by James Jinks
In design terms Valiant was what Dreadnought would have been had the British refused Rickover’s offer.251 The basic design concept was to use the forward end of Dreadnought together with an aft end consisting of the British nuclear machinery based on the Dounreay prototype but with a few minor alterations, such as the use of different materials. Improvements on Dreadnought included more explicit reactor safety requirements; a 75 per cent increase in diesel fuel; a 50 per cent increase in communications fit and the repositioning of the forward hydroplanes away from the main bow sonar array to reduce self-noise. The diving depth was increased, back to the original UK specification of 750 feet; a secondary means of propulsion was fitted independent of the main propulsion system, which could be retracted into the submarine’s streamlined hull when not in use; sound isolation against sonar noise and reduced machinery noise was also introduced as well as raft-mounted machinery, a considerable achievement given the size and weight of much of it. At normal operating speeds, the raft essentially floated free of the hull, giving the submarine a noise advantage over both American and Soviet submarines. However, at high speeds the raft was locked into position and Valiant made a great deal of noise.252
According to the naval architect David Brown, ‘Valiant was the finest British post-war design of its day, surface or submarine.’253 However, it had a number of deficiencies, especially with machinery operation and maintainability. Insufficient attention had been given to the propulsion and auxiliary machinery sited outside the reactor compartment.254 The secondary plant, as it was known, was regarded as established technology because of its similarity to steam propulsion plants found in Royal Navy surface ships. The designers at Dounreay mistakenly concluded that the systems and equipments unique to a diving submarine, which had successfully evolved over the preceding forty years, particularly for the HTP programme, would only require extrapolation to meet the requirements of the nuclear programme. The design was also very complicated. A full-scale mock-up constructed of wood and cardboard was built in Barrow to aid those responsible for fitting out the submarine. When the layout in an area was confirmed and accurately represented in wood, the pipe shop would bend a wire to conform to the shape of the mock-up, and go back and fabricate the real article in the appropriate material. ‘Though it was effective it was ridiculously expensive,’ recalled Patrick Middleton, who worked on the mock-up when building a later ‘Valiant’ class submarine. ‘The lower reaches of the structure were like a forest floor, strewn with broken bits.’ (It was also covered in ‘suggestive’ graffiti aimed at the female cleaners who cleaned the mock-up in the small hours when no one else was around.)255
Why did Rickover help the British? His respect and admiration for Mountbatten certainly played a part. In September 1957 he wrote to the Commanding Officer of USS Nautilus, Commander William R. Anderson, and explained why he had gone ‘all out’ to help the British. ‘I did this,’ wrote Rickover, ‘because of my feeling of urgency about the international situation, my admiration for the British, and particularly my great liking for Admiral Mountbatten.’256 But there were clearly other, calculated reasons. As Vice Admiral Sir Robert Hill has concluded ‘it seems clear that his intention from the outset, having personally established that the UK had the ability and determination to have a nuclear-submarine force, was to give a single, time-limited boost to the UK programme. He knew that we were poor, and would become poorer; and that given half a chance would scrounge on the US rather than apply our own thought and our resources to solving the problems that would inevitably arise.’257
Whatever his motives, Rickover’s offer had a dramatic impact on the Royal Navy’s nuclear-submarine programme. Two of its key architects later admitted that ‘The UK’s debt to the US Navy, and to Admiral Rickover in particular, is incalculable.’258 According to Baker, ‘in so far as our nuclear submarine programme has been a success it is mainly due, first to RICKOVER selling us his bit and second to me for insisting that this S5W plant be used by us in an environment similar to Skipjack, and that we should buy from America a complete machinery installation’. Designing and building Dreadnought provided the Admiralty’s naval architects and engineers, Vickers and Rolls-Royce as well as associated parts of industry, with a sound basis from which to progress to the all-British nuclear submarines from then on to the present day. Since Dreadnought put to sea submarine reactor development in the UK has steadily increased reactor core life until the reactor cores currently being manufactured by Rolls-Royce are designed to power a submarine throughout its lifetime.
Reflecting in January 1982 on the achievement of the earlier pioneers of the nuclear programme, Vice Admiral Sir Ted Horlick concluded that:
Today DSMP [Dounreay Submarine Prototype] is seen as one of the corner stones of our successful nuclear propulsion programme. Not only has it provided a test bed for new technology and the lead plant for sea going submarine propulsion systems, but it also provided initial practical training for the operators of nuclear submarines. Furthermore it afforded a test bed for the solution of technical problems which could be expected to arise in the submarine plants.259
There is still a healthy debate about just how much impact Rickover’s offer had on the Royal Navy. According to Rickover’s biographer, Francis Duncan, ‘Events had made Rickover the “stepfather” of the British nuclear Navy. Its officers and officials found him hard to deal with, hard to predict, and often abrasive, but without him they would never have gotten their first nuclear submarine to sea.’260 This view is shared by Vice Admiral Horlick: ‘There is little doubt that the Admiralty’s objective in having the Royal Navy’s first nuclear-powered submarine at sea by 1963 would not have been achieved without the purchase of the S5W.’261
Professor Jack Edwards had a different view:
I suppose some would regard him as some sort of foster father of the British nuclear fleet. Personally I am still convinced we would have built our nuclear submarine entirely on our own efforts – it would not have been as good as Skipjack, and it would have taken us some 2 years longer to get to sea. But it would have been entirely our own design and would not have made us so dependent on the whim of the US Congress on the passage of further information to us.262
The truth probably lies somewhere in between. Peter Hammersley, HMS Dreadnought’s first Mechanical Engineer:
Without belittling the achievements of those who had been working on the British design, I believe that two or three years is an understatement. I also believe, and have always believed, that we would have lost most of that advantage had we bought the American reactor and primary plant only to match to our propulsion machinery as was proposed by some in the MOD but opposed by Mountbatten.263
This fits with William Crowe’s view that ‘The minimum estimate was six months given by a scientist in the British program. The maximum was five years given by a high ranking officer who was on the Admiralty Board at the time and instrumental in driving through the exchange.’264 Rickover estimated the time saving as a minimum of three years and the cost saving as between $50m and $75m.265 Wherever the truth lies, Sir Solly Zuckerman, who later became the Government’s Chief Scientific Advisor, was surely right when he said that ‘Without Rickover’s cooperation, we would never have had the Skipjack reactor. While we may have devised corresponding equipment on our own, we were certainly enormously helped by the American Government.’266 This was not lost on the Navy. ‘The American Agreement not only advanced it [the UK nuclear programme] but it also enabled the UK to establish the necessary planning, quality and management standards,’ Hammersley recalled:
We in Dreadnought were American trained. The key people in the shipbuilders and Rolls-Royce had also learned from the Americans. Between us, we transferred Rickover’s standards to our programme. We were lucky. We had a proven plant with an experienced crew. Valiant and her successors had a new British plant, which was more complicated, and a crew who had only such experience as we could give them, which wasn’t very much. They had a much more
difficult time and deserved great credit for what they achieved. I don’t think that was ever fully recognised.267
The term ‘special relationship’ is often overused, but can rightly be applied here. ‘We knew from the very beginning that we were closer politically, culturally, and in many other ways with the British than we were with other countries, and that is why we treated them differently from other countries,’ Rickover later said.268 When parts of the Eisenhower administration raised the possibility of sharing US reactor technology with France, Rickover was horrified. ‘The head of the French Atomic Energy Commission is a proselytizing Communist,’ Rickover is said to have complained. ‘He makes frequent trips to Moscow for instructions. He has five hundred known Communists in his atomic program. It’s nuts!’ In a special meeting of the AEC Rickover sat in silence as each commissioner outlined why he thought the proposal was a good idea. ‘Does anyone here doubt how the American people would vote if they were given a chance to express themselves on this issue?’ he asked. ‘Knowing that, it is immoral for you to proceed otherwise.’269 The US never did sell its nuclear-propulsion technology to France, or any other nation.
With HMS Dreadnought on trials, HMS Valiant under construction and the Dounreay prototype beginning to show significant progress by the end of 1962, a small pattern of nuclear-submarine building had begun in the UK. Important questions remained. ‘The problem now facing us, in a nutshell, is this,’ said Lord Carrington in a presentation to the Admiralty in 1962. ‘On the assumption that the Royal Navy is to get into the nuclear submarine business, what sort of building programme is required, what is the best way to use our shipbuilding capacity for it, and what first steps ought we take now against the background of a sensible and feasible future programme? And by “feasible” I mean financially as well as technically.’270
Although Anglo-American naval relations were at something of a high point, one of the most ‘potentially destructive crises in Anglo-American relations’ was about to thrust the Royal Navy and the Submarine Service into an entirely unexpected and unfamiliar role: as custodians of the United Kingdom’s independent nuclear deterrent.271
4
‘Move Deterrents out to Sea’: The Bomb Goes Underwater
Indestructible retaliation. Indestructible retaliation. That is the secret. Never forget that.
Winston Churchill to Lord Hailsham, First Lord of the Admiralty, 1955.1
Move deterrents out to sea, where the real estate is free and where they are far away from me.
Admiral Arleigh Burke, Chief of Naval Operations, US Navy, to Admiral Lord Mountbatten, First Sea Lord, 1959.2
We planned in 1963 to fire our first missile at 1115 EST (Eastern Standard Time) on 15 February 1968; we failed by 15 milliseconds. We were told in 1963 that there must be a continuous deterrent from July 1968[9]; this was achieved.
Rear Admiral Charles Shepherd, Deputy Controller Polaris.3
Give us the will, but never the wish, to obey the order to fire. Oh God, if it is thy will, grant that that order may never need be given, Amen.
Captain Michael Henry, CO HMS Resolution.4
FIRST CONTACT
Throughout the 1950s, responsibility for carrying the United Kingdom’s independent nuclear deterrent lay with the Royal Air Force. In order to maintain its effectiveness and credibility into the 1970s, the Ministry of Aviation began to develop Blue Streak, a fixed-base, liquid-fuelled medium-range ballistic missile (MRBM) to replace the Royal Air Force’s ageing and increasingly vulnerable nuclear-armed Vulcan, Victor and Valiant bombers.5 Although the 1957 Defence White Paper reaffirmed this policy of airborne deterrence at the expense of conventional forces (ominously for the Royal Navy stating that ‘the role of naval forces in total war is somewhat uncertain’), by 1970 the Royal Navy and the Submarine Service were on the front line of British defence policy, as the custodians of the Polaris weapon system.6
Polaris was ‘possibly the most revolutionary development in weapons technology in the twentieth century’.7 For a deterrent system to be truly effective it must be capable, reliable, available and invulnerable and the political will to use it must exist or be thought to exist. With three quarters of the Earth’s surface covered by the sea, the nuclear-powered Polaris submarine combined the advantages of land-based ballistic missiles with the flexibility of air-launched missiles but with the disadvantages of neither. Land-based ballistic missiles and the aircraft that carried air-launched missiles were vulnerable to pre-emptive attacks. Polaris, as one of its key US architects explained, provided ‘assurance of retaliation’ and fulfilled ‘the new function of military force – that of preventing war – by being so attuned and adjusted to grand strategy requirements that battles do not occur’.8
The Royal Navy’s association with Polaris began in November 1955 when Mountbatten learned of the United States Navy’s programme to develop a solid-fuel ballistic missile that could be fired from a submarine. He was so impressed with the determination of the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Arleigh Burke, to push ahead with development that he asked if the Royal Navy could be associated with the programme. Burke agreed. Mountbatten was amenable to anything that would give the Royal Navy a new role.9 Polaris was one way of achieving this. Although he remained ‘sceptical about the reality of Britain’s independent deterrent … [he was] determined that it should be maintained in the most efficient manner’.10 During a discussion on submarine policy in February 1956, Mountbatten explained that if ‘the Americans got through their teething troubles and were successful in developing such a missile, and were willing to give us the design, then … we might consider such a project’.11 A year and a half later, he believed that it was a question of ‘when, and not whether, the Admiralty should seek the resources to introduce’ a submarine-based ballistic missile into the Royal Navy.12
When the Naval Staff first heard of Polaris they ‘found it a little difficult to believe’, as did most of the Admiralty technical departments in Bath, which ‘regarded it akin to Science Fiction’.13 Throughout 1956 and 1957 its development in the USA was watched with great interest. In October 1957, the Admiralty Board concluded ‘that it would be inexpedient for the present to urge any claim to equip Royal Navy submarines with ballistic missiles’, but the Naval Staff did decide to discreetly promote it to ministers, including the Prime Minister.14 When the First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Selkirk, visited the United States at the end of 1957 he received a personal briefing from the Director of the US Special Projects Office, Admiral William ‘Red’ Raborn, outlining the technical, financial and managerial aspects of the US Polaris programme.15 Selkirk was deeply impressed and on his return to London wrote to his predecessor, Lord Hailsham:
I am very anxious to percolate slowly but gradually into the minds of our colleagues the future possibilities of submarines equipped with the IRBM [Intermediate-Range Ballistic Missile] Polaris which is being developed in the United States and is likely, I believe, to be operational about 1961 … I am sure that by 1967 or so missile sites will be out of this island and at sea in submarines.16
‘Out of this island and at sea’ was an attractive prospect, given the public and political uproar that had arisen over the recent deployment in the UK of the US land-based IRBMs, known as Thor.17 Selkirk was particularly anxious to avoid a position whereby ‘we are completely committed to a policy of IRBM sites in this country before the full implications of the guided missile submarines are appreciated’. But he had to ‘get the idea across slowly without frightening or offending or promising that it will be available’.18 With the UK also developing its own land-based MRBM, Blue Streak, Selkirk knew that it was highly unlikely ministers would agree to stop work on the missile, which had strong supporters, including the Minister of Defence, Duncan Sandys, who had initiated its development, and the MOD’s Chief Scientist, Sir Frederick Brundrett, who was ‘wedded to Blue Streak’.19
By then the Admiralty had already decided to increase its links with the US Polaris programme. The
Admiralty British Joint Service Mission (ABJSM) in Washington developed particularly good contacts with the Special Projects Office, whose staff operated ‘an open door’ policy for the Royal Navy. Relations were so close that when Polaris was publicly unveiled at a Navy League Symposium in Washington in April 1957, ABJSM officers were granted unprecedented access to a test firing of a Polaris missile. A slightly perplexed ABJSM reported back to the Admiralty that:
Our Staff Ordnance Engineer Officer attended this firing and was taken very much into the confidence of those present – even to the extent of being offered a skin diving trip to view the business under water! Whilst his attendance was officially cleared, in fact he saw and heard rather more than I fancy was really intended by the authorities and I therefore feel that it would be wise not to publicise that we managed to get in so very well ‘on the ground floor.’20
But the United States Navy was unwilling to make Polaris available until it had completed its own programme. Despite this, in April 1958 Admiral Burke expressed his hope ‘that the Royal Navy will join with us in the Polaris weapon system at some time in the future’, suggesting participation in about one or two years, once the US Polaris fleet had achieved operational capability.21 Burke’s advice to wait and see was welcomed by many in the Admiralty.22 In May 1958, Mountbatten confided to Burke that:
what we are aiming to do at the moment is to keep the Polaris pot boiling over here so that the manifest advantages of this weapon system shall not be overlooked. We can only do this if we can show that the USN, backed by your government, is willing to give us every possible assistance to get such a weapon into service or at all events to be prepared to hold discussions on this subject. But whether or not this happens, I hope you would agree to release to us on a strictly, Navy-to-Navy net as much information as your Acts will allow us to have in advance of your getting the weapon into service. It is only by this means that we shall be in a position to take advantage of your suggestion to join in with you, without great loss of time.23
