by James Jinks
At the time of Mr Brown’s announcement, eight months before the general election of May 2010, the original White Paper timetable was being adhered to. The so-called ‘Initial Gate’ of the ‘Successor’ procurement – the configuration of the boats’ missile compartments and their nuclear-propulsion system – was to be announced in September 2010 early in the life of what would be a new Parliament (the previous general election having taken place in May 2005) to allow the first of the Successors to enter service, according to the original timetable, in 2024 at a cost of £11bn–£14bn.
The outcome of the general election in 2010 added a novel element of political risk. The question of the Bomb was affected for the first time by the politics of coalition (Churchill had kept his Coalition colleagues – and his War Cabinet as a whole – well away from atomic matters during the 1940–45 Second World War Coalition).91 By the time of the 2010 general election, the Ministry of Defence and BAE Systems were some way into the ‘Concept’ phase for the Successor boats and the first sections of the intentionally elaborate organizational machinery of delivery were being pieced together. Shortly after the House of Commons vote, the Ministry of Defence created a Future Submarine Organisation to see the programme through its ‘Concept’ phase. In 2008 a Common Missile Compartment programme was established with the United States to cover both the ‘Vanguard’ and the ‘Ohio’ replacement programmes.
Stripped to its essentials, the ‘Successor Programme’ has five elements:
The design and build of the submarines to replace the ‘Vanguard’ class.
The industrial infrastructure needed to support the design and build.
Life extension of the current ‘Vanguard’ boats.
The operational infrastructure needed to support the ‘Successor’ system when it has entered service.
Support for the current warheads and the capacity to design a new warhead if needed.
It is easy when observing these huge interlocking procurements to lose sight of the need to keep existing facilities in a condition where they can rise to the demands of the new. For example, John Reid, as Defence Secretary, told the Commons on 19 July 2005 that the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston would be getting an additional £350m per annum for three years for this purpose.92 It was plain, too, before the Blair Cabinet took the decision to proceed with a ‘Successor’ system that the original 25-year operational life of the Vanguards would have to be extended beyond thirty years.
But the coming of the Coalition changed these calculations. The Bomb became a significant bargaining chip between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats in the Coalition’s programme for government in May 2010. The form of words agreed stated that ‘We will maintain Britain’s nuclear deterrent, and have agreed that the renewal of Trident will be scrutinized to ensure value for money. Liberal Democrats will continue to make the case for alternatives.’93
How did the nuclear-weapons element of the two-party deal play out as Britain got used to its first taste of peacetime coalition government since 1939? Firstly, Continuous At-Sea deterrence was maintained throughout the life of the Coalition. In the early days of his Premiership, David Cameron, after being briefed by the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Gus O’Donnell, and the National Security Adviser, Sir Peter Ricketts, wrote his four last-resort letters and appointed his Nuclear Deputies.94 The value for money study was completed in the run-up to the Government’s wider 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR). The question of the Trident upgrade swirled through the nuclear policy sub-committee NSC(N) of David Cameron’s new National Security Council and then, as is the way with the most sensitive intra-Coalition deals, in meetings outside that committee between the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg.95
The Cameron–Clegg deal was placed in a paper which went to the full National Security Council on 12 October 2010 before being announced in the SDSR document, ‘Securing Britain in an Age of Uncertainty’.96 The ingredients were:
Defer decisions on a replacement for a current warhead.
Reduce the cost of the replacement submarine missile compartment.
Extend the life of the current ‘Vanguard’ class submarines to thirty-seven years.
Re-profile the ‘Successor’ building programme. This means getting the first boat out of Barrow in February 2025 if it is to meet the target of leaving Faslane for its first operational patrol in July 2028.
Consequently, take the second investment decision, the so-called ‘Main Gate’, in 2016 which will involve approving the design and settling the question of three or four ‘Successor’ boats.
Reduce the number of warheads on board each submarine from 48 to 40.
Reduce the requirement for operationally available warheads from fewer than 160 to no more than 120.
Reduce the number of operational missiles on each submarine.97
The SDSR disclosed that the value for money review had yielded savings of £3.2bn and that the new boats will have eight operational missiles in a compartment of twelve in the shared US–UK design. It emerged later in the House of Commons that running the Vanguards on into the late 2020s and early 2030s (between six and eight years longer than the ‘Resolution’ class were at sea) will add £1.2bn to the eventual bill, largely because of the requirement for an extra refit for each Vanguard.98
Wherever you touch the ‘Successor’ programme, whether at the designers in Barrow, or with the policy-makers in the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall, the procurers at MOD Abbey Wood near Bristol, among the operators at Faslane or the refitters at Devonport, you have a sense of three clocks ticking simultaneously and relentlessly. The first counts the hours, days and years of effort needed to sustain the Vanguards into the late 2020s and early 2030s. This, it’s plain, is a technological leap in the dark which all concerned wish could have been avoided. The second clock is related to the first. The Chief of the Defence Staff’s directive (the wording and details of which are secret) lays upon the Submarine Service the duty of maintaining Continuous At-Sea Deterrence, which the Service has done through thick, thin and some very dicey moments since June 1969. Fulfilling that directive is bound to have some perilous moments as the ‘Vanguard’ class age and enter lifespans beyond those of the ‘Resolution’ class (some of which were pretty raddled by the time the ‘Vanguard’ class replaced them). The third clock is related to both the others – getting the first and subsequent Successors out of the Barrow Yard and through their sea trials and shakedowns in time to keep ‘a bloody Union Jack’ (Ernest Bevin’s phrase during discussions on the UK bomb in 1946) on the British Bomb at all times from 2028 until deep into the 2050s and maybe even into the 2060s.
Just how difficult it will be to extend the life of the ‘Vanguard’ class and to maintain CASD was evident to us when, with the former Chief of the Defence Staff, Lord Guthrie, we visited HMS Vigilant in the final stages of her refit at Devonport dockyard on 1 August 2011. We were greeted by Gavin Leckie, Programme Director responsible for getting the ‘Vanguard’ class through refit and for maintenance on the Clyde, and Rear Admiral Steve Lloyd, CSSE, in a board room alongside the huge warehouse where all the spare parts are kept for the submarines. 25,000 pieces of equipment came off Vigilant, which was in 9 Dock, where we saw her in February 2010, but the dock was no longer dry. Leckie explained how the dock could withstand an earthquake of a magnitude likely to happen once in 10,000 years, tsunamis and extreme tides. On the pace of refits, he said ‘the whole workforce is educated to CASD’. By the time Vigilant’s refit was completed 2.7 million man-hours had been spent on refurbishing the submarine – half industrial, half technical.
Boiler-suited and hard-hatted we climbed up the submarine’s gangplank with a Babcock photographer taking pictures from the dockside. There were 108 crew and the galley had already produced the first batch from its chip pan. ‘The day the chip pan works there’s life back on the boat,’ said Leckie. For refits, the chip pan moment seems to be the equivalent of a keel-laying or a launch
ceremony. Gavin says there have been twenty-eight alterations and additions to increase capacity.
We started our tour in the Torpedo Room and moved through the Control Room and Sonar Room. The galley was sparkling. Full health and safety rules applied (‘if you send a crew out with bugs you’ll run out of loo paper’). We went through 67 bulkhead into the missile compartment, ‘from metric land to imperial land’, said Leckie as US specification is in evidence where the weapons are. ‘If you blindfold an American submariner and put his hand on any bit of the equipment in here, he would know where he was.’ We looked at the three-tiered bunks for the junior rates, eighteen of them, which ran alongside part of the missile compartment.
Much of the morning and afternoon briefings covered the LIFEX Programme – the extension of the lives of the ‘Vanguard’ submarines. As we gathered once again in the Board Room, Leckie explained that twenty-four years is the normal life of a nuclear submarine. HMS Sceptre – the last of the ‘Swiftsure’ class now laid up – did 32–3 years. He finished by saying: ‘The reactor core burnt up and the hull life ended.’ Of the ‘Resolution’ class extension, Gavin said that ‘we stumbled into it; we cannot afford that now’. Getting the ‘Vanguard’ class to 2036, he said, is ‘a challenge … we’ve got to understand what that requires – early warning’. It’s a matter of maintaining CASD and managing the transition from the ‘Vanguard’ class to the ‘Successor’ class and anticipating ‘the cliff edges’. Do we need to prove Successor technology on the ‘Vanguard’ class? There is a Deterrent Transition Programme to ensure CASD as the classes overlap.
As we walked back to the Board Room Leckie told us that the origin of the ‘Vanguard’ class Life Extension Programme was HMS Victorious’s DASO in May 2009 when he and Mark Beverstock went for a run down Cocoa Beach. Of the work so far, Gavin said: ‘We’ve not found the show stopper – the cliff’s edge [such as a serious defect or serious hull fatigue]. The “Vanguard” class were well designed, well built and have been well supported. Non-destructive examination is now so intense using ultrasound so we’re away from using radiography. Structural surveys are not finding anything untoward at all but there’s more work to do. You can fingerprint these platforms to make sure it is not changing.
‘We’re doing a complete evaluation to do something today to keep it going another six years. But one of the biggest risks we are going to stumble into is, are our suppliers going to be there in twenty years? Mind you, you’ll need those suppliers for “Astute” and “Successor”. That could drive change. And the way we control the nuclear-implicated work is very, very safe. There’s independent scrutiny and standards are getting better.
‘The real issue is that we’ve moved from twenty SSNs to seven, so regenerating suitably qualified and experienced personnel with less than half the platforms. The risk is making savings in this.’
Leckie was certain that we cannot afford to dip below the critical mass required to remain a submarine nation. ‘Barrow lost the ability between “Vanguard” and “Astute”,’ he says. ‘You cannot afford to lose that critical mass.’
The timing anxiety increased a month after our visit to Devonport when the September announcement of the ‘Initial Gate’ funding, the choice of nuclear reactor for the Successors and the configuration of their missile compartments, did not materialize. The chief cause of the delay was arguments between the Ministry of Defence and the Treasury about reactors. The Treasury, with Danny Alexander, the Liberal Democrat Chief Secretary as its lead Minister, were finally persuaded that rather than carrying on with an improved model of the latest PWR2 installed in the ‘Astute’ class the expense of a new Rolls-Royce Pressurized Water Reactor 3 system (PWR3) was worth while, especially given the stringent health and safety requirements likely to apply in the 2030s, 2040s and 2050s. The Fukushima disaster in Japan sharpened the minds of all concerned to the dangers of running on reactors designed more than a generation earlier.99
Work on PWR3 began in 2000. In November 2006, Steve Ludlum, the then managing director of Rolls-Royce, explained the rationale behind the new reactor to the House of Commons Defence Committee:
The biggest issue with a nuclear reactor is when you are not using the power to move around or for electricity it is still generating heat and you need to take that heat away. Largely speaking, you would do that using a pumped flow system and electricity is required for that. If you lost the electricity the pump flow is not there and it is much harder to take the heat away. So a new design of reactor would aim to avoid pumped flow systems and a more natural process of taking the heat away and, hence, it would be much safer. In doing all that, the affordability changes, too, so when we have looked at a new reactor design compared to the old reactor design, we are looking at something like, perhaps, 10 or 20% improvements in affordability through a new reactor design too, because of the way that we would remove some of the components on the plant that we could basically design out and, again, make the plant better and safer to operate. We would be aiming to make it safer and cheaper, and within that new design sustaining the industry as well.100
The decision to go for PWR3 was finally taken on 29 March 2011, though it was not disclosed in Parliament until 18 May 2011 as Government announcements fell into purdah until the local government polls and the referendum on the alternative vote system for elections to the House of Commons had taken place in early May. In addition to a statement in the Commons from Liam Fox, the Defence Secretary, the Coalition published an Initial Gate Parliamentary Report.101 The document estimated that PWR3 would add £50m to the cost of each ‘Successor’ submarine. The reason given for going for PWR3 was that it would provide ‘superior performance over PWR2’ as it would significantly reduce periods in upkeep and maintenance as well as enhancing safety. ‘As we move to a new class of submarine the requirement to continually improve our performance … is only met through PWR3.’102
The PWR3 is also the result of renewed technical exchange between the Royal Navy and the United States Navy. In the late 2000s the restrictions on technical exchange put in place by Admiral Rickover were finally lifted. Around 2004 the US decided that it was in its strategic interest to start cooperating again on nuclear propulsion. There were a number of triggers that led to the change of policy. On the British side, the Chief Scientific Adviser to the Ministry of Defence, Sir Keith O’Nions, realized that the technical programme had started to atrophy. On the American side, the former head of US Naval Reactors, Admiral Frank Bowman, had experienced similar problems when the US Navy moved from the ‘Los Angeles’ class submarines to the new ‘Sea Wolf’ class. In 2004, both men sponsored a naval exchange programme that led to increased cooperation. The UK had made enormous inroads in sustaining the life of nuclear cores. This is a real UK success story and something the Americans are interested in.103
Under the US/UK 1958 MDA, Naval Reactors is providing the Ministry of Defence with US naval nuclear-propulsion technology to facilitate the development of the nuclear-propulsion plant for Successor. As of 2013 a UK-based office comprised about forty US personnel providing full-time engineering support for the exchange, with additional support from key US suppliers and other US-based programme personnel as needed.104 The PWR3 propulsion unit that will power Successor is ‘based on a US design’ but uses ‘next-generation UK reactor technology, PWR3 and modern secondary propulsion systems’.105
This does not mean that the PWR1 and PWR2 reactors used in existing classes are unsafe. As Rear Admiral Lister explains:
Designs have evolved over time, so while PWR-2 is perfectly safe, the opportunity to further improve safety performance existed. The other driving point is that the new plant is significantly simpler in design and operation than PWR-2. That brings a reduction in through-life costs, and also brings the levels of operational performance and availability that we seek. An additional supporting argument is that by exercising the design expertise in nuclear propulsion plant you sustain its competence and expertise. Designing a modern pressurise
d water reactor will sustain these skills for the lifetime of Successor.106
However, the Defence Nuclear Safety Regulator’s 2012/13 report predicted that the ‘Vanguard’ class are ‘likely to exhibit plant ageing effects’ because their lives have been extended to the late 2020s and early 2030s.107
In 2012, a problem was found with the PWR2 Prototype at Dounreay, after low levels of radioactivity were discovered in the cooling waters. Later tests revealed that a microscopic breach in the zirconium cladding around the reactor’s core was thought to be to blame, but it was not entirely clear how this came about. The PWR test reactor at Dounreay, which was shut down after the leak was detected, was intentionally run at higher levels of intensity than those in the Royal Navy’s submarines in order to pre-empt any similar problems with the reactors on board the vessels. It was restarted in November 2012 and continues to operate safely. But as a result of the discovery, HMS Vanguard, the first and oldest of the Vanguard fleet, will have to be refuelled with a new core during its next scheduled ‘deep maintenance period’ in 2015 at a cost of £120m. ‘ “This is the responsible option,” said the Defence Secretary, Philip Hammond, in a statement to the House of Commons on 6 March 2014. “Replacing the core on a precautionary basis at the next opportunity, rather than waiting to see if the core needs to be replaced at a later date, which would mean returning Vanguard for a period of unscheduled deep maintenance, potentially putting at risk the resilience of our ballistic missile submarine operations.” ’108 A decision to refuel the next oldest submarine, HMS Victorious, will not be taken until 2018.