The Silent Deep

by James Jinks

  But all was not lost. Between 20 and 31 August 1956, Admiral Rickover conducted his first visit to the United Kingdom in order ‘to discuss exclusively’ with Mountbatten ‘the obstacles with which he was confronted and the methods he had to use to surmount them in order to get Nautilus built’.86 Rickover was ‘most insistent’ that, due to the problems with Congress, ‘discussions could only be arranged by personal invitation from you and that any suggestion of such discussions reaching the press might do incalculable harm’.87 Mountbatten invited Rickover and his wife to Broadlands, his country estate in Hampshire, with the Controller of the Navy, Admiral Sir Ralph Edwards, the Engineer-in-Chief of the Fleet, Admiral Mason, and the head of the Atomic Energy Authority, Sir John Cockcroft. Their wives were also invited in order to make the meeting a social occasion. Over drinks and dinner, Rickover, the ‘introvert iconoclast from the Ukraine [sic] … fell under the spell and aura of Queen Victoria’s great-grandson’.88 Rickover was amused to learn that he and Mountbatten were born in the same year and that while Rickover was growing up in Makow in tsarist Poland, Mountbatten and his family were occasional guests of Nicholas II at St Petersburg.89

  Throughout the discussions Rickover restricted his talking points to organizational matters associated with the development of nuclear propulsion. Due to the legal restrictions surrounding the Atomic Energy Act and the difficulties with Congress, he was unwilling to talk about technical aspects. When he was asked how fast Nautilus could go, he went silent, leaving his wife to give ‘away the fact that by hearsay nothing could catch the NAUTILUS’.90 Rickover was emphatic that the Royal Navy should award its development work to a private company, what he called a firm, and that in no way should the Royal Navy rely on a Government department to run the programme. He explained that ‘some may believe that projects such as Nautilus emerge from routine organisations, systems and established procedures. Our experience with the Nautilus shows that none of these lead to really significant results. A project like the Nautilus calls for dedicated people who do not permit obstacles to stop them.’91 When Mountbatten asked what exactly the Royal Navy should do Rickover told him to disregard the normal Admiralty machinery and appoint an independent man with direct access to the top to lead a small staff of about a dozen individuals, all with engineering experience, and that they should stay in the job for a long time, possibly up to seven years. In the words of the minute taker, Rickover:

  proposed that we should buy a reactor from Westinghouse in order to save time and the initial large development cost. Thereafter he said we could go off on our own. He was only speaking of the reactor and said that the rest of the machinery could be designed and made in the UK. He added that the development will cost a lot of money and its scope should not be under-estimated. He mentioned 20 million dollars as the probable cost of developing the first machinery installation. He suggested that we use Rolls Royce both as our reactor designers and because they have a link with Westinghouse. We should buy a reactor from the latter and while it was building send naval and civilian personnel to the firm to learn the technique. This would save time and money and he appeared to be genuinely concerned that we should be able to save both. He made it clear that he was all for giving us their latest information and was working towards that end.92

  (The Rolls-Royce link with Westinghouse took the form of a 1953 agreement on the exchange of classified information about gas turbines.)

  Mountbatten recognized that if he accepted Rickover’s offer he ‘would have to have someone of high calibre to work with him and be his connection with this country’.93 Edwards was concerned about ‘how on earth we are going to find the right chap to work with him and so make use of all that would accrue from Rickover and his organisation?’94 Mountbatten, Edwards and Mason were, Rickover said, ‘quiet and contended cows [sic]’ and unsuitable, no Engineer had the necessary qualities and any retired Admiral ‘was not worth a damn’.95 Rickover was adamant that what the British programme needed was a man with ‘fire in his belly’. ‘In other words we have got to find another Rickover, maybe he has a brother’ was Edwards’s rather glum conclusion.96 Although Rickover implied on many occasions that no Englishman qualified for the job he was very impressed with Edwards, who, after the meeting, wrote to Mountbatten and explained how Rickover ‘talked at great length – or rather he talked and I listened’ and:

  Ended up by embarrassing me horribly by telling me that I had better take the job on and then went and spent twenty minutes trying to persuade my poor wife that being a Commander-in-Chief was as nothing to being the Head of this new development organisation. He finished the evening by saying he wouldn’t take no for an answer and was going to see Mountbatten. I explained to him that in our country no matter whether we were Admirals or midshipmen we did what we were told and could not go choosing our way.97

  Mountbatten was ‘left with the impression that, provided Admiral Rickover was handled with care and that we were prepared to take at least some of his advice, he would be an ardent helper’. Rickover told Mountbatten in the margins at Broadlands: ‘If you have allies, and good ones at that, you would be foolish not to take them into your confidence over one of the most important developments of war today.’98 Mountbatten later wrote of the ‘extremely friendly and helpful attitude which Rickover has shown during his visit here … he could not possibly have been more friendly to us and I am hoping for great things from our contact’.99

  But Mountbatten was not, at that stage, prepared to accept Rickover’s main proposal – purchasing a US-made reactor from Westinghouse. He told Sandys that while, eighteen months before, American help would have been valuable, ‘we have had to develop our own ideas’ and the need was largely past.100 Rickover’s recommendations about reforming the Admiralty organization responsible for supervising the Navy’s nuclear programme also had little immediate impact. When the Flag Officer Submarines, Rear Admiral Woods, argued that ‘a far more closely knit design team than is possible under the existing Admiralty organization is required. Ideally this team should be responsible to one man with the authority to take decisions necessary to ensure proper co-ordination of effort,’ Admiral Edwards disagreed, stating that ‘the arrangements which have been made to handle the nuclear-submarine project should ensure that it is dealt with as expeditiously as possible. Unless and until this is proved otherwise I think it is unnecessary to consider the exceptional measures postulated by F.O.S.M., which would in any event involve duplication of effort and increase in staff.’101, 102

  A VISION OF THE FUTURE

  The nature and punch of the Soviet adversary changed gradually but significantly in the mid-1950s. The post-Stalin leadership in Moscow was determined to narrow the very considerable gap between its naval capabilities and those of NATO, the United States especially. When the new First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, came to power in the mid-1950s, the Soviet Northern Fleet, with its headquarters at Severomorsk on the Kola Peninsula had only a few surface ships and around thirty submarines – less than 10 per cent of the underwater capability of the Soviet Navy at that time.103 In 1956 Khrushchev appointed as Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Navy an individual who would have a profound influence on Soviet naval policy for the next thirty years, Admiral Sergey Georgyevich Gorshkov, who immediately set about transforming the Soviet Navy from a primarily coastal defence force to a modern long-range offensive fleet. He scrapped the Soviet Navy’s First World War battleships, the cruisers built in the 1920s and 1930s, and most of the German and Italian war prizes worn out after extensive post-war trials and operations. In his memoirs, Khrushchev recalled how he and Gorshkov ‘decided to place the construction of submarines literally on an assembly-line basis, to create a powerful submarine fleet that could threaten the enemy on all oceans and seas’.104

  Khrushchev made no secret of what he was trying to do. In April 1956, during a visit to the United Kingdom, he told a largely British and naval audience that had gathered at the R
oyal Naval College in Greenwich that:

  Your country ‘rules the waves,’ but that is a thing of the past. We have to look at things realistically today. Everything has changed … In a future war the chief military questions will not be decided by cruisers, not even by bombers. They too are outdated … Today the submarine fleet has come to forefront as the chief naval weapon, and the chief aerial weapon is the missile, which can hit targets at great distances, and in the future the distances will be unlimited.105

  Given the Soviet Union’s limited number of land-based intercontinental strike aircraft and missiles, submarines offered a potentially attractive means of launching nuclear weapons against the United States. In 1954 the Soviet Government had ordered the development of ballistic-missile-armed submarines and later that year tests took place of the short-range (ninety miles with a nuclear warhead) R-11 missile (better known as ‘Scud’) on a swaying platform simulating a rolling submarine, This quickly led to mating the R-11FM with a ‘Zulu’ class submarine B-67, with two missile tubes. The missile had to be hoisted out of the fin using a ‘horn and hoof’ arrangement to keep the missile perched on the top. The first launch from the Kola test range on 16 September 1955 was the first-ever ballistic missile launch from a submarine. In 1956 production began of five new Project 611AB missile submarines known in the West as ‘Zulu Vs’. These also carried two missile tubes and four were in service with the Northern Fleet by the end of 1957; a fifth was added to the Pacific Fleet in 1959.

  At the same time as it had ordered the Zulu conversions the Soviet Government also called for a new missile submarine, Project 625, known as the ‘Golf’ in the West. These were to carry a new missile in three tubes in a lengthened fin, the 360-mile-range D-2. However, due to delays in the D-2 development programme, the first three submarines commissioned in 1959–60 carried the R-11FMs with non-nuclear warheads, while the rest carried the D-2 equipped with a high yield (1.45 megaton) thermonuclear warhead.

  In parallel with these ballistic-missile developments there were cruise missile projects, the most promising of which was the P-5, a jet-powered rocket-boosted weapon fired from the launching tube. It was tested on board a ‘Whisky’ class submarine at the end of 1957. This led to the conversion of six ‘Whisky’ class submarines with two launch cylinders as Project 644 (‘Whisky Twin Cylinder’). This was a not entirely successful conversion, one boat capsizing in 1961.106 Improved types, the Project 665 ‘Whisky Long Bin’ and the specially designed Project 651, known as the ‘Juliett’ class, each with four tubes, were deployed in the early 1960s. The role of the cruise missile changed from land attack to anti-ship warfare when an improved missile, the P-6, was deployed. Even the ballistic missile firers were temporarily re-tasked for naval purposes after Khrushchev gave the land-based Strategic Missile Forces a monopoly of the main strategic land attack role.

  Nevertheless the land attack potential of the Soviet submarine-based missile force soon made its mark. In a 1956 paper ‘NATO Control of Shipping Exercise, codenamed LIFELINE’, the reaction to the introduction of only three submarines equipped with missiles threatening the American seaboard was so violent that all other maritime air operations were brought to a halt. The Directing Staff eventually had to dispose of the submarines in order to avoid ruining the overall exercise.107 The same year the US Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Arleigh Burke, told a US reporter that ‘the Soviet submarine threat is tremendous right now. They are still building new submarines at an unprecedented rate. Some will probably have guided missiles. We have to be able to meet the threat if war comes, or we will be in big trouble, world-wide. This is a serious problem.’108

  In light of these developments, the Flag Officer Submarines, Rear Admiral Woods, was ‘concerned that such decisions as have been reached on new Submarine design and construction have been based on the fulfilment of present roles and priorities with the effort now available, rather than on a reassessment of the place of the submarine in the Fleet, after full consideration of its greatly increased potentialities’. Woods produced a paper that included ‘a reassessment in the light of the opportunity the submarine now offers to increase the offensive power of the Navy at comparatively small cost’. He argued that since 1948 ‘three revolutionary advances have been made which combine to alter completely previous concepts of submarine warfare’:

  Those advances and their effects can be summarized as follows:-

  (a) Nuclear Power. Allows the submarine virtually unlimited endurance at a speed comparable to, and probably exceeding that of the fastest surface ship. A relatively high quiet speed is already possible, and further development on existing lines will inevitably lead to very high quiet speeds indeed. The Submarine has not only regained the advantage which it had over the surface ship before the advent of asdics and anti-submarine weapons; but has become a flexible weapon of decision as opposed to one of chance encounter. At the same time, the difficulties of detecting and attacking it from the air or surface have become truly formidable.

  (b) Detection Equipment. With the advent of VLF asdics, submarines are capable of detecting surface ships, or other submarines proceeding above their silent speeds or inadequately silenced, at very many times the range previously possible. Thus, they need no longer be confined to operating near enemy ports, or at other focal points established by careful intelligence of enemy movements. There is no prospect of similar detection ranges being achieved by surface ships; and, though the actual ranges may be reduced by enemy silencing developments the submarine will always remain the best A/S detection platform (even if forced to rely upon active asdics), and will probably remain the most deadly counterweapon if properly armed.

  (c) Guided Missiles. Two American Submarines now in operational service are capable of launching a missile (Regulus I), which has a range of 500 miles with a megaton warhead, and which can be controlled by the launching submarine for 180 miles with a terminal accuracy of 1000 yards. By 1964, the Americans expect to be able to throw from one submarine three (TRITON) missiles with a smaller warhead and terminal accuracy, for 1500 miles (at Mach. 3.5). To launch those weapons, the submarine has to surface for about six to ten minutes. Since, however, even Regulus I has a total range of 500 miles, and its terminal guidance can be provided by a second submarine stationed inshore, there is no need for it to be launched from close to the coast, or for the launching submarine to be navigated with pin-point accuracy. The submarine is therefore not only able to attack ships at sea, or in relatively unprotected harbours, but can destroy tactical or strategic targets far inland.109

  Woods argued that:

  By contrast with the immensely increased flexibility and destructive power of the Submarine … Land based aircraft and missiles remain totally dependent on static and vulnerable logistic support. Surface ships (and hence carrier borne aircraft and missiles) must devote an increasing proportion of their armament to defence against aircraft and submarines, and must be surrounded by powerful screening forces, if they are to stand even a reasonable chance of survival. The submarine, on the other hand, needs no defensive support and very little defensive armament. It is, in fact … an outstandingly economical and effective weapon of offence.110

  Woods believed that because the Royal Navy could not afford to develop submarines, aircraft carriers and other ships simultaneously at the same speed as the Americans, it was important to review the roles which the various arms of the Navy would perform in ten years’ time with the submarine in the forefront.

  When Woods produced his paper, the Submarine Service was absorbing 5.9 per cent of the total naval manpower and only a small percentage of the Naval Estimates, exactly the same as it had in 1938. As far as Woods was concerned, this was unacceptable. But he had to tread carefully lest he upset the other, more traditional and more influential branches of the Royal Navy:

  It is not my purpose to suggest that the submarine can or should replace the carrier, the cruiser or the surface escort. It is to show not only that the submarine can underta
ke the tasks at present allotted to it more effectively than hitherto, but that it can now take its place as a complement to the carrier borne and shore based aircraft or missile in mounting the deterrent in global war. In this role it has the unique advantages of invisibility coupled with mobility, and hence the ability to remain on station unknown to the enemy (or potential enemy) for long periods. In addition the submarine will always be needed in considerable numbers in peace or war for training our A/S forces; it forms a potent threat in cold war and is a powerful offensive weapon in limited wars. Since all these assets can be realised with very considerable relative economy in manpower and cost, I am convinced that the time has come to devote a higher proportion of the available money, manpower and effort to the early development of a modern Submarine Fleet of effective size.111

  Woods prepared a list of functions which he believed the submarine could carry out ‘effectively and economically’:

  (a) The Deterrent – it can supplement the carrier borne and shore based deterrent forces.

  (b) Global and Limited War –

  (i) Attack on naval bases and communications.

  (ii) Attack on strategic and static tactical targets.

  (iii) Attack on enemy submarines.

  (iv) Attack on enemy surface forces.

  (v) Deterrent to and prevention of seaborne invasion.