Cold War Command: The Dramatic Story of a Nuclear Submariner

17 A Kind of Victory

The most curious feature of the epochal events that were to transform the political map of the world and end the Cold War was their unpredicted arrival. In a divided world obsessed with suspicions, espionage and military intelligence appeared to lie at the heart of international interplay, overlaid by diplomacy. True, there were the easements of perestroika and glasnost, but the nature of the immense and accumulating forces underlying these tentative cracks in the bastion of Communist totalitarianism were quite obscure. For those whose business took them down to the great waters of the submarine front line in the Cold War, it was, in those last months of the 1980s, business as usual. Indeed, in contrast to what was to come, for the Cold War warriors there was much going on in the submarine tactical development arena, and copious resources were being put into addressing the many problems and deficiencies which existed.

For Commander Conley this meant a swift journey from the polar regions to the tropics where, at the AUTEC range in the Caribbean, another evaluation of the Tigerfish Mod 2 torpedo was underway. Handing over his Arctic clothing to an agent in Anchorage, he collected his tropical uniform and, after a succession of flights, he arrived at Andros Island to join the SSN HMS Sceptre. Together with the SSNs Courageous and Churchill, Sceptre was conducting tactical evaluation exercises run by STWG, to which was added the task of acting as target for test firings of the Royal Navy’s Stingray lightweight torpedo, a weapon launched from aircraft, helicopters and surface warships.

Beyond these immediate trials and exercises there remained much work to do to improve the attack potential of British hunter-killer submarines, in particular honing the procedures for successful use of the now much more reliable Tigerfish, and evaluating the new Spearfish torpedo. Conley felt that the spirit of real improvement had both momentum and traction, and the fact that STWG was at the forefront of this demanding but vital task was enabling him to influence strongly the Royal Navy’s Submarine Flotilla’s war-fighting effectiveness.

This process had taken some years to get under way. In 1982, recognising the performance deficiencies of Tigerfish and, in particular, its limitations against the high-speed, deep-diving submarine, the Ministry of Defence had invited companies to tender for a replacement heavyweight torpedo ready to enter service in five years — 1987. In the event there were only two contenders: an advanced version of the United States Navy’s Mark 48 torpedo known as the ‘Adcap’ and the British GEC-Marconi Spearfish torpedo. On paper, the latter was the better weapon, being considerably faster and more advanced in its homing system than the Adcap. Furthermore, it would be a British weapon and its selection would ensure a heavyweight torpedo design and manufacturing capability would be maintained in the United Kingdom. It was, therefore, no surprise that the contract went to GEC-Marconi, notwithstanding it was the same company which had manufactured the troublesome Tigerfish, with its unenviable record of poor components and general unreliability.

To add to this augury, the five-year lead-time and the operational availability date of 1987 was unrealistic. This, it was later revealed, had been set in the competition process to meet the planned availability of the Mark 48-Adcap. In the event the latter entered service a year later, in 1988, but it would be another six years before Spearfish was sufficiently reliable to be adopted by the British Submarine Flotilla.

Spearfish was a very ambitious project, as the torpedo incorporated a new type of turbine engine which used a highly volatile mixture of two fuels. It also had a very sophisticated homing system, which was able to contend with a target submarine which laid a trail of powerful noise countermeasures aimed at deflecting an approaching torpedo. Furthermore, when used against a surface ship, its homing system was designed to place the weapon under a precisely specified part of the hull in order to achieve maximum damage. Combine all these novel features into one weapon, and significant development challenges were bound to arise.

Conley’s team at STWG were responsible for the analysis of the Spearfish trials and he was therefore able to gain first-hand knowledge of the many problems the project encountered. This, on top of his experience gained in the several firings of the Spearfish from Valiant, engaged his professional interest as a submariner because, notwithstanding the successes of the torpedo as a highly destructive weapon in two world wars and sundry lesser campaigns, its history was littered with failure.

The holy grail of torpedo development prior to the Second World War was to achieve a reliable magnetic fuse which enabled a torpedo to explode under its target. This type of detonation creates a very powerful bubble of gases which lifts the targeted ship out of the sea and breaks its back, causing critical structural damage and sinking it. It is much more lethal than actually hitting the side of a ship where the effects of the explosion are — to a significant extent — dissipated by a ship’s compartmented structure. To achieve this, both the German Kriegsmarine and the United States Navy adopted the magnetic fuse, only to discover that it proved unreliable. Premature detonation was very common, so too were the numbers of cases where a torpedo failed to explode under its target and only did so harmlessly at the termination of its run — thereby betraying the fact that it had been fired by a hostile submarine. Faced with this, both the German and American navies reverted for a period to sole use of the contact fuse in their torpedoes.

Initially, the United States Navy was extremely reluctant to adopt this expedient, carrying out extensive and prolonged investigations. The American Navy Bureau of Ordnance insisted that the weapon problems were caused by submarine commanding officers failing to fire their torpedoes with an adequately accurate target solution. This purblind infatuation with human error was not entirely confined to America; there were similar conclusions drawn elsewhere in other submarine forces.

The British also dabbled with the magnetic fuse during the Second World War, but suffered similar problems with its reliability. The Germans, meanwhile, developed the first acoustic homing torpedoes for use in their submarines, and these were specifically designed to lock on to the propeller noise of the convoy escorts as they located and attacked the U-boat.

The complex wrestling with the problems generated by the poor performance of the Tigerfish were but one chapter in this long history. The constant upping of expectations expressed in formal specifications seemed to constantly tempt design engineers to over-complicate mechanisms, resulting in expensive weapons being issued to highly-trained crews operating highly expensive submarines, but which would be of dubious effectiveness in war. Unsurprisingly, Conley was not alone in having being long very concerned that if he and his ship’s company were ever pushed to the limit, their means of attack was, at best, of doubtful reliability. To discover that deficiencies were emerging in his team’s assessment of several early Spearfish trials was not merely disappointing, but brought on a strong sense of déjà vu.

Specifically, Spearfish was displaying to Conley and his team a problem with its final approach and fusing arrangements against ship targets. The detonation of Tigerfish directly below its surface ship targets had been achieved by the relatively robust arrangement of the weapon actively generating its own magnetic field which, when broken by the target’s magnetic field, initiated detonation. This had been taken to a much greater level of sophistication in Spearfish. However, Conley’s efforts to persuade the Spearfish MoD project team there was anything wrong proved fruitless. His case was to an extent undermined by the contractor’s flawed reporting of the results, which he despairingly observed on completion of several trial firings at AUTEC. Furthermore, the value of any fieldwork was impaired by the attitude of the project director in the Ministry, who proved far too optimistic about the progress of the weapon’s development and failed to be inquisitive about potential problems.

Following a time-honoured tradition of ignoring the facts, the project’s weapons specialists accorded the shortcomings in the final approach of the Spearfish to the artificial depth ceiling imposed upon the trials weapons. This ceiling was applied in order to prevent a torpedo actually hitting the target, success being measured by its dummy triggering at an offset distance. However, with his very extensive torpedo experience Conley was not convinced. Moreover, he was desperately disappointed that there were no plans or resources available to progressively update the homing software of the Spearfish to enable it to successfully contend with all types of target, such as the under-ice situation he had so recently perfected with Tigerfish at APLIS. Infuriatingly, these deficiencies were to affect the Spearfish programme for many years to come but, like his predecessors in the American and German navies, he was to learn that it was one thing to identify torpedo deficiencies, and quite another to persuade the hierarchy that they actually existed.

The passage of time also revealed that, in addition to its performance vagaries, Spearfish was unreliable. It gradually percolated to those responsible in the Ministry of Defence that they were grappling with another runaway project and that before acceptance for service a costly programme to rectify Spearfish had to be put in place. This would finally be done in the early 1990s, but not before the introduction of the new torpedo had slipped miles astern of its projected acceptance date, leaving Conley and his colleagues with the disturbing yet apparently ineluctable sensation of having been there before.

There was, however, one conventional submarine weapon system that was proving highly reliable for the Royal Navy — but it was not British, nor was it suitable for anti-submarine use. This was the American anti-ship Sub[marine]-Harpoon missile, the dependability of which was absolutely outstanding. Sub-Harpoon proved highly robust and reliable, homing convincingly onto its intended target. The missile was enclosed in a canister which, having been fired from a torpedo tube, rose to the surface of the sea. Here the missile’s ignition system fired and it took off on its trajectory to its programmed target.

The introduction of Sub-Harpoon marked the culmination of a long search for such a weapon. Earlier initiatives to put conventional missiles into Royal Naval submarines included the submarine-launched airflight missile (SLAM) which Oberon had been fitted for — but not with — in 1972 after her return from the Far East. A Vickers initiative, SLAM featured a retractable mast in the submarine’s fin, containing a pod of four Blowpipe missiles. These were intended to shoot down an anti-submarine helicopter hovering in the area dipping its sonar into the sea. However, the pod was conspicuous — particularly from the air- protruding above the sea, and the missiles required visual guidance onto the target through one of the periscopes. This was not a very practical proposition and, after a series of trials firings from the diesel submarine Aeneas, the project was dropped.

Another project which failed to get off the ground was Hawker Siddeley’s Sub-Martel anti-ship missile. Fired from a torpedo tube, this would have been driven to the surface by a booster rocket whereupon a separate rocket motor took over. Conley had witnessed handling trials of a prototype Sub-Martel onboard Swiftsure in 1974 and was unimpressed. He and his peers within the Submarine Service were extremely pleased that the MoD cancelled the project in 1976, and went for the very much cheaper option of the proven, more powerful and longer-ranged American Sub-Harpoon. Almost certainly Sub-Martel, even if all its technical challenges had been overcome, would not have available in short order. By adopting Sub-Harpoon, the Royal Navy were able to deploy the missile for the first time onboard HMS Courageous in May 1982, at the end of the Falklands War.

STWG was responsible for the routine proving firings of Sub-Harpoon. Normally these were carried out on the Army-run Benbecula missile range situated to the west of the Outer Hebrides. Fired against remotely-controlled target vessels, the missiles were fitted with telemetry equipment which enabled range control to destroy them if they deviated from their intended flight path.

However, the periodic testing of a randomly selected Sub-Harpoon warshot was a very different matter. These were conducted well to the west of St Kilda using as target a warship hulk that had been towed into place by a tug, which then retreated to a safe distance. As there were no range-tracking facilities, a RAF Nimrod provided confirmation that there was no surface ship contact within an eighty-five-mile range of the firing submarine. A Buccaneer low-level strike aircraft would also be involved, ready to take up a station behind the missile as it emerged from the sea, following it and filming its flight until its impact on target. This in itself was a co-ordination challenge. Responsible for the safe conduct of these tests, it was always a worry to Conley — the son of a fisherman — that there might be a small, undetected vessel within the missile’s ‘search and acquisition envelope’. Furthermore, an errant missile could fly in any direction, with no method of destroying it in-flight until it ran out of fuel at the end of its sixty-five-mile range. However, at least during his own watch, the Sub-Harpoon missiles performed flawlessly.

During this period, as Conley and his people brought the Tigerfish to operational standards compatible with taking on the might of the Soviet Union’s Typhoon and Delta IV SSBNs, the entire political and strategic fabric of the Cold War underwent tremendous upheaval. Such was the extent of this, that the year of 1989 effectively saw the Cold War end in a kind of victory for the West.

The struggle that had begun in the Far East in 1931, with the first Japanese incursions into China that would precipitate the Sino-Japanese War, had by September 1939 grown into a European war with the German invasion of Poland and the consequent declarations of war by Great Britain and France. With the German attack on the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941 and the Japanese attack on the United States of America that December, hostilities rapidly involved many countries, maturing into the Second World War. The events following the defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in 1945 had in turn produced the impasse of the Cold War which, for forty-four years, had dominated the world. That this sudden transformation was about to take place was unforeseen, but among the several causes was the simple fact that the powerful imperatives which had driven both opposing sides in the confrontation to continually ‘up the ante’ in terms of military and naval posturing came at a massive cost. And this proved too high a burden for the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact to sustain. In simple terms, the price of the sabres so necessary for a convincing rattle became excessive.

As far as the professional submariners were concerned, a sign that all was not well in the Red Banner Fleet came in April 1989 when a fire broke out onboard the modern Russian Mike-class SSN, Komsomolets, in the North Norwegian Sea. The Komsomolets was a prototype third-generation submarine which came into service in the early 1980s, and with its pressure hull built of titanium could dive about three times deeper than its Western equivalents. The fire spread, causing a catastrophic chain of events which would result in her sinking and the death of over half of her seventy-strong crew.

Captain Evgeny Vanin brought the Komsomolets to the surface using an emergency blow system and ordered her abandoned, but the sea conditions were rough. Although the majority of the crew escaped onto the casing, their plight was dire as the submarine was so badly damaged that she sank several hours later, the wretched survivors being swept off into the fatally cold water of the Norwegian Sea where many perished, long before any form of rescue could arrive.

Vanin and several of his crew, still being below as the Komsomolets began her final plunge, retreated to an escape capsule fitted under the super-structure. Wracked by extreme sea pressure and heading for the abyss carrying two nuclear-tipped torpedoes, the Komsomolets started to break up as Vanin and his colleagues released their capsule in which they succeeded in making it to the surface. Tragically, the inside of the capsule was at a very high atmospheric pressure so that, when its hatch was opened, it depressurised with catastrophic force, expelling and killing all but one of its occupants, whereupon it too sank.

This appalling death toll might have been much reduced if Norwegian search and rescue support had been sought promptly, but the Soviet Union still remained a very secretive state, reluctant to seek the help of others, even in such extreme conditions when, it might have been thought, considerations of humanity overrode all else.

The loss of the Komsomolets could, in part, be attributable to the Soviet Union pushing technical boundaries in their submarines beyond safe limits in their quest to outdo the Western alliance. Clearly, the technological challenges of the Cold War, particularly in the high-risk underwater confrontation played out largely in the North Atlantic and its adjacent seas had come at a tremendous cost. Having spent considerable quantities of national treasure trying to match the West’s military capability, the Soviet Union was teetering towards bankruptcy and the Komsomolets disaster was but one symbol of its failure. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the implosion of the Soviet Union, the loss of power of its Communist Party and the break-up of its empire in eastern Europe were only around the corner.

On a warm, sunny spring morning, a few weeks after Captain Vanin and his crew had been fighting for their lives, several hundred British submariners and their families gathered on the parade square of HMS Dolphin for the monarch’s presentation of her colour to the Submarine Flotilla. This flag is periodically presented to branches and regiments of the armed forces and this occasion reflected the nation’s recognition of the Submarine Service’s achievements and its contribution to national security since the colour’s previous presentation in 1959. It was also a rare opportunity for submariners — traditionally the more relaxed wing of the Royal Navy — to enjoy and participate in a gathering of some pomp and ceremony.

The Royal Navy’s Submarine Service was reaching its zenith, with twenty nuclear and twelve diesel submarines in commission, including the brand new Upholder, first of a new class of twelve conventional submarines. Three of these were under construction at Cammell Laird ’s shipyard in Birkenhead and further up the coast at Vickers Shipbuilding & Engineering (VSEL), Barrow, HMS Talent and HMS Triumph, the final two SSNs of the Trafalgar class were being completed. Work was also progressing apace upon the build of the first two massive 14,000-ton Trident-class submarines, Vanguard and Victorious. Added to these projects the MoD was drawing up the specification for a new, highly capable third-generation SSN which would eventually replace the ageing Valiant class. The future of the Submarine Flotilla seemed very bright and this was reflected in the happy, family atmosphere of those gathered for the colour presentation, with a Marine band playing and a spectacularly smart guard of honour paraded to greet the sovereign.

Conley and a contingent from STWG were invited to attend the occasion with their wives. He proudly presented his team members to the Queen, relating to her their individual achievements and successes in trials and evaluations from the high Arctic to the tropics. His early days in STWG, struggling with Tigerfish submarine certification in the rain-swept mountains of northwest Scotland seemed a lifetime away.

Few who woke in the West on the morning of 9 November 1989 had much idea of the day’s significance. Disturbances which had begun in the Polish shipyards of Gdansk and spread to other Warsaw Pact countries had precipitated an apparently expedient loosening of the constraints of Communism under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev, but on that November evening, for the first time since the start of the Cold War, East Berliners were allowed unrestricted access to the western part of their city. As the ‘Ossis’ swarmed through the Berlin Wall, they were greeted by ‘Wessis’ waiting with flowers and champagne amid wild rejoicing. There followed a remarkable example of the domino effect: the withdrawal of Soviet forces from their satellite states in Eastern Europe, the break-up of the Warsaw Pact, the overthrow of Gorbachev and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Almost at a stroke, the Cold War was effectively over.

In the years of chaos in Russia in the following decade of the 1990s, its submarine force, like most of its military arms, suffered serious neglect and upheaval. Added to the difficulties of running a large submarine arm with many different classes of boat, dangerous weapon systems, and conscript crews of varied ethnicity, was a chronic lack of money for pay, fuel, stores, maintenance and upkeep. 1987 had seen the last major surge of Russian submarines into the Atlantic and this was not to be repeated. Many hulls were laid up for disposal and the number of operationally available submarines decreased significantly. The Russian Navy withdrew its warships from the Mediterranean and other distant theatres and, in due course, with the rise of new nations within and outside the Russian Federation, the old Soviet Navy was split up. The most significant breakaway was the transfer of most of the Black Sea Fleet to the Ukraine. All of this resulted in the Russian Navy and its offshoots tending to stay in harbour and the tempo of its submarine operations declined remarkably.

Any sense of triumphalism in the Royal Navy was muted partly by a suspicious incredulity at what was happening, and the sensible precaution that a dying bear was capable of lashing out, but also because of sobering news from Devonport Dockyard. Here, that same November, the SSN Warspite was undergoing a routine refit when a technician, inspecting part of her reactor system, discovered alarming signs of cracks in critical welds within her two steam-generating boilers. This discovery was to have a crucial impact upon the Submarine Flotilla.

The defective welds joined two 14in diameter pipes — colloquially known as ‘trouser legs’ because that was what they looked like — through which the highly pressurised reactor cooling water flowed from the reactor core into the boiler heat-exchanger pipework which, in the non-nuclear secondary part of the plant, generated the steam necessary to drive Warspite’s turbines. The welds were about an inch thick and in Warspite’s case the cracks extended across half their depth. This was extremely worrying, because if a weld failed an uncontrollable loss of reactor coolant would cause a major accident. Furthermore, it had to be assumed that potentially all the Royal Navy’s nuclear submarines might well been in a similar condition.

In the prevailing situation of grave international uncertainty it was imperative both to limit submarine operations pending a thorough investigation, but very importantly to sustain one SSBN on deterrent patrol. As the problem was considered age-related, the older Valiant-class boats were immediately withdrawn from sea service whilst a testing and repair regime was developed, the newer Swiftsure and Trafalgar SSNs having priority for checking and repairing.

The ageing SSBN force was equally affected by the ‘trouser-leg’ problem but somehow continuous deterrence at sea was maintained by a thread. On occasion, deterrent patrol durations were significantly extended beyond the normal sixty-day mark, whilst the SSBNs in port had their steam generator welds examined and made good. Since access to the affected welds was through a very small hatch on the bottom of the generator, this required the innovative design and manufacture of robotic welding equipment. Such was the anxiety generated by this serious flaw that even the new Trident submarines under construction had their ‘trouser-leg’ welds strengthened. Sadly, all this appeared to fulfil Admiral Rickover’s prediction — made in the 1950s when American nuclear reactor technology was passed to the British — that the Royal Navy would be incapable of the technical challenges of maintaining a nuclear submarine fleet.

As a consequence of the crisis, the MoD decided to decommission forthwith the SSNs Warspite, Churchill and Conqueror. The two remaining boats of the class in service, Valiant and Courageous, were in the early 1990s to fall victims to the British government’s post-Cold War defence cuts — the so-called ‘peace dividend’. Other savings in the defence budget were effected by decommissioning HMS Swiftsure, along with the remaining diesel-powered Oberon class, six of which had been modernised. Finally the decision was made to dispose of the four brand new Upholder-class boats and not to proceed with any new orders. The result was to geld the Royal Navy’s Submarine Flotilla to a much reduced all-nuclear force of four SSBNs and twelve SSNs.

In this period of rapid retrenchment, Conley was selected for promotion to captain and in August 1990 he left STWG. In his last few months in Faslane he had observed with sadness the bored crews of the submarines tied up alongside whilst the ‘trouser-leg’ rectification progressed. For many it was up to eighteen months of inactivity, even extending to long-term uncertainty about their boat’s future. For some junior officers this prolonged hiatus was to become a void in their career development, while the overall erosion of their core operational skills was an irreparable loss. The high standards achieved and maintained by Conley and his generation of highly competent submarine commanders inevitably waned, with only a single intelligence gathering SSN being tasked to patrol the Barents Sea to watch the now largely supine Russians.

Even though the full impact of the ‘trouser-leg’ problem had still to be revealed and as yet unaware of the extent to which Soviet submarine activity was in decline, Conley left a depressed Faslane. On his appointment to STWG he had begun writing a manual encompassing tactical guidance on the approach and attack of Soviet submarines. Completing it just before he handed over to his relief, he was not to know that his publication would gradually gather dust on the bookshelves of his successors, but a hint of the future could be discerned from the parting remark of one frustrated submarine commander. ‘You were very lucky to see the best days in submarines,’ he was told. ‘The good times are over’. The words rang in his ears long afterwards.

The threat of change breathed in the air of Faslane was obvious elsewhere. Despite his recent promotion, Conley sensed a likely curtailment of his aspirations as a naval officer. The looming prospect of a culling of senior officers resulting in redundancy called to mind the old adage, always useful at sea and equally sensible ashore, that one might hope for the best but should prepare for the worst. Before taking up his new job as the deputy of the Ship and Submarine Acceptance section, part of the Royal Navy’s procurement organisation at Foxhill, near Bath, Conley found he had time on his hands. Not due to start at Foxhill until April 1991, he embarked upon a six-month sabbatical at Strathclyde University Business School, undertaking a Master’s degree in business administration (MBA). Such a qualification would be an advantage if he had to leave the Service.