The greater part of patrol life centred around our ability to unleash nuclear weapons on the Soviets at 15 minutes’ notice, should Britain find herself subjected to a nuclear attack. The deterrent would only be used as a second-strike option, but in the days of the Cold War the perception of the public at large was that we were teetering on the edge of nuclear destruction. Cold War brinkmanship, spying, propaganda and the rise of hawks on the right, both in the UK and in the States, with Thatcher and Ronald Reagan (who’d succeeded ex-submariner Jimmy Carter), had led to increased tension between East and West. This continued into the 1980s, and by the end of the decade the threat of all-out nuclear confrontation had escalated and was never far from the headlines. Nowhere was this felt more acutely than on board my submarine.
We practised a firing drill at least once a week. During this exercise we’d receive the firing signal from fleet headquarters at Northwood, and a pipe would go over the main broadcast: ‘XO WEO wireless office.’ They’d both haul themselves along to the radio shack as quickly as possible, where they’d rip off a coded message from Submarine Command, then make their way back to the control room where the message was decoded using code books locked away inside a double safe. This authentication message would be matched against codes. It was then the captain’s responsibility to check whether the signal was the real thing or an exercise. No one person could launch the missiles singlehandedly; a series of steps – a checklist, if you like – was followed whereby different crew members’ responsibilities had to be fulfilled and ticked off, before the next step could be actioned and the launch continued. Once authenticated, the submarine was brought to action stations for missile launch.
The WEO would leave the control room via the aft ladder, go to the missile control centre on 3 Deck to spin up the missiles ready for launch, check the guidance codes and stand by with the old-fashioned firing mechanism. It looked like the grip of a handgun, with a trigger that would actually commence the firing sequence and propel the missiles out of the tubes and away to their targets. With the WEO safely tucked away in the missile control centre, the submarine made its way to launch depth. And then the fun began.
The pitch of the submarine first had to be perfect. In order to launch the missiles, this 8,500-tonne, 20th-century man-of-war needed to be able to hover completely still to launch its grim payload into the skies. The hover pump was controlled at the systems console, and either let water in or out, pumping or flooding to maintain launch depth. The submarine slowed right down, and adjustments were made to any bubble buoyancy issues with a tweak of the afterplanes and foreplanes, all of which helped keep the submarine level and ready for action.
Behind the periscopes, sitting on the outside of the nav centre, was the attack centre info panel, a light indicator console that illuminated the status of the individual missiles. The captain’s key went into the bottom of this. When we were safely at depth, hovering nicely, he would turn the key and announce over the loudspeaker system: ‘The WEO has my permission to fire.’ Upon hearing this, the missiles would be spun in a pre-determined sequence and then fired by the WEO. A high-pressure pump forced gas into the tube, opening the missile hatch and propelling the missile out and upwards as it headed towards the surface, finally breaking through to the world above.
The missile at this point stopped dead in its tracks for what seemed an eternity, but was actually less than a second, before the rocket motor ignition kicked in with a mighty roar. It now essentially became a rocket, albeit a massively armed one, and launched into outer space on a pre-determined flight path, homing in on its target via a high-arcing orbit. The missile could be guided by the boat’s computers or become self-guided, should the boat come under attack, and would fly towards its target following re-entry from space. After second-stage ignition, the decoys would launch, teasing Moscow’s air defences, and somewhere in all the chaos the actual warhead would sneak through, cleverly hidden, stealthily homing in on its target with devastating effect.
Of course, none of this happened, thank Christ. We only ever completed these drills as part of a weapons systems readiness test, and when the signal was decoded it immediately became clear that this was just an exercise, not the real thing. We practised again and again until it became second nature and everyone was suffering from the extreme tedium of it all. The world could have ended, and we would each one of us have been bored fartless doing it.
Seriously, though, what would have been the reaction had the firing signal come through? I’ve got no hesitation in saying it would have been carried out, the crew doing their job as professionally as possible. I shudder to think what I would have done afterwards – gone and wept in my bunk, I guess. Britain as a country would have been wiped out; family, friends and loved ones dead, much of the so-called civilised world completely flattened. And for what? To kill all of them, as they’d killed us? Nothing could have brought back the dead, and the deterrent would have been proved worthless, having failed in its basic purpose – to preserve the peace.
I remember listening to a WEO on one of those TV news items on the nuclear deterrent that used to pop up from time to time, wittering on about how he’d have found it more of an honour than a burden to pull the trigger. I’m presuming the poor man lost all clarity of thought with the TV lights and cameras on him. I can’t remember serving with anyone who’d have found it ‘an honour’ to help precipitate such an unthinkable cataclysm.
What I am quite sure of is that having the deterrent for the last 50 years has made the possibility of nuclear conflict almost non-existent. I, and many of the crew I served with, believed whole-heartedly we would never receive the firing signal. I couldn’t think of any circumstances in which it would have come through; it would simply never have happened. I went through my whole career taking this for granted. It made everything more bearable, especially as I ate, slept, drank, showered and kept watch no more than 100 feet away from the most powerful weapon Britain had ever produced.
It became a mental battle of will every time I heard the phrase ‘XO WEO wireless office’, but I always believed it would be a signal for another drill. Who was going to take the decision to destroy their own country, a country that had suffered great hardship from the time of the tsars, through the Bolshevik Revolution, to the Great Terror and the famines of Stalin’s premiership, during which an estimated 10 to 20 million Soviets perished, not to mention the Second World War, which accounted for a further 26 million lives? The Soviets would never have undertaken a first-strike option. What was in it for them? Not even Kremlin hardliners would have contemplated ritual suicide.
During the Cold War neither side was prepared to take a step back, and this lack of trust fuelled paranoia and led to a preposterous build-up of both their nuclear arsenals. They were now in the business of MAD – mutually assured destruction – and this was the game that I was in. The more deadly the weaponry became, the less likely the confrontation. I saw nuclear weapons as an incessant and unremitting threat, but never a real one, as no one was willing to play the ultimate game.
Even though nuclear war remains a very distant possibility, our weapons have hardly made the world a more peaceful or safer place. Since the deterrent patrols began, Britain has been embroiled in wars both at home and abroad: the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the Falklands War of 1982, the First Gulf War of 1990–91, the Bosnian War of the early 1990s and the Kosovo War of 1998–99, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the fight against Islamic State … the list is considerable. What all these interventions have taught us is that our having the nuclear deterrent has not been enough to keep the peace. Conventional warfare continues regardless of who the nuclear states are.
Over the last 20 years we’ve become entangled in wars in faraway places, which in turn have been responsible for stoking the fires of radical Islamism in this country. The world’s nuclear powers stood by helplessly as first Saddam Hussein, then Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons on their own populations, Western military might in neither case acting as a deterrent. The same can be said about the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the attempted assassination of a Russian double agent and his daughter in Salisbury in 2018; Russian leader Vladimir Putin, who ordered the first and is alleged to have been behind the second, knows he can act with impunity, as he also possesses nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, we seem to have no hesitation in spending anything up to £31 billion, with an extra £10 billion in reserve – apparently the going price to deter the ultimate confrontation – on four new submarines to replace Trident in ten to fifteen years’ time. Some argue that our nuclear obsession is more to do with perceived power, and that our place at the top table, a hangover from the bygone days of empire, is only ensured by maintaining the deterrent. It’s all well and good believing that, especially when it’s not your responsibility to launch the missiles.