Cold War Command: The Dramatic Story of a Nuclear Submariner

Prologue

It was an evening in May 1985 and the sun was setting over the empty, heaving, grey wastes of the North Atlantic Ocean, where almost half a century earlier Great Britain had struggled to maintain her supply line in a world at war. On that day the world was at peace. The people on the western shore of the vast ocean were still about their business, those on the eastern side were on their way home from the toils of the day. Both were, for the best part, untroubled by thoughts of death and annihilation. The threat of the ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’ implicit in the stand-off between the countries of the NATO alliance and those of the Warsaw Pact kept that peace by the unrelenting maintenance of a crude but effective balance of power. For the NATO alliance, this strategic stalemate — the Cold War — depended largely upon the deployment of nuclear weapons in submarines deep in the North Atlantic Ocean.

On that May evening Britain’s contribution to this delicate mechanism was the nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed submarine Revenge, patrolling somewhere in the North Atlantic. She was armed with Polaris intercontinental ballistic missiles, capable of striking at strategic targets deep inside Soviet Russia with their nuclear warheads, but she could be vulnerable to location and — if the international situation deteriorated due to some escalating circumstance — to potential destruction by Soviet submarines before she could launch her deadly weapons. That, at least, was the theory.

To protect her, and to ward off the inquisitive Russians, British submarines of a different type were also on patrol. These were smaller, highly manoeuvrable and also nuclear-powered, but conventionally armed, known in the naval jargon as ‘hunter-killers’, though all submariners, in acknowledgement of the unorthodoxies inherent in their branch of the naval service, continued to buck tradition and call their craft ‘boats’. It was a grossly misleading simplification.

On that particular May evening, Commander Ian McVittie’s Revenge had the distant support of Her Majesty’s Submarines Trafalgar and Valiant, the latter of which was under Commander Dan Conley, a friend and neighbour of McVittie. The Valiant was then the Royal Navy’s oldest nuclear-powered ‘boat’ which, thanks to the demands of maintaining her prototype propulsion plant and machinery, was known throughout the Submarine Flotilla as the ‘Black Pig’.

Dan Conley was among those for whom the Cold War was a protracted test of professional skill, of pitting his wits against an opposition that was always an operation order away from becoming an enemy. For the first — and perhaps only time — this account reveals the true nature of the submarine brinkmanship that was played out off our shores.