseeable future, British Prime Ministers have the necessary assurance that no aggressor can escalate a crisis beyond UK control.78

  Within days a carefully choreographed exchange of letters between Tony Blair and President George Bush had agreed to essentials of a deal under the terms of the 1958 Mutual Defence Agreement and the 1963 Polaris Sales Agreement.79 On 14 March 2007, the House of Commons voted 409 to 161 to renew Trident (88 Labour MPs voted against but Conservative support gave the Blair Government a comfortable majority).80 Earlier the Government had defeated an amendment which would have delayed the decision by 413 to 167 (95 Labour MPs voted for this).81

  For all the force of Tony Blair’s Foreword to the White Paper and the size of those majorities in the House of Commons, there was a lingering dash of uncertainty for those in the Royal Navy, the Ministry of Defence, at Aldermaston and Burghfield, BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce, Babcock International, plus a myriad of suppliers to Submarine Britain – which the Government itself made plain. Future Parliaments would have to take decisions on the number of successor submarines, their detailed design and build, and new warheads for the Lockheed Martin missiles.82

  What did not emerge at the time was the degree to which Tony Blair had contemplated ending the enterprise begun by Attlee and his nuclear Cabinet Committees in 1945–7.83 When the Blair memoirs, A Journey, appeared in September 2010 they contained an intriguing admission, written in the conversational style the former PM adopted for his recollections:

  We agreed the renewal of the independent nuclear deterrent. You might think I would have been certain of that decision, but I hesitated over it. I could see clearly the force of the common sense and practical arguments against Trident, yet in the final analysis I thought giving it up too big a downgrading of our status as a nation, and in an uncertain world, too big a risk for our defence. I did not think this was a ‘tough on defence’ versus ‘weak or pacifist’ issue at all.

  On simple pragmatic grounds, there was a case either way. The expense is huge, and the utility in a post-Cold War world is less in terms of deterrence and non-existent in terms of military use. Spend the money on more helicopters, aircraft and anti-terror equipment? Not a daft notion.

  In the situations in which British forces would be likely to be called upon to fight, it was pretty clear what mattered most. It is true that it is frankly inconceivable we would use our nuclear deterrent alone, without the US – and let us hope a situation in which the US is even threatening use never arises – but it’s a big step to put that beyond your capability as a country.

  So, after some genuine consideration and reconsideration, I opted to renew it. But the contrary decision would not have been stupid. I had a perfectly good and sensible discussion with Gordon [Brown] who was similarly torn. In the end, we both agreed, as I said to him: Imagine standing up in the House of Commons and saying I’ve decided to scrap it. We’re not going to say that, are we? In this instance, caution, costly as it was, won the day.84

  The nuclear-weapons people in Submarine Britain are well aware – none more so – that just one instance of what Tony Blair called ‘caution’ not winning the day, and that would be it. Britain would cease to be a nuclear-weapons state either within weeks (if the decision was to decommission the existing boats) or years (if it was decided to carry on for as long as the system was viable but no longer). For it would be, in practical terms, impossible to regenerate a substantial nuclear-weapons capacity once it had been abandoned.

  The ‘Successor’ teams are very aware that the boats which exist only in the designs upon their computer screens, like the old ‘Resolution’ class and the current ‘Vanguard’ class, are the most politically controversial pieces of military equipment that have been, or will be, operated by the British Armed Forces. When you visit the more sensitive parts of Submarine Britain, that idea hangs in the air, especially at a period, in the words of one insider, ‘when the politics of the programme meet the realities’ of the time needed to build the new systems if there is not to be a gap between the ageing Vanguards and sufficient of the fledgling Successors to sustain continuous at-sea deterrence.85

  Another insider, also reflecting on the wider ecology of the ‘Successor’ project in the summer of 2012, said: ‘The political risk is significant. If it’s a half-hearted programme, if there’s a lukewarm appetite for the programme, if it’s just another procurement, that’s a risk. If [by contrast] it’s like the Olympics [whose start was imminent then], you’re going to do it.’86 Between the 2006 White Paper and those candid conversations in the summer of 2012 there had been a number of anxiety-inducing elements in the lives of what one might call the ‘Successorites’, whether in uniform, in civvies or in overalls.87 Tony Blair’s successor in No. 10, Gordon Brown, took nearly everybody by surprise in September 2009 during a non-proliferation session of the United Nations Security Council when he declared that ‘the United Kingdom will retain only the absolute minimum credible and continuing nuclear deterrent
capability’. The Prime Minister explained that ‘subject to technical analysis and progress in multilateral negotiations, my aim is that when the next class of submarines enters service in the mid-2020s, our fleet should be reduced from four boats to three’.88 Neither the full Cabinet, the US allies, or even the members of the nuclear sub-committee of Gordon Brown’s National Security, International Relations and Development Cabinet Committee, let alone the First Sea Lord, Sir Mark Stanhope, had been consulted in advance of his departure for New York. Only at the last minute did word reach the Royal Navy of what he intended to say and Mr Brown was persuaded to add the words ‘credible and continuing’ to his speech.89

  There is a consensus within the Submarine Service that if the size of the Successor fleet was reduced to just three submarines, the Royal Navy would not be able to maintain one submarine continuously at sea. A fourth submarine reduces the workload and stress on the other three submarines, it also allows the Navy to plan against the possibility of accidents and other unforeseen circumstances, which history has repeatedly shown can and do happen.

  The most recent occurred in February 2009, a few months before Gordon Brown’s announcement, when HMS Vanguard, the on-patrol submarine, collided while submerged with the French SSBN, Le Triomphant. The French authorities initially believed Le Triomphant had hit a shipping container, but it later became clear that the two submarines struck each other while travelling at slow speeds. Le Triomphant was able to return to its base on L’Île Longue near Brest, under its own power. HMS Vanguard also remained on patrol until another submarine could sail from Faslane and take over responsibility for maintaining the deterrent. When Vanguard returned to Faslane, the submarine was put into the ship lift and raised out of the water. Royal Navy and Babcock engineers then carried out repairs before returning the submarine to the operational cycle. ‘Doing it [Continuous At Sea Deterrence] with four is bloody difficult, especially with one in Devonport having its core done,’ says one senior submariner, with responsibility for ensuring the Vanguards are able to put to sea. ‘When the third boat goes into the ship lift, I’m left with two boats, one of which always has to be on patrol. It’s bloody hard.’90