The Silent Deep

by James Jinks

  The Royal Navy came away from Operations ‘Rum Tub’ and ‘Strikeback’ ‘deeply impressed and depressed by the realization that we had no counter to NAUTILUS’.160 Woods later said that he would have got on better without any other submarines in the Norwegian Sea – just the Nautilus alone against the Strike Fleet.161 ‘It was a devastating demonstration of her potential,’ wrote Coote, ‘which changed our thinking forever.’162 The Commander-in-Chief Home Fleet, Admiral Sir John Eccles, was so disillusioned that unusually he did not ask his staff to draft a report on the operation but wrote his own and sent it to the higher echelons of the Admiralty. In it, Eccles argued that Nautilus ‘confirmed our worst fears of the threat to our sea communications posed by a nuclear submarine, even when it is armed only with existing torpedoes’.163 Its performance highlighted the following facts:

  (a) Not only has the nuclear submarine complete freedom of action in three dimensions: its ability to manoeuvre at high speed and make rapid changes of direction and depth far exceeds that of conventional submarines. Furthermore its endurance is such that it can continue to carry out this type of manoeuvre virtually indefinitely.

  (b) A nuclear submarine can disregard the threat from the air due to the fact that she need not for days on end put anything on the surface. The anti-submarine aircraft’s supreme asset of speed therefore remains of no avail until a major research break through arms it with the means of detecting and killing a deep nuclear propelled submarine.

  (c) With modern equipment she has as good a picture of what is going on around her on the surface, and an even better picture below the surface, as a surface ship, and due to her unlimited manoeuvrability she can make the best possible use of this information.

  (d) In her ability to attack and destroy submarines (conventional or nuclear) and surface ships she is vastly superior to surface ships and conventional submarines in the attack role. During Exercise STRIKEBACK, NAUTILUS constituted a greater threat to the opposite forces than did all the other 21 Snort fitted submarines put together. Exercise RUM TUB demonstrated that she can command the freedom of the seas wherever she chooses to take the initiative.164

  Eccles could only conclude that Nautilus showed that ‘unless science comes to the aid of ships and aircraft with some unexpected technical development, only another nuclear submarine, acting as convoy escort or on barrier patrol, can locate, track and destroy a nuclear-propelled opponent of similar characteristics’.165 ‘It is my firm belief that time is against us’ he wrote:

  We are now at least six years behind the United States Navy and, possibly, the Red Fleet. Accordingly, we must make fundamental and immediate revision of our priorities, drawing freely from recent transatlantic experience. In particular we should note the energy with which the United States Navy tackled the problem once they appreciated its true significance. Although this clearly is a field for closer co-operation with the United States Navy (including the establishment of many more exchange and liaison appointments at all levels), we must now emulate the following steps and decisions they have already taken, or are clearly moving towards.166

  In order to counter the threat, Eccles argued:

  (a) That extraordinary methods and personalities with over-riding powers are needed to get a nuclear submarine into the Fleet.

  (b) That the highest priority be given to developing a range-determining adjunct to VLF passive sonars and to adapting a long range active sonar to submarine use.

  (c) That compatible weapons, with nuclear and conventional explosives, must be developed for use at the longer ranges at which submarines will fight one another.

  (d) That a new overall command of all anti-submarine defence forces is needed.

  (e) That submarine opinion and experience must in future be adequately represented in the Navy’s highest counsels.

  (f) That there is no place in the submarine new-construction programme for battery-powered submersibles, even though existing conversions will be invaluable for years to come as missile launchers or as mobile sonobuoys.167

  The Commander-in-Chief Portsmouth, Admiral Sir Guy Grantham, later told an anti-submarine conference that the ‘advent of the nuclear submarine … with its fast underwater speed and almost unlimited endurance and the characteristics of the true submarine has clearly introduced an entirely new problem in the Anti-Submarine World’.168 His remarks were fully substantiated by the post-exercise analysis of ‘Rum Tub’ conducted by the Joint Anti-Submarine School at Londonderry, the first sentence of which read: ‘The overall impression gained from the Exercise was that our existing air and surface A/S defences are incapable of protecting any surface force against the high speed, deep, true submarine.’169

  Woods felt vindicated. ‘For the past twelve years,’ he wrote in a letter to the Secretary of the Admiralty:

  Flag Officer Submarines has consistently advocated by letter and on Admiralty Dockets that the true Submarine, capable of high submerged speed, is the logical successor to the ‘submersible’ of World Wars I and II and that, to counter the threat posed by its possession by a potential enemy it is essential that we ourselves should develop such a submarine … Now that practical experience has been obtained, in such a potentially devastating manner, of the offensive power and elusiveness of a nuclear propelled true Submarine, it has become more than ever important to speed up the building of HMS Dreadnought, for I am convinced that as the Commander-in-Chief, Home Fleet remarks in his paragraph 13, time is no longer on our side. A radical change in sea warfare is presaged by the exploits of U.S.S. NAUTILUS in Exercises STRIKEBACK and RUMTUB, which cannot be ignored or lightly pushed aside if the future safety of this country is to be preserved.170

  No longer was it a matter of whether the Royal Navy could afford nuclear attack submarines. The question now was whether it could afford to be without them. The Admiralty Board was clear. ‘The advent of such naval vessels must change the strategy and tactics of naval warfare,’ it concluded. ‘If the Royal Navy did not acquire these submarines it would cease to count as a naval force in world affairs.’171 Woods urged the Admiralty to think of Dreadnought as the first ‘and not a lone venture into the atomic field; and that steps should be taken to lay down at least four more of her class as soon as her design is approved’.172

  While Nautilus was in the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first satellite, into orbit, sending shockwaves throughout the Western world. Within three weeks Macmillan was in Washington, where the Prime Minister and President issued a ‘Declaration of Common Purpose’ that promised increased interdependence in the defence field.173 Conscious of the increased Soviet threat, President Eisenhower also announced that he intended to ask Congress to amend the Atomic Energy Act, restoring nuclear cooperation with the British. In the President’s State of the Union Address on 9 January 1958, he stressed that it was ‘wasteful … for friendly allies to consume talent and money in solving problems that their friends have already solved’.174

  THE AGREEMENT

  At the end of January 1958, Rickover visited the United Kingdom for his third and most decisive visit. In the final few months of 1957 relations between the British and American nuclear-propulsion programmes had deteriorated to such an extent that ‘the British naval attaché delivered an unsigned, undated letter to the Navy Department, stating that they were not getting adequate information from’ Rickover and the US Navy.175 In early January, Elkins informed the Admiralty that when Rickover arrived he was ‘likely to suggest to us (a) that we buy a reactor on very favourable terms, which he will arrange & (b) that we go on with our own development causing as little interference as possible with his’.176 Mountbatten called, but did not attend, a meeting of what he called the Admiralty’s ‘special nuclear committee’ to discuss what to do ‘if the UK were pressed to acquire a nuclear submarine or parts of it with Rickover’s help’. Those who attended the meeting felt ‘bruised by the past few months’ fruitless attempts to conduct information exchange in the USA’ and they had conc
luded that ‘Rickover was adamantly opposed to firm-to-firm business.’ They ‘completely misjudged Rickover’s opinions and his intentions’ and concluded that any offer of American assistance should be refused for three main reasons.177 First, lack of money, principally dollars; second, the belief that American assistance would not accelerate the Dreadnought programme; third, the belief that, by accepting the American reactor, the UK would lose all the advantages of having to work out its own indigenous reactor design.

  Rickover arrived on 24 January and met with Mountbatten in his office at 10.30 a.m. ‘I told him that I understood that this powerful nuclear submarine propulsion committee was going to advise strongly against accepting the steam propulsion plant,’ wrote Mountbatten:

  We spent the next hour going through this in very great detail. He absolutely convinced me that this would be a mistake. He told me that whereas the nuclear reactor was a reasonably straightforward job as they knew what they were doing, the problem of the heat converter and the steam turbine was one that gave them the most trouble. They had had endless little failures and unexpected difficulties and now at last they had got a homogenous whole in the Skipjack. He now had the authority to offer us the whole propulsion plant and he thought we would be absolutely crazy to cut out the steam propulsion unit.178

  At 11.30 a.m. Mountbatten left Rickover and met the committee. He listened to their arguments. ‘I then said I had an hour with Admiral Rickover and had heard his arguments.’179 He was convinced that Rickover was right and the committee was wrong. He warned them that he intended to recommend that the First Lord back the proposals to acquire the entire American propulsion plant. According to Denning Pearson of Rolls-Royce, one of the attendees at the meeting, this announcement ‘produced a deathly hush of disapproval’.180 ‘I must say that this caused consternation,’ remembered Mountbatten. ‘I do not think I have ever seen top class people quite so horrified and so hostile at the attitude I took up.’181 Mountbatten told the committee that he was ‘quite determined to persist in this attitude’. He then called in Rickover and explained the committee’s views, that the British should not take the entire propulsion plant, but should instead purchase the nuclear reactor. Rickover remained ‘very calm and lucid’. He told the committee that:

  he was out to help as much as possible and if eventually the United Kingdom decided to go ahead with the DREADNOUGHT project on present lines he would assist as much as he could, including firm-to-firm contacts. He would, however, most strongly advise that the easiest and cheapest way in which the Royal Navy could achieve its aim of having a nuclear submarine was for the Admiralty to designate Rolls-Royce Ltd. as their representative with intent that the firm should place a contract with Westinghouse of America for a complete machinery propulsion plant for a submarine. What he had in mind was that the United Kingdom should acquire everything in the way of drawings, spares, training and so on including such facilities from other contractors like Electric Boat Company and also facilities to have representatives of the contractors watching the manufacturing processes of the machinery including the nuclear cores … He emphasized that every part of the nuclear machinery was tied up with every other part and that you could not change one thing in a nuclear machinery plant without taking account of its effect on others. He suggested that the United Kingdom should decide on the type of submarine to aim for and thought that the best choice would be the U.S.S. ‘Skate’. This was a proven type and was a ship of high performance with a speed of over 20 knots – admittedly less than ‘Nautilus’ and also smaller than ‘Nautilus’, but nevertheless a very satisfactory ship. He estimated that about 18 months to two years would be taken in building the machinery unit, but the United Kingdom could go on with the hull in the meantime.182

  On 5 February, Selkirk informed the Cabinet’s Defence Committee that it was ‘desirable that we should respond to this overture as rapidly as possible, since it should ensure that the Royal Navy would be provided with a nuclear submarine at a considerably earlier date than could be envisaged if we had to rely solely on our own efforts’. The Committee approved the purchase as it would ‘provide valuable evidence of the practical application of the policy of inter-dependence which the Prime Minister and President Eisenhower had recently endorsed’.183

  During Rickover’s discussions with the Admiralty he rightly ‘emphasised that he was not making a proposal from America to England, he was speaking for himself and it would be for the English Government to put forward a request to the United States Government’. Any sale also required further amendments to the Atomic Energy Act. Rickover promised to ‘do his best to ensure that the answer of the American Government was favourable to such a request’ and Bills incorporating the proposed amendments were introduced to both the House and Senate on 27 January 1958.184 A month later, Rickover testified before a sub-committee of the US Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. He explained that:

  About a year ago agreement was reached between the United Kingdom and the United States committing exchange of submarine nuclear propulsion information between the two Governments; that agreement has been consummated. The British had people over here studying what we are doing, we gave them the necessary design information. They took this information and went back to England, but what they then started doing was not fully conducive to the conservation of scientific and engineering talent of the two countries. They were starting to go into minute detail and learn how to design on their own, every nut, every gasket, every bit of equipment in order to make a complete British design out of the American design. To supply them with all the necessary details would be an endless, time consuming proposition and would require very large expenditure of effort on our part and would seriously interfere with our ability to do our work. You know how it is if one Company makes a machine and another wants to make one exactly like it but use their own standards and techniques. It is an almost impossible situation.

  Rickover then explained why he was standing before the Committee:

  In a meeting I had with British Admiralty officials it was agreed that to conserve their money, it would be best that the British designate a commercial company to act for their Government. The British company would enter into a commercial relationship with an American Company to buy a submarine nuclear propulsion plant just as they would buy anything else in this country. In this way they would keep completely out of the transaction; it would be a completely commercial transaction.

  He then elaborated on the advantages of a commercial as opposed to government agreement:

  If our Government were to furnish the British a reactor and something went wrong it would invariably end up as our fault, but if they buy the reactor on a commercial basis from us, they have their own inspectors, they can decide whether or not to accept the various items but once they accept them through their own inspection, it is their responsibility and we, as a Government, have no further responsibility.

  It also ensured that the British kept out of Rickover’s nuclear programme:

  The gist of it is they would like to station people all over – in my office, in every laboratory – and be right there all the time getting every question answered. That means a great deal of extra work for our people, and we cannot do that and keep on with our own job. This was why I recommended to them and they agreed with the idea of procuring by commercial arrangement a complete plant, on the condition they keep out of our laboratories, and let the American firm … handle the matter for them.185

  Rickover argued that it was ‘better for the strength of both our countries that the United States naval nuclear programme should not be interfered with’. He also argued that ‘There are probably no two countries in the world that have as similar a cultural and legal and political background and are the same kind of people. I think they are probably the most reliable outpost in Europe as far as we are concerned, and we are in a sense helping ourselves, too.’186 But Rickover was equally clear that the term ‘exchange’, which was often used to describe the proposa
l, was inaccurate. ‘They do not have anything to give us,’ he said, ‘if I confine myself to nuclear power, there is at present no contribution they have that is evident at this time to our program.’187

  But there was one area where the British did have something worthwhile to exchange, the British civil nuclear programme, in particular the gas-cooled plant at Calder Hall, the first nuclear reactor in the world to deliver commercial quantities of electricity. Some members of the Joint Committee were very interested in this British natural-uranium-fuelled gas-cooled reactor technology. In January 1957, Congress had requested information from the British and although a limited amount was provided, a formal proposal to exchange information on US submarine reactors for British data on gas-cooled reactors was rejected by Macmillan’s Cabinet, which feared that the United States would pass the information on to private companies who would then use the design and compete with the UK commercially in the gas-cooled reactor field.188 This angered the Joint Committee. ‘I think it’s wrong that when we give them the secrets of the Nautilus they hold back from us,’ declared the Democratic Senator for New Mexico, Senator Clinton P. Anderson.189 Hard bargaining followed. Rickover told Elkins that ‘Congress was sore on this point with the British’ and that if ‘the U.K. would clear information to the U.S.A. on gas cooled reactors, then the U.S.A. would give the U.K. practically any information they wanted’. The response of the head of the British Joint Services Mission in Washington, Vice-Admiral Sir Robert Elkins, was simple. ‘I told him the British were sore with the U.S.A. on the question of the McMahon Act where they had sucked our brains and then closed down.’190