Dive Bombers

20th January 2008
By Michael Bilton
The Sunday Times
 

They can wipe out entire nations, and the British government plans to build even more. Are our Trident nuclear submarines essential for peacekeeping, or are they just expensive relics of the cold war? Michael Bilton meets the men with their fingers on the trigger.

Gordon Brown had been prime minister for only a few days when he learnt what it is to be the only person who can order the launch of Britain's nuclear weapons. He sat down to write a personal letter to the commanders of the Royal Navy's four Trident missile-carrying submarines. Every British leader has to do it on taking office. The letters are, in effect, a PM's last will and testament, a doomsday bequest putting the submarine, its deadly ballistic ballast, and the lives of hundreds of millions of people at the disposal of one man. Brown's letter is locked in a safe on all four boats, to be opened only if the British government is wiped out in a nuclear war and all contact with home has been irrevocably lost. The irony is that if the letters are ever opened by a Trident skipper, it will mean his career, as custodian of Britain's multi-billion-pound deterrent, will have been wasted – and life as we know it will probably have ceased.

John Major considered the task so sensitive that he preferred to write his letters at home over a weekend. He wanted to consider his words carefully, aware of the heavy burden he would be placing on four comparatively young men. The captains of the submarine might well have lost their own families. The loss of communication with the government command centre would mean a huge nuclear strike had reduced vast swathes of Britain to ashes. How do you write a letter to these men? What do you say?

The historian Peter Hennessy says that during the long years of the cold war, the prime-ministerial order gave commanders four choices: put yourself under US command, if it still exists; go to Australia, if it is still there; fire your nuclear missiles at the enemy we are at war with; and finally, use your own judgment.

Julian Ferguson, now 54, never read his letter during his patrols in charge of the Polaris submarines and their Trident successors. His family lived close to the key Soviet target in Scotland, the Faslane nuclear-submarine base. The retired commander recalls the day the cabinet secretary came to lunch on his submarine in 1992: "He asked me to go to the safe to see whether John Major's letter had actually turned up. It had. I never read it but I knew it was hugely symbolic – straight out of Dr Strangelove. There are steps that we are invited to take to see whether there is anybody [left] out there." Ferguson's only connection with the submarines now is the view from his house, watching the black leviathans slice through the Clyde on their way to secret patrols in the world's oceans. Down at Faslane the cold war may be long over, but the deterrence patrols remain rigidly in force. One Trident submarine – which are known as "bombers" in the Navy – is submerged on silent watch every day of the year. The other three rotate: one returning from a three-month patrol, one in the maintenance berth, and one in long-term refit in Devonport. The process, called "continuous at-sea deterrence", has been the centrepiece of Britain's strategic-defence policy for over 40 years, and costs £1.5 billion a year. That, the government says, is a cheap price to pay to prevent nuclear war.

In 2007, the 300th patrol slid into the North Atlantic without fanfare, and this process will continue for the next 20 years. For three months the crew is expected to be invisible and silent. Communicating with headquarters is allowed only in dire emergency. A 1,000-metre aerial wire trails from the submarine along the surface of the sea and receives incoming messages.

 

On a bleak autumn day in Faslane, the naval base northwest of Glasgow, leaden clouds hang overhead and deliver an unrelenting drizzle. The crew of HMS Vigilant and a group of maintenance men are "locked down" inside a high-security area. The submarine is guarded by Royal Marines, with orders to shoot to kill.

The beast is 450ft long and weighs 16,000 tons. Engineers are working furiously, gingerly navigating the hull, which is covered in dark, sonar-absorbing anechoic tiles. Below decks, crew members and civilian workers bustle through narrow corridors. The nuclear reactor that powers the boat is in sleep mode. On board are a dozen or more Trident missiles. Each is the height of a four-storey house and weighs 60 tons. They each carry an average of three nuclear warheads, shaped like large traffic cones.

A hundred yards away, a Greenpeace boat swans up and down the loch, protesting. It attempts occasional forays in dinghies or canoes to breach the cordon of security where HMS Vigilant makes ready for its next patrol. An attempt triggers a procedure that shuts the entire base down in seconds. The drill is well-rehearsed among the thousands of base employees. Doing the wrong thing could get you shot. Faslane is a series of compounds within compounds, all heavily guarded. To board HMS Vigilant, everyone is painstakingly cleared from one zone to another until the last and most secure box around the submarine quay itself. Security checks involve different-coloured official passes, codes to be keyed into computer-controlled locks, and turnstiles. Only those with a special pass board the bomber itself, through a small door in the side of HMS Vigilant's conning tower and then down a 20ft steel-runged ladder into the belly of the submarine.

Navy personnel and base workers have as many problems getting out as getting in. In the late afternoon, the Vigilant's captain, Cmdr Paul Dunn, is "held" within the highest security zone beside his boat during an alert, unable to get to his car. He and his wife, Kathryn, are due to go camping for the weekend with their two young boys and the local Cub Scouts. The prematurely silver-haired Dunn waits with calm resignation for nearly an hour before the emergency ends. This is nothing new. Faslane attracts constant protest. Outside, a permanent peace camp of tents, dilapidated trucks and caravans has made its presence felt for years. Attempts to break into the base cause chaos. Traffic on the road outside is held up for miles.

Dunn is a down-to-earth Devonian with an easy manner. His postings since graduating from Dartmouth seem to have marked him for high command. He joined the navy at 18 and, now 36, is one of the youngest men ever to command a Trident submarine. "I don't have a problem with the peace camp," he says. "Our job is to ensure they have that right to protest. Their activities do prove very difficult for local people, not just those who work at Faslane. It means hundreds, if not thousands, of lives are disrupted. But that is what happens in a democracy."

Nuclear deterrence is not just a shield: it qualifies Britain for a seat at the top table of international diplomacy. With this much power to destroy at our fingertips, we cannot be ignored. Working with the United States, British scientists in the 1950s and '60s tested and developed first an atom bomb, then nuclear weapons with names that were bland and colourful at the same time: Blue Danube, Yellow Sun, Red Beard, Green Grass, Violet Club, and Orange Herald. Most were horribly crude pieces of engineering, weighing several tons and over 20ft long.

But the science of manufacturing megadeath becomes ever more sophisticated. It took nearly 20 years for Britain to design, build and fully re-equip the navy with the fleet of four new Vanguard-class submarines it has today. HMS Vigilant was the third to be built. Trident was Britain's cold-war weapon of choice, massively powerful and with a range of at least 4,000 miles, but by the time the first Trident bomber entered service in 1994, the cold war had ended. The submarines, built at Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria, were made to last 25 years.

Now, the warheads are not aimed at specific targets. Instead they await co-ordinates that can be received from HQ, programmed into their onboard computers and fired independently within a 15-minute timescale. Many believe that the US has a "golden key" to override the British firing mechanism. But this is completely untrue. The final word on firing is the prime minister's – unless his letter has been opened.

On board HMS Vigilant, control of the firing process is in the hands of Dunn and a senior weapons officer. Both have to independently verify a series of codes and protocols. Nobody on board actually knows what targets are selected. The co-ordinates are prepared by a "targeting cell" somewhere inside the Ministry of Defence.

Britain doesn't actually own the Trident missiles: they are leased from a pool shared with the US at Kings Bay, Georgia. Britain has title to 58 of these. When a bomber has finished a prolonged three-year refit, it performs trials, collects its missiles at Kings Bay, then carries out a shakedown, test-firing off the Florida coast. It then comes back to the Clyde and goes to another heavily guarded base, the armaments depot at Coulport, to collect its warheads. Final sea trials are followed by operational patrol – most of the crew never know where they are. A series of preplanned "boxes" are patrolled, each several hundred thousand square miles in the vast Atlantic Ocean. Intelligence is constantly relayed to the bomber, providing details of shipping movements and potentially hostile aircraft or submarines in the area. The submarine navigates by mapped contours of the ocean floor. The most crucial job is to remain quiet and covert. "At times we switched off the washing machine," says submariner Julian Ferguson.

The boats are super-stealthy. A pump-jet propulsion system and a 20-blade fan instead of a propeller allow the submarine to remain virtually silent. All patrols are audited – in 40 years, no Trident or Polaris submarine on operational patrol has ever been detected.

Dunn says that missile-firing is not something that he spends a lot of time worrying about. "Obviously, it is something I think about – I have a wife and two kids at home. But having nuclear missiles on board is why we are here: we are a delivery platform. And if we are required by the prime minister to fire, then that is what we will do, and nobody should be in any doubt."

Ferguson says: "If there was an exchange of these things, by the time you were told to fire, you could assume your home was ashes. That might sound rather melodramatic, but that was what the cold war was about. Nowadays it is rather more complex. There are people in the basement at the MoD scratching their heads going, 'Which of the world's trouble spots do we wish to present to the politicians [as targets]?'

"As a commander of one of these platforms out there, I would not wish to know where the rockets were going, because if I did, the missile technician who was programming the computer on board would know as well. What you do not want is a bunch of disaffected people for whom the burdens of what they are doing fall very heavily on their shoulders, going into the ship's library, picking up an atlas and looking at a spot on the map and saying, 'That's where it is going. I wonder if we should be doing that.' "

On board HMS Vigilant, fire is a very real danger. Two crew members on the nuclear-powered HMS Tireless were killed in March when fire broke out in the submarine's bow. An oxygen-processing machine exploded near the forward escape compartment. Firefighting drills are constantly held. Smoke is the killer. Three years ago a Canadian submariner died three seconds after inhaling highly toxic fumes. But life-threatening emergencies are a rarity. With a nuclear reactor powering their craft, many of the crew are highly educated technicians. There are workshops in which they can repair most parts of the submarine that go wrong.

On patrol there are 140 crew members. Games are organised, DVDs are watched, iPods listened to, quizzes held. Time management is crucial to psychological wellbeing. Submerged, daytime is simulated to provide some semblance of normality for the body clock; at night, lighting is dimmed and red lights bathe the submarine. Routine is essential. The navy is well versed in the psychology of maintaining morale in confined spaces. Crews need anchor points during the patrol, when they stay totally submerged and out of touch for three months.

On board, if it is curry for dinner, it must be Wednesday. Fish on Friday. Roast, followed by a choc-ice, always on Sunday. There is even a mini-gym. The crew receives news broadcasts – even The Archers during the first week of their patrol. The BBC provides DVDs of forthcoming programmes. Each crewman gets a 40-word family-gram every week, but bad news is usually kept from them. Julian Ferguson once had an officer on board whose wife worked for BBC radio. Very occasionally he would go down to the wireless room and have one of the communications staff tune in to her broadcast so he could hear her voice. It was his way of getting through a patrol. Only in a dire emergency will the boat surface or send a signal. The entire 13-week patrol is an exercise in getting lost and staying lost until it is time to come home. By then, another bomber will already be starting its patrol. Only then would Dunn bring his boat to the surface and begin sending a slew of messages detailing maintenance issues.

As a gesture to disarmament, in 1998 the Blair government dramatically cut the British nuclear stockpile – getting rid of all tactical weapons and limiting each submarine to a maximum of 48 warheads, weapons that can nevertheless cause terrible damage. They can strike anywhere on Earth and cause some countries to cease to exist. Britain's post-cold-war Trident submarines go to sea with fewer missiles and warheads. Sometimes one or more of the missile tubes contains concrete ballast blocks to control buoyancy. Most British weapons have a yield of 80 to 100 kilotons – seven or eight times the destructive power dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But some are much smaller – 10 to 15 kilotons. Some missiles have multiple warheads and dummies; others contain only a small single device – probably a low-yield weapon, with limited destructive power. In some scenarios it doesn't take a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

The key to deterrence-theory is to convince a potential adversary that we have not only the capability but also the will to fire a nuclear weapon if critically threatened. A British prime minister might feel constrained in giving the order to fire if the result was massively disproportionate to the threat from a rogue state or terrorist group. Smaller-yield single warheads could be used to demonstrate British resolve, coupled with a warning of the devastation that might follow if a potential enemy did not back off. Deliberate ambiguity is a crucial strategy. Would Britain make the first use of nuclear weapons? Ministers refuse to say. Keeping an enemy guessing is the name of the game.

But do we need a nuclear deterrent any more? The argument goes that it's just like a home-insurance policy – your house will probably never burn down, but would you rather not have the policy? In an uncertain world, the government, a huge majority of MPs, and most of the British people themselves believe in it. It is a subject that hasn't taxed voters since the 1980s.

In March a huge majority of MPs voted to renew Britain's nuclear deterrent. The four Trident submarines are to get a life extension of five years. Designing and building their replacements will cost between £15 billion and £20 billion. The first of the new submarines, carrying an improved missile, has to be ready by 2024, when HMS Vanguard ends its useful life. It sounds like business as usual. But has the government missed the opportunity to think outside the box?

Critics argue the decision to renew the nuclear deterrent was rushed through parliament to help BAE Systems, the company that builds the submarines in Barrow. It's the same firm that is caught up in the alleged bribes-to-Saudi-princes scandal, in which Tony Blair intervened to halt an investigation by the Serious Fraud Office.

Building nuclear submarines and maintaining the warhead stockpile is a costly business on both sides of the Atlantic. But the Americans are extending the life of their Trident subs from 30 to 40 years. Professor Richard Garwin, a US nuclear-weapons expert, believes the same could be done here, saving a big slice of the £15 billion cost of replacement, but his ideas have irked the British defence establishment. UK officials insist that our strategic submarines were designed differently. When they are 30, they will truly be worn out. Julian Ferguson remembers when Polaris subs were coming to the end of their life; crucial parts wore out and replacing them became harder and harder. "It's like having a 30-year-old Ford Escort: finding new parts gets more difficult as each year goes by."

But Garwin and some of his US colleagues – who between them have enormous experience of American nuclear-deterrent programmes – say Britain would be crazy not to have a radical rethink. They told MPs a longer life extension to Britain's Trident boats could save £5 billion.

The defence secretary, Des Browne, poured scorn on the idea, allegedly claiming in private that Garwin had no expertise in designing submarines. In fact, Garwin has served on several US blue-ribbon panels on anti-submarine warfare and naval warfare, and his knowledge of submarine technology and the longevity of their hulls is extensive. He and his colleagues openly challenge the view that British Tridents only have a maximum life of 30 years, saying this suits the companies that build them and their shareholders. A member of the US National Academy of Sciences and a leading adviser on nuclear weapons to three presidents, Garwin says that new maintenance programmes would extend the life of the British Tridents. During that time a root-and-branch rethink could be made about the UK's nuclear deterrence. Would Britain necessarily want to keep nuclear weapons beyond 2035, continuing with cold-war weapons, which have huge overkill? Instead, new technologies offer opportunities to build cheaper, smaller submarine platforms capable of carrying smaller missiles with longer ranges. Instead of Britain constructing three or four new huge Trident bombers, Garwin believes that we should construct a fleet of six to eight smaller ones. This would offer greater flexibility. Two could be at sea at all times, carrying smaller single-warhead missiles. "The question is 'What is necessary?' Against whom could the strategic nuclear deterrent effectively be oriented? This is difficult to answer at a time of international confusion about the future of nuclear weapons. Extending the current submarines' life allows a delay that might produce a clearer answer."

For 50 years a handful of countries have possessed the capability of destroying much of the life on Earth. Now a new super-rich Russia is planning to re-equip its navy with nuclear subs; China is expanding its navy; Iran is determined to get nuclear weapons. Here the RAF faces the loss of two bomber squadrons. The navy is facing devastating cuts in its surface fleet to pay for two giant aircraft carriers. Meanwhile, the British Army has been pared to the bone fighting on two fronts: men and equipment shortages crucially are costing lives and efficiency in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Saving £5 billion on our nuclear deterrent would free up money needed elsewhere. A fierce debate is already taking place in our armed forces about the politicians' decision to replace Trident – and nobody is taking bets that MPs at some time won't be forced to reconsider the future size and shape of Britain's deterrent.

 
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