Not Much Point In A Nuclear Submarine
Obsolete and Sinking Fast
Round and round the world it goes, and where it stops, nobody knows. Welcome to the submarine cycle, a non-stop underwater carousel where half-mad humans ride in the bellies of giant metal fish carrying atomic firecrackers. Nuclear subs -it’s a cliche-ridden netherworld of undersea tin-can cat-and-mouse, where everything’s for your eyes only and need-to-know. Except now the entire world knows Britain’s got only four big ones and our latest missile test went belly-up. Allegedly.
It’s a manic-depressive’s life in the modern Royal Navy. Aircraft carriers with no aircraft, minesweepers that crash into stationary objects, pirates giving you the finger. Sailors! Is your journey really necessary? But the quartet of iron whales that comprise our ‘independent nuclear deterrent’ is one of the many delights British tax-cattle get to pay for whether we like it or not.
So when comics as cheap as The Sun newspaper are printing the details of the Royal Navy’s latest soggy flop, you can bet your flippers the admirals are back at the doors of Parliament with their begging bowls. Last year’s Top Secret is this week’s front page for a reason -namely, the Navy is flat broke.
I’m no expert in the area of military budgets, just a sceptical observer, but I can’t help noticing how the armed forces get the same three headlines lined up in every single election year. For five decades we’ve been hearing: (1) Beware the Diabolical Threat from Evil Russia (2) Our Heroic Armed Forces Are Desperately Underfunded (3) Without Deadly New Weapons We’re Doomed.
You can see the angle. There was (once) a long-standing tradition that a bevvy of votes was there to be had for any political party patriotic enough to support Our Boys in Blue. Somewhere deep in the collective British mind lived a maritime race-memory which surfaced like a periscope whenever an election came chugging into view. It’s a result of living on an island; sooner or later everyone finds themselves at the coast watching some whacking great ship go by, a cheer goes up and then all the old lags start muttering about Francis Drake and Horatio Nelson.
These days, however, it won’t be the HMS Ark Royal churning the surf, flags flying and guns akimbo. Instead, what you’ll see on the crest of the ocean wave is a whacking great floating Holiday Inn full of retired swingers who can’t face life without five meals a day and the promise of an Abba tribute band.
Some rascally landlubbers would argue that high seas crammed with cruise ships instead of destroyers can only be progress. It’s not as if we’ve won any naval battles recently. With the odd exception, our surface-going vessels have been largely decorative since around 1960, when the real action moved underwater -as Hollywood never stops explaining in endless excruciating submarine movies, ping………….ping………..ping………..BOOOOOM!
So let’s take a deep dive (sorry, it’s infectious) into the whole business of hauling missiles around the ocean to keep the free world safe. Is there still any real point in this exercise or are Our Boys and the Ivans chasing each other’s tails between icebergs just to keep clapped-out actors in work?
There’s not much clarity as regards the specific threat posed by submarines in 2024. Precious few of us lie awake at night fretting that a gi-normous snub-nosed shark from Putin’s undersea arsenal is silently creeping up the channel to fire off a volley of nukelets at London Bridge. Given that our fearsome wave-warriors can’t seem to fend off an Afghani sex-pest in a rubber dinghy, the Navy is be unlikely to put much of a dent in an armour-plated atomic jumbo like the PrideofLeningrad. We just don’t believe it’s going to happen.
In essence, the subtext (sorry) is a credibility problem. Only yesterday a former Navy captain named Tom Sharpe let the cat out of the diplomatic bag on the pages of the Daily Telegraph. Bemoaning the chronic lack of investment in up-to-date submarine technology, Tom confessed: “the credibility of the deterrent, and therefore its pivotal role in the defence of NATO and the West, depends on whether or not you believe in it.” Quite so. Tom, by the way, wants you to know he captained four different Royal Navy warships, although he’s too shy to name them.
Times change, of course, and these days cap’n Tom is a humble PR hack who can get away with saying the quiet part out loud. He works for an outfit called Special Project Partners. And what do they do? I’m glad you asked, because the startlingly kinetic SPP website supplies the answer, right on the front page:
We Enhance, Protect and Defend the Most Complex Reputations.
How about that? I’ve been writing on and off thirty years and I never heard the phrase “complex reputation”. In my limited sphere, reputations have been well-earned or dreadful and even iffy, but complex? That’s a fine thing. As SPP kindly explain…
Agile and experienced, we combine communications, change management and data science expertise to enhance, improve or defend your reputation no matter how complex your organisation or situation. Specialists in short notice, international and challenging projects; our focus is your outcome.
Agile and experienced, eh? Sounds a bit like an athletic hooker, but what do I know?
Anyway, SPP is where this particular old sailor chose to bunk down and start scribbling. I doubt his bosses at Admiralty HQ would have been too pleased to read his brand of newfound wisdom in their morning paper back when he was still in uniform. But maybe that’s why he hung up his tricorn hat -who knows?
Tom however, perhaps unconsciously, put his finger right on the button. The jolly old bang-bang boat only matters “so long as you believe in it”. It’s not exactly a secret that a great many varieties of nuclear-armaments are now orbiting in space above the planet. (Both Russian and American, regardless of whatever nonsense the BBC tries to palm you off with). Some of them may even be pointed at a piece of essential infrastructure near you. Quite apart from the stratospheric rocket threat, the range and speed of the latest ground-based missiles is astonishing, and frankly, between them they render the idea of a submarine-sourced nuclear holocaust every bit as daft as it sounds.
The sad truth is that nuclear submarines are obsolete, expensive, irrelevant and generally ignored. Much like the Daily Telegraph itself, which nevertheless manages to feature a least one article a month on the subject of undersea warfare. Pretty dreadful stuff it is too, as you’d expect from a newspaper with almost no money or readers. When it’s not ex-skipper Sharpe imploring readers to stump up a few more billion, it’s 1000 words of ‘human interest’ fluff from ‘senior features writer’ Rosa Silverman.
You’ve got to feel sorry for the crews on Britain’s four Vanguard-class nuclear subs. Those poor bastards are stuck in a 150-yard pipe beneath the waves for 24 weeks breathing recycled farts and then along comes Rosa to big them up, and right away she declares…
“They’re sometimes known as ‘sun-dodgers’.”
Sometimes? When? What are they ‘known as’ the rest of the time? Mole-people? Trouser-browsers? Rosa won’t tell. But the stifling horror of life beneath the waves has her in its grip… “This week it was reported that one such British submarine has broken the record for the longest patrol at sea. Its tour is believed to have lasted more than six months. For those of us who grow panicky when the Tube grinds to a halt in a tunnel for more than 20 seconds, such a stint is hard to imagine.”
Indeed it is. Although imagination probably isn’t Rosa’s strong point, as can be inferred from her literary output. Titles like Why Politicians Cant Afford to be MPs - Despite the £120k Salary don’t suggest we’re dealing with an apex predator of investigative reporting. Nor does Why Young Men Are Turning Their Backs on Feminism. Mind you, the ‘sun-dodgers’ could have answered that one for her. After six months stuck in a sweaty tunnel with 130 other sex-starved fruitcakes, the last thing a sailor needs to meet is an ass-kicking girl-boss.
Rosa’s heteronormative empathy comes to the rescue, however, as she laments: “No personal telephones or transmitting devices are allowed on board at any time because any transmissions could alert enemies to the submarine’s location. So crew members must be prepared for long periods with no communication with the outside world.”
Bless her heart, hasn’t she seen Hunt for Red October? If this cupcake thinks the global panopticon of Russian military technology can’t locate an underwater tube that’s 150 metres long and driven by a nuclear reactor, she needs to watch more Netflix. It ain’t Jim-lad’s Samsung Galaxy that’s going to give them away. Incidentally, the real reason the crew don’t get to bring their smartphones is because staring at the internet drives people batshit crazy. Those dudes already have all the neuroses they need.
I get the feeling somebody somewhere is flogging a dead sea-horse. It’s one thing to admire the stoic nature of brave young sub-mariners, but another thing entirely to shout Hurrah! Let’s build another six hunter-killer subs at £7 billion a pop! I doubt this week’s missile-flop “revelations” will secure the Royal Navy the kind of blank-cheque funding it clearly covets. It certainly doesn’t help when experts we’re supposed to take seriously -the likes of Tom Sharpe- feed us this kind of baffling info:
“It is also not the first time there has been a problem. The last UK test firing in 2016 resulted in an early termination as well.”
There are only two sensible reactions to that. The first is that our equipment must be utter crap and we’ve been ripped off. The second is -are you effing kidding? Are we supposed to believe we spent nearly four billion quid each on these subs but you only test-fire a missile once every six years? Pull the other one.
It’s at times like this you wonder where the PR stops and the BS starts. Sharpe continues: “But we need to be realistic. Specifically for Trident, its 6 per cent failure rate is exceptionally reliable. Russian equivalents fail at a rate of at least 30 per cent. A Trident boat of today might suffer one failure to launch, but it carries at least eight missiles. If only six worked, Russia would still be wrecked.”
Woah, tiger. In this throwaway sentence Tom is claiming plucky little Britain can “wreck” Russia - the largest country on earth at over six and a half million square miles -with just a single one of our 30 year-old submarines. Is there any place in this charmingly simplistic arithmetic for the consequences of, say, one single Russian missile hitting the UK?
“At least 30 percent” of the equivalent Russian missiles misfire, he blithely asserts. Says who, Tom? It is precisely this kind of evidence-free hogwash that has kept the horrendous Ukraine debacle going so long. Forgive me if I include a screenshot of entirely typical propaganda from today’s Telegraph:
Enough, already. Every week for nearly two years this kind of unverifiable claptrap has been passed off as fact, with no conceivable consequence beyond continuing the enormously profitable mass-murder they call “the Ukraine war”. Are we expected to swallow an equal measure of deep-water waffle about the power of our “independent nuclear deterrent”?
Real world: All of Britain’s military posturing is meaningless. Without America’s trillion-dollar backup gear we are toast in the bullseye of the Kremlin’s ICBM cross-hairs. If we managed to lob one lousy nuke into Russia (as opposed to straight into the sea, where January’s squib went) we’d be wiped off the map with a yo-ho-ho.
Who on earth are we going to fire a submarine-based nuclear missile at -and why? It’s an insane fantasy, a myth, a product of deranged minds. Militarily speaking, Britain -imperfectly positioned between Moscow and New York- is no more capable of waging an independent war on Russia than was the equally supine poodle-parlour of Ukraine. The last war we won single-handed was a massively one-sided affair with the paramilitary shrimp known as Argentina. The whole world knows we haven’t beaten a well-trained army without American backup in over 100 years. Perhaps that’s what SPP means by a “complex reputation”.
And if we were mad enough to attack the Russians, the result would be a catastrophic, irretrievable loss of everything that makes us a nation. So please, Daily Telegraph, let’s quit with the muti-billion sub-sob-stories. We’re not fooling anyone with our cut-price navy and its tattered union jacks. Down periscope! Dive! Dive! Dive!