Trident: the British question

The debate is not simply about submarines and missiles. It touches almost
every anxiety about the identity of the United Kingdom. The decision may tell us
what kind of country – or countries – we will become
by Ian Jack
At this moment, a British submarine armed with nuclear missiles is
somewhere at sea, ready to retaliate if the United Kingdom comes under nuclear
assault from an enemy. The boat – which is how the Royal Navy likes to talk about
submarines – is one of four in the Vanguard class: it might be Vengeance or
Victorious or Vigilant but not Vanguard herself, which is presently docked in
Devonport for a four-year-long refit. The Vanguards are defined as ballistic missile
submarines or SSBNs, an initialism that means they are doubly nuclear. Powered
by steam generated by nuclear reactors, they carry ballistic missiles with nuclear
warheads.
The location of the submarine – both as I write and you, the reader, read – is
one of several unknowns. Somewhere in the North Atlantic or the Arctic would
have been a reasonable guess when the Soviet Union was the enemy, but today
nobody could be confident of naming even those large neighbourhoods. Another
unknown is the number of missiles and warheads on board. Each submarine has
the capacity to carry 16 missiles, each of them armed with as many as 12
independently targetable warheads; but those numbers started to shrink in the
1990s, and today’s upper limit is eight missiles and 40 warheads per submarine.
Even so, those 40 warheads contain 266 times the destructive power of the bomb
that was dropped on Hiroshima.
Vickers (now BAE Systems) built the submarine hulls at Barrow; Rolls-Royce
made the reactors in Derby; the Atomic Weapons Establishment produces the
warheads at Aldermaston and Burghfield in Berkshire. All these inputs are more or
less British (less in the case of the Atomic Weapons Establishment, which is run by
a consortium of two American companies and Serco), but the missile that they
were built to serve and without which they would not exist is American:
the Trident D5 or Trident II, also deployed by the US navy, comes out of the
Lockheed Martin Space Systems factory in Sunnyvale, California.
According to the Ministry of Defence, a British ballistic missile submarine has
been patrolling the oceans prepared to do its worst at every minute of every day
since 14 June 1969, when the responsibility for Britain’s strategic nuclear weapons
passed from the Royal Air Force to the Royal Navy. Over the course of 46 years,
many things have changed. Resolution-class submarines with Polaris missiles were
replaced with Vanguards and Tridents nearly 20 years ago. The submarines are far
bigger – a Vanguard submarine is twice as long as a jumbo jet – while the missiles
have enormously increased their range and the warheads their precision. But the
system, known as continuous-at-sea-deterrence or CASD, is essentially the same:
four submarines work a rota which has one submarine on a three-month-long
patrol, another undergoing refit or repair, a third on exercises, and a fourth
preparing to relieve the first. The navy’s code name is Operation Relentless.
This is an epic vigil, born in the cold war and not abandoned by its passing,
and the government intends that it continues into a third generation of ballistic
missile submarines – the provisionally-named Successor class – that will work to
the same pattern as the Vanguards and carry a new version of the Trident D5, now
under development. In the end, a military strategy devised to deter attack by the
Soviet Union will have outlived its original enemy by at least half a century.
Since the advent of the industrial revolution, few weapons systems have
survived so long. The modern battleship, devised under the empty blue skies of
Edwardian Britain, demonstrated its vulnerability to air attack even before Pearl
Harbor; its useful career lasted hardly 40 years. Britain’s submarine-launched
nuclear weapon, on the other hand, seems immune to obsolescence – as well as to
financial, social and political hazards such as reductions in public spending,
deindustrialisation, and the growing possibility of the break-up of the kingdom it
was designed to protect.
2. ‘This project is a monster’
The Scottish Question is a familiar one. But Trident sits at the heart of a more
complicated puzzle – what we might call the British Question – and embodies many of the
crises and anxieties that have afflicted the United Kingdom since the second world war: the
passing of empire, the “special relationship” with the United States, the decline of
manufacturing and the disappearance of an industrial working class (and its consequences
for the Labour party) – and, of course, the spectre of Scottish independence and the end of a
United Kingdom. Trident and its ancestors have been among the causes and consequences of
all of them. Where and how (if at all) its successors are deployed will be a measure of the kind
of country, or countries, that Britain becomes.
The Strategic Defence and Security Review that was presented to parliament last
November described the building of the four Successor submarines as “a national endeavour
… one of the largest government investment programmes, equivalent in scale to Crossrail or
High Speed 2”. It will “require sustained long-term effort”, the report added, along with
radical organisational and managerial changes to “create a world-class, enduring submarine
enterprise”. The boosterism that inflects this language may reveal rather than disguise an
underlying nervousness: the more a British government talks of “world-class” schemes and
institutions, the faster we should count the spoons.
Crossrail and HS2 are Britain’s most expensive public infrastructure projects (with the
possible exception of the Hinkley Point nuclear power station, whose eventual cost to the
public purse is hard to quantify). Recent estimates put the cost of Crossrail at £15.9bn and the
first leg of HS2 – the 120 miles between London and Birmingham – at £30bn. The defence
review increased the estimated manufacturing cost of the four Successor submarines to
£31bn from an estimated £25bn that had held good from five years before, and for the first
time added a contingency estimate of another £10bn.
Delivery of the new fleet, already delayed from the early 2020s to 2028, is now
scheduled to begin in the early 2030s, postponing the withdrawal of Vanguard submarines at
least 10 years beyond their expected operational life. According to the defence review, the
increased cost and delayed schedule “reflect the greater understanding we now have about
the detailed design of the submarines and their manufacture”. Beyond this opaque statement,
the Ministry of Defence will not explain why the cost should have risen by nearly a quarter
during five years of near-to-zero inflation, for a programme that was authorised (by Tony
Blair’s government) as long ago as December 2006 and which has already cost £3.9bn in its
so-called design phase. And this is only the beginning of mountainous public expense.
Until last autumn, the generally accepted figure for the price of the entire Successor
programme – and the one used by its critics, such as the Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament – was £100bn. This is the cost of building and then arming, running and
repairing four nuclear submarines over 40 years of operational life, followed by their upkeep
as decommissioned hulks until the navy decides how to dispose of them. (A safe way of
scrapping a nuclear submarine has still to be found; the 19 that the Royal Navy has so far
withdrawn from service – the oldest of them in the 1980s – are all still laid up in navy
dockyards at Rosyth and Devonport.)

A Vanguard class submarine Photograph: PA

But in October, the Tory MP Crispin Blunt, a Trident sceptic, used information
contained in a parliamentary reply from a junior defence minister, Philip Dunne, to estimate
a far higher figure. Dunne had said that the in-service cost of the Successor programme would
be about 6% of the annual defence budget over the project’s lifetime. Nobody, of course, can
know what the UK’s defence budget will be in 20 years’ time; Blunt’s calculations presumed
that it would not fall below 2% of GDP, which is the present government’s promise, and that
GDP would grow at the rate expected by the government and the International Monetary
Fund. On that basis, and on the assumption that in-service costs would run from 2028 to
2060, Blunt concluded that Successor would cost £167bn – a price, he said, that would
consume double its predecessor’s proportion of the defence budget and was now “too high to
be rational or sensible”.
It may turn out to be lower. The new submarines may not last so long in service as the
32 years assumed by Blunt, and the principle of continuous-at-sea-deterrence could be
modified – continuous only at times of international tension, for example – or even abolished
by a future government. On the other hand, the cost could be higher. Dunne’s figure for the
submarines’ building costs – £25bn – was raised by at least £6bn only a month later.
Appearing in October before parliament’s public accounts committee, the senior civil servant
at the Ministry of Defence, Jon Thompson, could only say that it was “extremely difficult” to
estimate future costs – calling it “the project that most keeps me awake at night” and “a
monster”. Stewart Hosie, the Scottish National party’s deputy leader at Westminster, said it
was “truly an unthinkable and indefensible sum of money to spend on the renewal of an
unwanted and unusable nuclear weapons system”.
After independence itself, the SNP’s best-known political aim is the ejection of the UK’s
nuclear-missile fleet from its base at Faslane on the Clyde. Over the next 15 years, a second
referendum on the independence question in which Scotland votes to leave the United
Kingdom is at least a strong possibility. The SNP, should it form the first independent
Scottish government, would no doubt be pragmatic and opportunistic in its negotiations with
London, but it seems unlikely that Faslane would continue as the home of another state’s
nuclear deterrent. Its place in the SNP’s rhetoric has become far too prominent for that kind
of compromise, even if London wants it.
So far all the Ministry of Defence will say is that there are no plans to move the nuclear
deterrent from the Clyde and that “any alternative solution would come at huge and
unnecessary cost”. But unless the Trident renewal programme is something that the
government secretly wants to cancel and would be happy to see sunk by Scottish
independence, plans must exist to move the base out of Scotland. “Huge and unnecessary
cost” – so far unspecified but certain to be several billion – is therefore what the UK-minus-
Scotland will face.
3. The landscape of the cold war
Faslane, officially Her Majesty’s Naval Base Clyde, is one of the most unexpected sights
in modern Britain. The visitor imagines a small dockyard disfiguring a bare Scottish coast.
What he finds instead is a long settlement that stretches for nearly two miles down the
eastern shore of the Gareloch, the gentlest and most suburban of the Clyde’s seven larger sea
lochs, an hour’s journey from Glasgow by commuter train and local bus.
The best view of the base is from the loch’s western side, where a scattering of seaside
villas, built in Victorian times for the Glasgow gentry, stand back from the little road that
leads south down the Rosneath peninsula towards the open firth. A wood separates the road
from the loch, but here and there a rough path leads down to a rocky beach glistening with
damp seaweed. Scramble down one of these paths and you look across a mile of calm water to
the kind of industrial scene that has vanished from most of Britain. Among the wharves,
cranes, ships and sheds, a tall chimney marks the power plant that can generate enough
electricity for a town of 25,000 people. Nearby, a ship lift capable of holding a 16,000-tonne
submarine rises to the height of an 11-storey building. A cluster of accommodation blocks
looks as trim and permanent as a fair-sized municipal housing estate. Faslane has a hospital,
shops, naval mess rooms and civilian canteens.
No other industrial site in Scotland has as many workers: Faslane employs about 6,500,
while another 200 work over the hill on Loch Long at the armaments depot at Coulport,
where the missiles are “mated” with their warheads. By day, the scene on the Gareloch is full
of movement. Police launches and small grey warships come and go from the jetties, and
sometimes, assisted by tugs, the heavy, dark shape of a submarine moves into mid-channel
and slides towards the Firth of Clyde. By night, from the straight hill road that was built to
take the lorries loaded with nuclear warheads on the last leg of their journey from Berkshire
to Coulport, the base spreads out below like a brightly lit seaside resort with a pier and a
promenade. Security is dramatically visible: double razor-wire fences, sentry posts, watch
towers. Sometimes, driving slowly to take in the view, you form the impression that the car
behind is also taking an interest – when you stop, it stops – too artfully, you think, but then
you were raised on the paranoid fictions of the cold war.
Faslane belongs to that time, and more particularly to one of its most influential
theories: that the immensely destructive power of nuclear weapons had changed the purpose
of military strategy from winning conflicts to deterring them. An adversary would be
dissuaded from attacking because the lives and property lost in a counter-attack would be too
heavy a price to bear. No matter the difference in military strength between the powers – for
example, between the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom – the same calculation would
still apply. It wouldn’t quite be tit for tat. The Soviets could easily wipe out the UK completely
and capture what remained of its resources, while UK retaliation might amount only to the
ruination of Moscow. But for the Soviet Union, that might be dissuasive enough.
The weakness in the theory was the surprise attack, in which the aggressor state struck
at military installations to eliminate its victim’s capacity to hit back. How was that capacity to
be kept intact? Defensive missile shields offered only limited protection to pre-emptive
attacks on the static (and hardly secret) locations of land-based nuclear weapons: airfields for
the aircraft that would drop free-fall bombs and the silos that sheltered intercontinental
ballistic missiles. Submarine-based weapons, on the other hand, had the twin advantages of
mobility and near-invisibility. A new method of propulsion, in which a nuclear reactor made
the steam that drove the turbines, was a sealed system that, unlike the diesel engine, neither
needed air nor emitted waste; human endurance was now the main limitation to the length of
a submarine’s voyage. A nuclear submarine could travel as fast as any large surface ship and
at lower speeds much more quietly, and therefore less detectably, than its diesel-driven
predecessor. The increasing range of missiles meant that by the early 1960s they could be
fired well out to sea and hit a target a thousand miles inland. Their submarine launch
platform had a whole ocean to hide in.
The US navy commissioned the world’s first nuclear submarine, the Nautilus, in 1955.
On his visit to Britain the next year, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev told an audience at
the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, that a future war would not be “decided by cruisers, not
even by bombers. They too are outdated … Today the submarine fleet has come to the
forefront as the chief naval weapon, and the chief aerial weapon is the missile, which can hit
targets at great distances, and in future the distance will be unlimited.”
By 1957, this had become equally clear to the Royal Navy. In the words of an Admiralty
paper published that year, if Britain didn’t acquire nuclear submarines it would “cease to
count as a naval force in world affairs”. The first of them, HMS Dreadnought, put to sea in
1962, but only after considerable technical assistance from the US navy and the American
engineering company Westinghouse. It marked the beginning of a dependence on American
technology that has grown with every generation of British missile submarines since.
4. Losing an empire
I saw Faslane for the first time in the early summer of 1958, from a steam train puffing
slowly into the western Highlands. I remember a bay scattered with small craft at anchor and
a glimpse of one of Britain’s last battleships, which was being dismantled at the breaker’s yard
that in those days occupied the bay. Later research shows that the battleship must have been
HMS Anson – named after Admiral George Anson, who defeated the French at the first battle
of Cape Finisterre in 1747. At the time I recognised her only as a member of the King George
V class: ten 14-inch guns in three turrets, two funnels, 27 knots at full speed.
I knew this because I lived next door to a royal dockyard, Rosyth, and ships had become
an enthusiasm. I liked their taxonomy – destroyers, frigates, minelayers, corvettes – and
easily absorbed the details of their fighting power from books with titles like The Boys’ Book
of the Navy. There was, of course, something else – some ineffable boyhood veneration of the
ship itself and with it the kind of patriotism – unexamined, omnipresent – that came from
watching films about the war at sea. I argued with an American boy at my primary school.
Who had the bigger navy? I contested, insupportably by then, that it was ours.
 The 1950s were what the journalist Nigel Fountain once described as Britain’s “Icarus
period”. It still imagined itself as the world’s third great power, equipped industrially to
pioneer exciting and, as it turned out, risky technologies such as jet airliners and nuclear
power stations. British innovation allowed a different kind of patriotism – scientific
achievement rather than imperial dominion – but many of its pet projects fell to earth (the
world’s first jet airliner, the Comet, did so literally and too often), while others failed to take
off. This was the case with the Blue Streak medium-range ballistic missile, which the
government intended as the successor to an RAF bomber fleet that improved Soviet air
defences were making obsolete. For a time, the Blue Streak symbolised Britain’s bright future
(I remember Blue Streak racing bikes for boys and Blue Streak bubble gum), but it was
eventually cancelled on the grounds that land-based missiles were vulnerable to a pre-
emptive strike.
Britain then turned to an air-launched ballistic missile, the Skybolt, which America was
close to putting into production, but in 1962 that too was cancelled after a series of test
failures. This was a grave blow to British plans – an agreement reached between President
Eisenhower and Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had made the deal for the Skybolt look a
certainty. If Britain was to persist with an effective nuclear deterrent, it needed to persuade
the US to let it have the only available alternative: the powerful submarine-launched missile,
Polaris.
Britain had some leverage here: in 1961 the US navy had established a forward base for
its Polaris fleet at the Holy Loch, which lies only seven or eight miles across the Clyde from
the Gareloch. During the negotiations over the site, the British side raised the idea that one
day Britain might obtain Polaris missiles for itself. The Americans resisted the idea; they
distrusted British behaviour after the Suez invasion five years earlier and, more broadly,
believed that the fewer countries that possessed their formidable new weapon the better.
Enmities developed. There were rumours that Washington wanted to push the UK out of the
nuclear business.
It was in this context – and only a fortnight before Macmillan met the US president,
John Kennedy, at a specially convened summit in Nassau in December, 1962 – that
Kennedy’s foreign policy adviser, Dean Acheson, delivered a speech at the West Point military
academy. “Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role,” he said in the
speech’s most celebrated passage. “The attempt to play a separate power role … apart from
Europe, a role based on a ‘special relationship’ with the United States, a role based on being
head of a ‘commonwealth’ which has no political structure, or unity, or strength – this role is
about played out.”
The speech infuriated Macmillan – Acheson, he said, had made the same mistake as
“quite a lot of people in the last 400 years, including … Napoleon, the Kaiser and Hitler” –
and the discussions with Kennedy in the Bahamas became, in his words, “protracted and
fiercely contested”. America insisted that it would sell Polaris to Britain only if control of the
missile was assigned to Nato, but that wasn’t Macmillan’s idea of an independent deterrent.
Finally, the two sides brokered a compromise that gave control to Nato but reserved Britain’s
right to act independently – that is, to fire the missile without consulting anyone else,
including the US – in situations where “Her Majesty’s Government may decide that supreme
national interests are at stake”. With these dozen words, Britain could claim that its new
deterrent would be free from foreign veto over its use. The warheads and the submarines
would be made in Britain. Polaris was certainly an American missile, made by Lockheed (now
Lockheed Martin) in California, but it would be just as obedient to British command as the
British-built bombers it replaced.
The Nassau agreement laid down the fundamentals of the military policy that the UK
has followed ever since, but as Peter Hennessy and James Jinks write in their fine history of
the Royal Navy’s submarine service, The Silent Deep, the agreement’s attempt “to reconcile
interdependence with independence remained a source of continuing difficulties … as the two
countries disagreed over what exactly had been agreed”. Kennedy’s under-secretary of state,
George Ball, described it later as “intolerably vague” and a “monument of contrived
ambiguity”.
Nobody could say for sure what fell into the category of “supreme national interests”;
most people, including Kennedy, found it hard to imagine Britain launching an atomic
warhead without American assent. Solly Zuckerman, the UK government’s chief scientific
adviser, decided that the question “How independent?” was as pointless as medieval
disputation. If Polaris missiles ever came to be fired, the British public “would never even
know” whether they had reached their target. “There would be no newspapers to tell us, no
television … and maybe no ‘us’, just the crews of those Polaris boats that had been at sea.”
5. How Trident reached Faslane
We are often traitors to our earlier selves. In 1958, I was the kind of boy who loved
warships; in 1961, I was another kind of boy who opposed them. The US navy established its
Polaris base in the Holy Loch that year (it stayed until 1992) in the face of fierce opposition
from the anti-nuclear movement, which was reaching its first peak. Ongoing atmospheric
testing, the effects of radiation on Japanese fishermen, the better-dead-than-red rhetoric of
politicians, the obvious futility of civil defence: all contributed to the general foreboding and,
among a minority, the need to protest.
Civil disobedience and non-violent resistance, then novel techniques to Britain, gave the
demonstrations unprecedented publicity. The Holy Loch protest that I joined on a September
afternoon in 1961 had its farcical dimension; a gale prevented our ferry from landing its cargo
of several hundred protesters, sending us back across the Clyde to march miles away from the
base. Nevertheless, more than 350 people did manage to get arrested at a sit-in at the base’s
gates, where American sailors making their entrances and exits were taunted and teased with
chants of “Yankees go home!” and “Ye canny spend a dollar when ye’re deid” (to the tune of
“She’ll be coming ’round the mountain”). The anti-nuclear cause in Scotland had a distinct
and memorable flavour, less solemn than the protests in the south – the songs had a Glasgow
swagger and wit – but also more xenophobic, because the nuclear weapons being protested
against weren’t even our own.
There was another difference, which in terms of Scottish political attitudes may be the
Holy Loch’s most important legacy: one of the most beautiful seascapes in Europe – of
longstanding aesthetic and recreational value to industrial Scotland – had been chosen by the
United States as the site for a nuclear base with the connivance of a British government. It
was hard to resist the conclusion that the British government worried more about preserving
the safety and landscape of southern England than it did about those things in western
Scotland. The SNP at the time was insignificant as a political influence, but its opposition to
Polaris at its 1961 conference, extended to all nuclear weapons two years later, began to rouse
a slumbering grievance.
In fact, it was Washington’s brute power rather than London’s duplicity that decided the
location. According to the military analysts Malcolm Chalmers and William Walker (writing
in their 2001 book, Uncharted Waters), the Americans wanted a sheltered anchorage with
access to deep water that was situated “near a transatlantic airfield and a centre of population
in which the American service personnel could be absorbed”. The Holy Loch was an obvious
choice; it was close to Prestwick airport and the bright lights of Glasgow, sheltered from the
prevailing south-westerlies, and stood a better chance than a more open location of confining
a nuclear spillage, should one occur.
A deal between the Admiralty and the US navy was close to being agreed when Harold
Macmillan intervened and asked the two sides to think again. He was alarmed at the prospect
of nuclear weapons being based 30 miles from Glasgow and its “large number of agitators”; in
a letter to Eisenhower, Macmillan noted that its status as a Soviet target “would give rise to
the greatest political difficulties and would make the project almost unsaleable in this
country”.
The Admiralty looked again at the possibilities and this time included Falmouth in
Cornwall, Milford Haven in west Wales, and Fort William in the western Highlands, the last
favoured by the Macmillan’s cabinet because of its distance from large populations. But the
US navy was adamant in its choice and the political difficulties foreseen by Macmillan duly
arrived, in terms of the Holy Loch protests. But these didn’t last long – the end of
atmospheric testing and the peaceful resolution of the Cuban missile crisis had drawn the
sting from the nuclear disarmament campaign.
As a result, the question of where Britain’s own Polaris submarines were to be based
aroused remarkably little attention when the government began its deliberations in 1963.
Many of the criteria were the same as the Americans had applied earlier. The Admiralty
wanted a base near deep water that had easy access to a labour force and could be easily
supplied by road and rail – and in addition, for safety reasons, a missile storage and loading
site that was separated by at least 4,400ft from the regular docking berth, where routine
maintenance was carried out and crews came and went. These requirements ruled out all
islands, the remote north-west of Scotland, and the south and east coasts all the way from
Dorset to Berwickshire, just below the Firth of Forth. Of the eventual longlist of 10, Milford
Haven was judged too close to an oil refinery; Invergordon and Loch Alsh were too remote
and too vulnerable to submarine attack; Devonport had the city of Plymouth on its doorstep.
Falmouth was perfect in every way, but the land there owned by the Duchy of Cornwall and
the National Trust was held to be too expensive and difficult to buy, and the government
working party felt that “a strong case would be required to justify spoiling a national beauty
spot or vigorous sailing centre”.
That left two Scottish sites. The Treasury and the ministries of defence and transport
favoured Rosyth in the Firth of Forth, mainly because it was cheaper: it had a spacious
dockyard with a separate munitions jetty already in place. (The fact that Edinburgh’s 450,000
people lived only 10 miles away apparently played no part in the argument for or against.) For
operational reasons, the Admiralty much preferred Faslane: its site in the Gareloch offered
better shelter and protection than Rosyth, and the Clyde’s geography gave a submerged
submarine a choice of deep-water routes towards the Atlantic. The firth was also particularly
well equipped as a submarine testing ground. Its long sea lochs held deep, calm water,
notably free of inconvenient shoals and rocks, which the Royal Navy had used from the start
of the 20th century as the test-bed for the products of its Greenock torpedo factory. During
the second world war, when the Clyde became a primary destination for transatlantic
shipments of troops and supplies, Faslane Bay had acquired a substantial harbour, a railway
connection and a title: Military Port Number One. Postwar, half of it was given over to
shipbreaking and the other half to a flotilla of pre-nuclear submarines.
These convenient legacies of older wars clinched the navy’s case for Faslane as the base
for Polaris. By 1968, work had finished on new docking facilities in the Gareloch and the
loading jetty and missile bunkers at Coulport, and the Admiralty could congratulate itself on
one of the largest building projects it had ever undertaken. Much bigger things were to come.
Twelve years later, when the governments of Britain and the United States agreed to replace
the Polaris system with the Trident D5, an extravagant programme of works made Faslane
into the largest building project in Europe – one never equalled before or since in the history
of the Ministry of Defence. The ship lift, the power station, the new road to carry warheads
that was bulldozed nine miles down the glen: by 1994, thanks partly to the more stringent
safety standards that followed the Chernobyl disaster, the reshaping of Faslane had cost
£1.9bn (£3.5bn at today’s prices) and was 72% over budget. The ship lift can withstand
earthquakes up to 8 on the Richter scale.
I’ve travelled around this part of Argyllshire often enough, and seen it, too, from boats
and steamers on the Clyde. There is melancholy here. The industrial prosperity that created
its marine villas and yacht slipways began to ebb away after the first world war; by 1952, the
writer George Blake could describe the settlements around the Gareloch and Loch Long as
“slightly pathetic backwaters” – which in the case of Coulport’s long range of seaside houses
“wore the look of something that had not quite come off and had been written off”. In 2005,
when the Ministry of Defence demolished the last of these Victorian houses, the original
Coulport vanished. Other and grander dwellings went long before: Rosneath Castle, home to
Queen Victoria’s daughter Louise, the Duchess of Argyll; Shandon House, built for the
innovative shipbuilder and cofounder of the Cunard Line, Robert Napier. Country retreats
had been buried under an armed advance.
One bright afternoon last autumn as I drove along the miles of boundary fence, it struck
me that this might be the last great military landscape that the United Kingdom would create,
the last chapter in a history that includes the Grand Fleet’s anchorage at Scapa Flow, the
artillery ranges of the Salisbury Plain and the bomber airfields of Lincolnshire. Would there
ever be the money again? Or the will or the need? Once all these things had seemed like scars
on the land: the new straight roads, the roundabouts, the street lights, the watchtowers, the
ship lift, the anonymous sheds that held God knows what. Now it was interesting to see them
as potential ruins, something an empire left behind in the hills as it abandoned the frontier
and shrank back to the capital.
6. Everybody’s headache
On 3 September 1986, Margaret Thatcher laid the keel of the first Trident submarine,
HMS Vanguard, at Vickers’ shipyard in Barrow. Earlier that year, the most eloquent case for
its cancellation had been made by the first episode of Yes, Prime Minister, the BBC comedy
series written by Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn in which a fictional prime minister, Jim
Hacker, is in perpetual battle with his most senior civil servant, Sir Humphrey Appleby. “I’ve
decided to cancel Trident,” Hacker tells an astonished Sir Humphrey. He intends to divert
some of the savings into conventional forces and reintroduce conscription, and “at one
stroke” solve Britain’s balance of payments, educational and unemployment problems.
Sir Humphrey [scandalised] : With Trident we could obliterate the whole of eastern
Europe.
Hacker: I don’t want to obliterate the whole of eastern Europe.
 Sir Humphrey: But it’s a deterrent.
Hacker: It’s a bluff. I probably wouldn’t use it.
Sir Humphrey: Yes, but they don’t know that you probably wouldn’t.
Hacker: They probably do.
Sir Humphrey: Yes, they probably know that you probably wouldn’t. But they can’t
certainly know.
Hacker: They probably certainly know that I probably wouldn’t.
Sir Humphrey: Yes, but even though they probably certainly know that you probably
wouldn’t, they don’t certainly know that, although you probably wouldn’t, there is no
probability that you certainly would.
Hacker: What?
This wizard-behind-the-curtain aspect of Trident is the official reason for having it.
What matters is belief. The navy could fill the sharp end of a Trident missile with straw, but if
the straw could be kept a perfect secret and the world went on believing that instead of straw
there were warheads capable of destroying 266 cities, each the size of Hiroshima, then
Trident would be doing its job. If it had to be used, then the world, or what was left of it,
would of course discover the truth. But if it had to be used, it wouldn’t have worked (and
there would be few of us left to care).
When Jeremy Corbyn said in September that he was opposed to the use of nuclear
weapons – though his refusal to “press the button” was never stated in so many words –
General Sir Nicholas Houghton, chief of the defence staff, responded by saying that a prime
minister who announced he would never fire nuclear weapons “completely undermined” the
deterrent. In theory, this is true. Provided the enemy was credulous as well as rash, this
disavowal of nuclear retaliation might make an adversary more ready to attack. (A more
cautious enemy might decide that all such a prime minister’s statement probably meant was
that he probably wouldn’t.) But Houghton’s argument that the UK uses the deterrent “every
second of every minute of every day” invites greater scepticism. Just exactly what has been
deterred? And why have non-nuclear weapons states such as Germany, Spain and Japan been
just as successful in deterring it?
Even before it possessed them, Britain’s need for nuclear weapons was contentious.
“We’ve got to have this thing [the atom bomb] over here whatever it costs [and] we’ve got to
have the bloody Union Jack on top of it,” were the words of the Labour foreign secretary,
Ernest Bevin, in 1946 after he returned from an unsuccessful attempt to persuade
Washington to share its nuclear expertise. Not everyone in government was convinced. The
small cabinet committee that met a few months later to sanction Britain’s nuclear programme
was careful to exclude ministers such as the chancellor of the exchequer who might object on
grounds of cost, and the military also had doubts. A memo from Sir Henry Tizard, the chief
scientific adviser to the ministry of defence, suggested that Britain’s pursuit of the bomb
made the country blind to reality. “We persist in regarding ourselves as a great power capable
of everything and only temporarily handicapped by economic difficulties. We are not a great
power, and never will be again,” Tizard wrote in 1949, adding: “We are a great nation, but if
we continue to behave like a great power we shall soon cease to be a great nation.”
The question has divided Britain, and particularly the Labour party, more than any
other other nuclear weapons state. In France, which has a similar nuclear strategy, the left
was happy to applaud the force de dissuasion, but Labour’s Christian and anti-war traditions
made it more difficult for the leadership to celebrate military power, at least openly. On the
other hand, it needed to be seen as patriotic. In the words of Professor Michael Clarke,
formerly of the Royal United Services Institute, support for nuclear weapons came to stand
“for the defence of the realm in general”. What Clarke calls “the prevailing party folklore” –
that embracing unilateral nuclear disarmament had cost Labour the 1983 election – turned it
into a party that, at least until Corbyn became its leader, had to be more loyal than the king.
In their history of the Royal Navy’s submarine service, Peter Hennessy and James Jinks
describe this troubled history as “Labour’s nuclear neuralgia”. What its leaders wanted was
often difficult to know. The manifesto for the 1964 election said that the Nassau agreement to
buy Polaris nuclear missiles from the US would “add nothing to the deterrent strength of the
Western Alliance … [Polaris] will not be independent and it will not be British and it will not
deter … We are not prepared any longer to waste the country’s resources on endless
duplication of strategic nuclear weapons.” Nothing could be plainer. The military
establishment, including the then chief of defence staff, Lord Mountbatten, firmly believed
that Polaris would be cancelled if Labour won; the government encouraged the Admiralty to
spend as much as possible on the submarine programme to make cancellation more difficult.
But Labour’s victory, when it came, changed very little apart from shrinking the intended
Polaris fleet from five submarines to four.
Harold Wilson, the new prime minister, was told that the construction of the first two
submarines “had passed the point of no return” and seemed anxious to believe it. As he later
admitted, the deterrent “had an emotional appeal to the man in the pub”, omitting to say that
this might not be the case for the man in the party. When the first of the Polaris submarines,
HMS Resolution, was commissioned into the navy in 1967, no representative of Wilson’s
government attended the ceremony. In his memoirs, the chief executive of the Polaris
programme, vice-admiral Sir Hugh Mackenzie, recalled that while Labour ministers were
happy to give “their support wholeheartedly, and even enthusiastically” to Polaris in private,
in public they “remained sensitive to anything to do with it … and were reluctant to encourage
much in the way of publicity for what it was achieving.”
In its manifesto for the 1974 election, Labour promised that when Polaris expired in the
early 1990s it would not be replaced with a new generation of nuclear weapons – a policy
similar to the non-renewal of Trident that Jeremy Corbyn now wants Labour to adopt. The
party’s next election manifesto, in 1979, was more cautious, stressing that “a full and
informed debate” was needed before a Labour government made such radical commitment,
but even so it still believed that non-renewal was “the best course for Britain”.
This impression of open-mindedness was misleading. Since 1977, a small group of
Labour ministers and government officials, known as the Restricted Group, had been meeting
secretly to discuss how the nuclear deterrent might be continued when Polaris reached the
end of its life in the 1990s. Two senior civil servants, Sir Anthony Duff and Sir Ronald Mason,
were commissioned to write a study: the result is a key document in British military history,
the Duff-Mason report, which in its three parts laid out the pros and cons of renewing an
independent nuclear deterrent, the criteria such a deterrent would need to meet to be
effective, and the weapons systems that might deliver it. What level of damage would the
Soviet Union consider to be unacceptable? The report suggested that it might be reached by
“the disruption of the main government organs of the Soviet State [in Moscow] or by causing
grave damage to a number of major cities involving destruction of buildings, heavy loss of life,
general disruption and serious consequences for industrial and other assets.” Moscow’s anti-
ballistic missile defences and underground bunkers narrowed the chances of a successful
attack; the other options included “breakdown level damage to Leningrad and about nine
other major cities” and “grave damage, not necessarily to breakdown level, to 30 major
targets, including Leningrad and other large cities”.
Ministers and officials in the Restricted Group read the Duff-Mason report in December
1978 and made various suggestions about how cheaply “unacceptable damage” in any of its
forms might be delivered. David Owen, the foreign secretary, wanted to adapt ordinary attack
submarines (known as SSNs) so that they could launch shorter-range cruise missiles carrying
nuclear warheads. Someone else proposed collaborating with France, which by now had its
own fleet of ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs). Michael Quinlan, a deputy under-secretary
of state at the Ministry of Defence, thought that a casualty figure of up to 10 million Soviet
dead might not be enough to deter a country that had lost more than 20 million people in the
second world war. “In this field nothing is provable,” Quinlan wrote, “but it is far from clear
that they would regard less than half of 1% of their population as an unthinkable price for
contemplating a conquest of western Europe.”
Of the options available, James Callaghan, Wilson’s successor as prime minister, echoed
the recommendation implied in the Duff-Mason report and favoured the Trident missile
system that was then being developed for the US navy. The next month – January 1979 – he
flew to a summit meeting between the UK, the US, France and Germany held in Guadeloupe,
where he intended to have a private session with the US president, Jimmy Carter. It was on
his return from this summit that his nonchalant response to a reporter’s question about
Britain’s social turmoil that winter became the headline, “Crisis? What crisis?” – famous
words that were never in fact spoken by Callaghan but helped lose him the general election.
What he returned with might be said to be far more consequential – an assurance from Carter
that the UK could have Trident if it wanted it; information that, together with the Duff-Mason
report, he passed to the incoming government of Margaret Thatcher, who immediately
became embroiled in the arguments over its cost.
Nuclear neuralgia has never been confined to the Labour party. The need to have as
cheap a deterrent as possible has been the source of conflict within governments since the
early 1960s, asserting itself most obviously with the question: how many submarines do we
really need? First raised with the Polaris, this question returned with Trident and returned
again with Trident renewal, and each time, after pressure from the Ministry of Defence, the
eventual answer has been a quartet. In 1980 as in 1964, the Royal Navy wanted five, though
some members of Thatcher’s government wanted none at all. John Nott, the defence minister
charged with pressing Trident’s case, reported to Thatcher in February 1981 that two-thirds of
the Conservative party and two-thirds of the cabinet opposed the purchase of Trident and
that even the chiefs of the defence staff were not unanimous. Nonetheless, three submarines
were sanctioned in January 1982, with a fourth added only a few months later.
The building programme had financial repercussions that went far beyond the cost of
the vessels themselves and their remodelled base at Faslane. At Barrow, the Devonshire Dock
Hall, the largest indoor shipyard in Europe, was built specifically to handle their construction.
At Aldermaston, new facilities were needed to produce the Trident warheads. Even so, Nott
could boast in 1982 that Trident’s cost over 15 years would be about 3% of the UK’s annual
defence budget – compared to the 20% of annual defence spending that an independent
deterrent was costing the French. Whereas the Polaris missiles had to be removed from
submarines for routine maintenance and a change of warhead, the design of the Tridents
made that unnecessary: repairs could be done, and the warheads changed, without offloading
the missiles. That made a lot of Coulport’s work redundant. On the far fewer occasions that a
missile had to leave or join the ship, the US Navy proposed that the operation could be
carried out at its base in the state of Georgia – reducing Trident’s costs, at the cost of
compromising the idea of its independence. A meeting to consider the proposed new
arrangements decided, in the words of Thatcher’s summing-up, that “the political and
financial advantages of carrying out missile processing in the United States outweighed the
marginal reduction in the independence of the Trident system and the eventual loss of job
opportunities in Scotland”. The unspoken reality, then and since, is that the US could
eventually disable Britain’s nuclear deterrent if it chose to by cutting off technical help and
equipment – it might take months, but the outcome would be certain.
That hardly mattered in a strategy where perception was everything and Britain and the
US had a common enemy. According to the record of the decisive meeting, Thatcher had been
persuaded to up the number of submarines from three to four because three would not be a
credible deterrent “so far as the perception of the Soviet Union was concerned”. Nobody
conceived any other adversary.
The Duff-Mason report had been quite explicit: “Over the next 30-40 years, our
planning need not be geared to any nuclear threat beyond the Soviet Union.” And yet on 26
December 1991, little more than 13 years after that sentence was written, the Soviet Union
voted itself out of existence. In 1994, the British government announced that Moscow,
Leningrad (St Petersburg) and other sites in the former Soviet Union had been dropped as
targets, and that Trident’s guidance computers no longer routinely held targeting information
– implying that the coordinates of new targets would be programmed if and when they were
identified. When the first of the Trident fleet, HMS Vanguard, put to sea, the Soviet Union
had been dead two years. By the time the fourth submarine, HMS Vengeance, began its
operational life in November 1999, it had been gone for the best part of a decade. The four
most expensive ships ever built for the Royal Navy had arrived too late for the party.
7. Not just another country
One morning last October, I had coffee with Feargal Dalton, a former lieutenant
commander of a Trident-missile submarine. We met by arrangement in the house of a friend
who lives a mile or two down the coast from the warhead jetty at Coulport. From this house, a
bungalow set high on a hill, you look down on the great broad junction of the Clyde, where
sea lochs join the estuary from the north and west, and the estuary takes a 90-degree turn
towards the south and the Atlantic. It was a still morning of mist and sun. The sea was silvery,
and creased only by the wakes of small warships on a naval exercise.
This was familiar territory to Dalton, who spent 15 of his 17 years in the Royal Navy in
submarines, eventually as a weapons engineering officer, a WEO, in charge of the missiles. In
fact, he is one of the few Royal Navy officers – he believed there were “only nine or 10 of us” –
to have pulled the trigger and sent a Trident D5 bursting out of its undersea compartment
and roaring into the air towards its target on the US’s test range off the coast of Florida. The
missiles cost about $37m (£26m) each, so firings are rare. Dalton got his chance in May 2009
when his submarine, HMS Victorious, underwent what is known as a Daso, a Demonstration
and Shakedown Operation, after a substantial refit. These firings are usually publicised. As
Hennessy and Jinks write: “Central to remaining a nuclear-weapons nation is the need at
regular intervals to show the rest of the world that is exactly what the UK still is.” But Dalton’s
event was completely ignored by the media. “Check it,” he said. “It just didn’t happen. Gordon
Brown didn’t want the media to notice because a non-proliferation meeting was being held
around the same time.”
He seemed irritated by this – in his view, it was typical of Labour’s muddled and
hypocritical attitude towards nuclear weapons. You had to stand up and be counted for or
against them, and now he was against them, having left the navy in 2010 to become a teacher
and an SNP councillor in Glasgow. (His wife, Carol Monaghan, is one of the city’s new SNP
MPs.) Everything about Dalton is unlikely. His family’s political history is in the militant Irish
Republicanism of South Armagh; nonetheless, he said it was the IRA atrocities at Enniskillen
and Warrington that persuaded him to join the Royal Navy after he graduated with an
electronics degree from University College Dublin. He wore a few badges in his lapel: an
enamel Armistice poppy, a veteran’s pin, the insignia of the submarine base HMS Neptune.
He said several times that it was to the Royal Navy’s “immense credit” that it had accepted
and promoted him despite his background. He loved the Royal Navy and at the same time
wanted Scotland to kick it out. He hated nuclear weapons and at the same insisted that he
would have fired one for real if he had been ordered to.
We drank our coffee. Dalton said that submarine crews were just as sceptical about the
independent nuclear deterrent as he was; many of them believed its purpose was political
rather than military. “I knew for 15 years that Trident was about keeping Britain as a
permanent member of the UN security council and most of the men I served with knew it
too,” he said. “We had an acute sense of, ‘If we mess this up, the UK will lose its place at the
big boys’ table.’” The UK was “still concerned with projecting global power”, he added,
whereas an independent Scotland would be concerned with “projecting global justice and
peace”.
The crew of a submarine probably have a deeper knowledge of each other than any other
workplace can provide, though of course Dalton has a political axe to grind and may not be
the most reliable witness to their conversations. But who could argue with the idea that
“status and influence” is the most persuasive answer to the question of what Trident is for?
There are other answers: to provide jobs and preserve skills; to sustain what’s left in
Britain of high-tech shipbuilding and nuclear technology; to make the nation feel more secure
in an increasingly dangerous world, where the number of countries with nuclear weapons
looks certain to grow. But even in the cold war, the case for nuclear weapons went beyond the
military. “To give up our status as a nuclear weapons state would be a momentous step in
British history,” is the last (and by implication, not least) of the pro-Trident arguments in the
Duff-Mason report. “It gives us access to and the possibility of influencing American thinking
on defence and arms control policy and has enabled us to play a leading role in international
arms control and non-proliferation negotiations.”
Thatcher’s defence minister, John Nott, made a similar point about status and influence
a few years later. Not to proceed with Trident when it was “probably inevitable” that other
small countries would acquire a nuclear capability meant, he wrote, that “in the eyes of our
allies, and of our enemies, we would seem quite a different nation (and the Conservative party
quite a different party)”. A different nation, one whose political and military influence was
commensurate with its economic size – there were few takers for that. “Britain is not just
another country. It has never been just another country,” Mrs Thatcher told her interviewer
Sir Robin Day during the 1987 election, when she faced a Labour party whose commitment to
unilateralism was weakening but not yet expunged. “We would not have grown into an
empire if we were just another European country,” she continued. “It was Britain that stood
when everyone else surrendered and if Britain pulls out of that [nuclear] commitment, it is as
if one of the pillars of the temple has collapsed.”
Tony Blair reached a similar view in 2006 after he and his chancellor, Gordon Brown,
had debated the pros and cons of Trident renewal. Blair writes in his memoirs that it wasn’t
an argument between “tough” and “pacifist” attitudes to defence: “On simple pragmatic
grounds, there was a case either way.” But in the end he decided that “giving it up [was] too
big a downgrading of our status as a nation, and in an uncertain world, too big a risk for our
defence … but the contrary decision would not have been stupid.” Brown was similarly torn.
Blair remembers telling him: “Imagine standing up in the House of Commons and saying I’ve
decided to scrap it. We’re not going to say that, are we?” The cabinet agreed to renew Trident
without any dissent, and on 14 March 2007 the House of Commons voted by 409 to 161 (the
minority included 88 Labour MPs) to build the new Successor class submarines that, together
with modifications to the D5 missile, would prolong the system’s life from 2020 to 2050.
Soon after Blair’s victory in 1997, a profile in the New Yorker mistakenly identified him
as “Britain’s first post-imperial prime minister”. Nearly 20 years later, we still have not seen
such a thing – at least not in Westminster. But Scotland is different. Many people inside
Scotland, including its government, imagine their future as a country like Denmark: small,
northern and prosperous, and committed to free education and welfarism. Not the least
attraction of Scottish nationalism is that independence offers Scotland the chance to be what
Thatcher called an ordinary country, freed from a burdensome British past – conquest, war,
glory – of which Trident may be the last potent symbol.
Brendan O’Hara is the Westminster MP for Argyll, elected in last year’s SNP landslide.
Faslane is inside his constituency and the preservation of jobs there is in an important local
issue: when we met in London, O’Hara described the base as the future headquarters of
Scotland’s armed forces as well as a naval base for the frigates and patrol boats that would
comprise the Scottish fleet. But in his view, Trident can’t be justified on moral, economic or
military grounds. “The world is changing – terrorism, the mass movement of people into
mega cities, the conflicts over scarce resources, the migrations brought about by climate
change … and yet the UK is hell-bent on going down the same 1960s route,” he said, echoing
his party colleague Dalton. “Does anyone really think that nuclear weapons make the UK a
safer place? For the establishment down here [London], Trident is a political weapon – it’s
about preserving your status as a nation.”
In this way, the Trident argument has thrown up competing visions of a national future.
After I left O’Hara’s office, I walked up Whitehall, past the Cenotaph and the statues of
famous generals. Tourists gathered around the sentries from the Household Cavalry with
their scarlet tunics and shining helmets. The grand offices built for an imperial bureaucracy
rose tall on either side. Big Ben rang the half-hour. Big red buses obscured the base of
Nelson’s Column.
England has this history to consider – a weighty and complicated inheritance that
includes the Anglo-American relationship, Harold Wilson’s patriot in the pub and a popular
media that never wants to let the idea of greatness go. It can’t easily cut this history loose, nor
does it seem to want to. Wherever its road leads, it isn’t, or at any rate just yet, Tridentless
towards Scandinavia.
8. Transparent oceans
Consider a series of possibilities that verge on the probable: 1) Scotland has a second
referendum in the next 15 years; 2) it votes for independence; 3) negotiations to remove
Trident begin; 4) Edinburgh and London reach a settlement, several years before the first of
the new Successor submarines is scheduled to begin service in 2032 or 2033. Until recently,
many people – including me – thought these four events would trigger a fifth: that London,
facing the costs of relocating the Trident base would decide to abandon its nuclear strategy or
at least this submarine form of it. The submarines under construction could be converted,
scrapped or sold. Billions of pounds would have been spent, but future billions would be
saved.
John Ainslie, the knowledgeable leader of Scottish CND, wrote in 2014 that he believed
this to be “the most likely outcome” of Scottish independence – and the statements of
politicians and military officers, apparently appalled by the cost, suggested he was right. In
2012, Nick Harvey, the armed forces minister in the coalition government, told the Scottish
affairs committee that relocating the base outside Scotland would be “a very challenging
project, which would take a very long time to complete and would cost a gargantuan sum of
money”. A former Faslane commander, Rear Admiral Martin Alabaster, said that it would be
very difficult – “in fact, I would almost use the word inconceivable” – to recreate the facilities
elsewhere in the UK. The committee concluded that relocation would be “highly problematic,
very expensive, and fraught with political difficulties”. An MoD source told the Guardian that
the costs were “eye-wateringly high”.
There were strategic questions, too. Addressing the Royal United Services Institute in
December 2013, General Sir Nicholas Houghton argued that defence spending should be
refocused on the threats posed by terrorism, cyber warfare and climate change. His reference
to the danger of stretching “insufficient resources” to buy “exquisite equipment” did not
mention Trident, but the renewal programme stood out as the most obvious target of his
criticism.
What was missing in these arguments, however, was the effect of Scottish independence
on the government of the rest of the UK (rUK). Professor Malcolm Chalmers of the Royal
United Services Institute has spent a good part of a lifetime studying Britain’s nuclear
strategy. When I asked him if he thought independence was the beginning of the end for
Trident renewal, he shot back: “Would the rest of the UK be prepared to give up its nuclear
force when its reputation had already been damaged by the break-up of the union? I don’t
quite see it. English opinion may argue the rights and wrongs of keeping a nuclear deterrent,
but it’ll say, ‘We’re damned if we’ll allow Scotland to force us to give it up.’” Moreover: “This
thing has been at the centre of the British state since the 1940s. If we scrapped it, the message
to the countries that matter to the UK – to the US, to our European neighbours, to Canada
and Australia – would just be puzzling. Why are you doing it at this moment? Is the UK
bankrupt? It wouldn’t be a good message!”
In other words, Scottish independence would if anything intensify the rUK’s need to
perpetuate the nuclear deterrent. In a paper published by the Royal United Services Institute
in 2014, Chalmers examined the case for rebasing the submarines at the present Royal Navy
dockyard at Devonport and building a warheads dump and loading jetty (the equivalent of
Coulport) on the Cornish coast near Falmouth. He estimated the cost, excluding land
purchase, at between £3bn and £4bn over a building programme lasting 10 to 15 years, and
predicted fierce local opposition. But despite these “significant political and financial
barriers”, he and his co-author Hugh Chalmers (no relation) thought it might be “the best
available option within rUK”. A cheaper solution in which British submarines sailed from
French or American bases has practical difficulties (and would make the claim of
independent control perhaps conclusively unsustainable).
 But, waiting to break surface from below these essentially political arguments, are two
forbidding technical challenges. The first concerns the UK’s capability as a submarine builder
– can a country that has been so industrially eviscerated actually build them? The story of the
Royal Navy’s new Type 45 destroyers, recently revealed to have a fundamental flaw in their
power system, is hardly a good omen. The construction of the Astute class attack submarines
(SSNs), of which seven will eventually be built, has been troubled too. Hennessy and Jinks
relate the events in their submarine history – how the work of warship design had been
traditionally fulfilled in-house by the MoD’s Royal Corps of Naval Constructors, and how, by
the time the first of the Astute class was ordered in 1997, a lot of this responsibility had been
transferred to the builder. The MoD, in the words of an American industry report, had lost its
“ability to be an informed and intelligent customer”. Lack of orders at the shipyard meant
that the workforce had shrunk to 3,000 from the 13,000 employed at the height of the
Vanguard programme. Many highly skilled engineers and constructors had left; layers of
expertise had gone missing. The building schedule quickly ran into trouble – by 2002 the
project was running three years late and several hundred million pounds over budget – and
was rescued only when the MoD secured the help of more than 200 designers and engineers
at the American submarine builder General Dynamics Electric Boat, which sent over a senior
member of its staff to manage the project.
A lesson has been learned: engineers from Electric Boat have been involved in the
design of the Successor submarines from the beginning – about 40 of them now work on the
project in the UK. But several innovations in the Successor programme make it an even
trickier proposition than the Astute class – they include a new version of the Rolls-Royce
reactor; a new propulsion unit adapted from an American design; and a joint missile
compartment that will suit the needs of both British and American boats. Foreseeing
problems ahead, last year’s defence review promised a new MoD team headed by “an
experienced commercial specialist”, who would have “the authority and freedom to recruit
and retain the best people to manage the submarine enterprise”. Again, the language is
opaque. What it may conceal is a problem that is likely to stretch the capabilities of even the
most resourceful engineers and submariners: the problem of transparent oceans.
When in 1956 Khrushchev hailed the submarine as the great naval weapon of the future,
the underwater made a marvellous hiding place. Submarines were hard for an enemy to track
and find. “Stealth” was their operating principle – the Royal Navy remains proud even now of
how its ballistic missile submarines avoided detection by Soviet attack submarines whose
main purpose in the cold war was to find them. It was this combination of invisibility and
mobility that had recommended them as missile platforms when land and air-based systems
became vulnerable. But what if, thanks to new methods of detection, the sea became no more
secure a hiding place for the submarine than the air was for the bomber? A growing number
of military analysts think that technical developments are moving quickly in that direction.
One of them is Paul Ingram, the director of the British American Security Information
Council, a non-proliferation thinktank. According to Ingram, the “underwater battle space”
will be transformed with the massive deployment of cheap sensors that will operate the sound
equivalent of a net across relevant parts of the ocean. Additionally, shoals of underwater
drones could be positioned or dropped at the entrance to the Firth of Clyde (or perhaps by
that time, off Cornwall), ready to peel away and follow any submarine setting out on patrol;
sensors that are acutely sensitive to unnatural water movement, many miles distant, could
pinpoint a revolving propeller. How the Successor submarines would be able to avoid
detection in this new environment was far from clear, Ingram said.
Devices like these have still to be perfected, but the world’s militaries are pouring money
into their development, At NATO’s Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation near
La Spezia in northern Italy, and at more lavishly funded laboratories and workshops in
Russia, China and the US, people go to work every day to make the big missile submarines
redundant. By the time the first Successor submarine starts on its maiden voyage – 16 or
more years from now – it may be as elusive to a sophisticated enemy as a white-hulled cruise
ship.

9. Our battleships
I first saw Faslane at the age of 13. One of Britain’s last battleships, HMS Anson, was
being dismantled at the breaker’s yard that in those days occupied the bay. When I looked out
from the train that summer afternoon in 1958, I was looking at a battleship that, incredible as
it seems to me now, was only three years older than I was. The Anson made her first voyage
under the white ensign in 1942. She and her sister ships King George V, Duke of York and
Howe all reached the breakers’ yards within months of each other in the late 1950s, none of
them having spent more than 10 years in active commission. The unluckier fifth sister, the
Prince of Wales, lasted only 10 months before Japanese torpedo bombers sank her and the
battle-cruiser Repulse in the South China Sea in December 1941, three days after Pearl
Harbor. These were well-armoured ships, returning fire and moving at speed when the
aircraft attacked them. The shock to Britain’s naval prestige was severe. Nothing quite like it
had happened before.
The war carried on. Battleships were occasionally useful – pounding Normandy with
shellfire, for instance, before the D-day invasion. But what had seemed like advanced
thinking on Admiralty drawing boards in 1936 were by 1950 obsolescent hulks. An earlier
HMS Vanguard, predecessor to the present nuclear submarine, was the last battleship to be
launched anywhere in the world; constant changes in design – many made in the light of the
loss of the Prince of Wales – kept the hull on the slipway through most of the war and she was
commissioned into the navy a year after the fighting in Europe had ended. Retired after nine
years and scrapped, again at Faslane, in 1960, her most important voyage had been to take
King George VI to a royal tour of South Africa. As a small boy, I saw her anchored a mile out
to sea from our village, a big, grey two-funnelled shape with gun turrets that pointed straight
ahead. “There’s the Vanguard,” people said, pointing through the haar, but she was there one
morning and gone the next.
The British navy has shrunk almost beyond recognition since then. In the book by
Hennessy and Jinks, a submarine commander says that its personnel could “fit into Stamford
Bridge and leave room for the away fans”. Despite the arms lobby and veterans’ Save the Navy
campaigns, ships and crews have lost their purchase on the national imagination. Britain has
become what sailors call “sea blind”, while the British military as a whole has still to recover
the reputation and confidence that it lost in the misadventures of Iraq and Afghanistan. And
yet Trident survives – and it seems will go on surviving despite the questions over its cost,
purpose and durability and the ominous parallels with the battleship.
Should we renew it? As someone of a certain generation and disposition, I find it hard to
be absolutely sure. The boy who loved ships sits at odds with the teenager who wanted to ban
the bomb. The world grows more hostile; unlike Jeremy Corbyn, I don’t believe that Britain’s
renunciation of nuclear weapons would set an example pour encourager les autres. The sight of
a nuclear submarine moving down the Clyde can still excite me in some unplumbable and
perhaps regrettable way; the fact that Britain can still build them, when it builds so little else,
is remarkable. But to set against these feelings, which come out of personal history and
watching the news, stands the unassailable fact of Trident’s expense and the growing question
of its usefulness.
It has been a great triumph of British governments, and particularly the present
government, to have successfully depicted any opposition to Britain’s nuclear strategy as the
treacherous work of people “who cannot be trusted with the defence of the nation”.
History tells a more muddled story. Nuclear weapons were never the done deal, the only
way forward, that the ebullient certainties of politicians such as the present defence minister,
Michael Fallon, would have us believe. They have been contentious inside the British
establishment for 70 years, never properly scrutinised because opposition to them was
usually based on moral and not practical grounds. If we didn’t already have them, would we
want to acquire them? Nobody I talked to in the course of reporting this piece thought so, but
the question is hypothetical. Trident may or may not keep us safe. The hope is, and always
has been, that it will keep us important.