Cold War Command: The Dramatic Story of a Nuclear Submariner

19 The Awesome World of Nuclear Weapons

In July 1994 Conley arrived on the seventh floor of the Ministry of Defence main building in Whitehall, colloquially known as the ‘Madhouse’, to join the directorate responsible for nuclear weapons policy and planning. He would be the Royal Naval captain who was specifically responsible for nuclear weapons target planning.

At this time, the Soviet Union was disintegrating under the turbulent leadership of Boris Yeltsin, and there existed the very real threat of nuclear proliferation in those former Soviet states which had nuclear weapon bases within their territory, although these were supposedly being dismantled. In the West, populations were seeking the so-called ‘peace dividend’ and within the United Kingdom the 1991 ‘Options for Change’ defence reduction programme was just the start of two decades of protracted contraction in the size and strength of the country’s armed forces. Meanwhile security agencies such as MI6 and the listening complex at GCHQ at Cheltenham were grappling with a rapid change of priorities from the confrontation of the Cold War in Europe to the troubled Middle East. It was into this not so brave new world that the Trident nuclear missile system was entering service as the replacement for Polaris, and already many within the defence establishment considered it was an upgrade that the United Kingdom could ill afford. This would manifest itself by pressure being applied to the assumption that the Royal Navy required four SSBNs to maintain the status quo of a minimum of one on operational patrol at any given time.

As Conley surveyed his office, the shabby furniture, the tarnished office walls streaked in coffee stains, a half-dead spider plant and an ancient electric kettle which gave him a belt when he first switched it on, he wondered what lay ahead of him in the very enigmatic environment of the Madhouse. To add to this very jaded ambience, his office window faced into an enclosed courtyard which was netted over to prevent birds nesting within the area, but which would frequently inadvertently entangle them. Consequently, the office occupant had an eye-level view of the rotting and half-devoured carcases of these unfortunate creatures scattered across the nets. It all seemed somehow more claustrophobic than the inside of any submarine. The office across the passageway was occupied by an immaculately dressed Irish Guards colonel who every night, at the stroke of five, packed up his papers and left his desktop in perfect order with his coffee mug and utensils placed in a touchingly careful, strict layout on a tea towel. Further down the passageway, a Scots infantry officer had his desk covered in tartan and played a few bars of the bagpipes every morning when he arrived in his office. Such minor habits were metaphorical comfort blankets, forming a link to the individual’s past and seemingly distant existence of being an officer in the comparative sanity of front-line service.

The Nuclear Policy Directorate, staffed by a score of people from both the armed and civil services, was part of the policy department of the Ministry of Defence and was headed by a civil servant ranking as a deputy permanent secretary. Conley became aware that whilst possessing a brilliant intellect, the latter’s leadership and management skills left a lot to be desired, exemplified by the fact that during the captain’s two years in the organisation, his ultimate superior never walked round his department to meet and encourage the hundred or so people who worked for him. Nor did he make any attempt to manage the resources at his disposal to best effect and efficiency. However, he was clearly very impressive in his support and briefings to Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the then Secretary of State for Defence; undoubtedly he knew his priorities in terms of career progression.

Conley soon concluded that the Ministry’s main building and its organisation were often totally dysfunctional. Two weeks after he had taken up his new post, one of the department’s office administration staff who dealt with paperwork and publications up to the Secret level was arrested in her office and removed by Ministry of Defence and Home Office police officers. It was revealed that she was an illegal immigrant of Nigerian nationality and had been apprehended prior to deportation. Astonishingly, a foreign national who had no status in the United Kingdom had managed to get through the Ministry’s security vetting process and for a period had unfettered access to classified information regarding the nation’s nuclear weapons programme. Conley observed that: ‘Even worse, she could have been removing documents by the bag load and no one would have been the wiser: there were no security checks at the building’s exit doors.’

One reason that contributed to the MoD’s nickname of the Madhouse was the inter-Service rivalry which was absolutely rife in the building and was quickly apparent to Conley. It was particularly virulent between the staff of the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force, the former remembering the very creative but unrealistic case the latter had made in the 1960s for providing air cover to the Navy in the Indian Ocean. This issue was considered to be a significant factor in the demise of the Royal Navy’s fixed-wing carrier force in the 1970s, which had an extremely deleterious impact upon the size and shape of the contemporary Fleet.

Conley had already experienced this rivalry when, as a newly promoted captain in the first three months of 1991 during the first Gulf War, he had been a Naval Staff watchkeeper in the Ministry of Defence. He recalled the naval hierarchy’s extreme enthusiasm to get the light carrier HMS Ark Royal into the Gulf, despite absence of a genuine military need, on the grounds that it was thought that such a move would bolster the ‘naval case’. A personal letter had gone from the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Julian Oswald, to the head of the United States Navy, Admiral Frank Kelso, asking that he make a request to the British Secretary of State for Defence, Tom King, that Ark Royal join the Alliance naval forces deployed in the Gulf. The American response was strongly supportive but it was despatched by sea mail and did not arrive until the war was over.

Also apparent to Conley was a cultural chasm and mutual suspicion between the senior civil servants and the higher level armed services officers. The former were the better educated, and in general they were very intellectually gifted. Unfortunately, however, they were given to engagement in esoteric debate for its own sake, irrespective of the effort and resources devoted to such a luxury. In consequence, many of them made very poor managers. On the other hand the so-called armed service ‘warrior’ working in the Ministry could be prone to over-zealously presenting the case for the procurement of equipment for his or her own Service, providing unrealistic financial costs, timescales and other criteria. On occasions this mutual lack of co-operation resulted in the suppression of bad news by both parties. One such extreme example Conley stumbled across in his most classified files had occurred in the 1980s. A serious problem concerning the reliability of the Polaris warheads had arisen, but had not been communicated to any of the senior civil servants in the Ministry of Defence, not least head of the Ministry, the Permanent Secretary. When, after the problem had been rectified, the latter found out that for a period the deterrent had been in a parlous state, there was inevitable rancour and recrimination which contributed to sustaining the continuing lack of mutual trust between the senior military officers and their civilian equivalents.

Besides the divisions between the Navy, Army and Royal Air Force, Conley observed that there was also a clear disparity in working practices, with army and air-force officers working largely normal office hours, but the naval staff often putting in very protracted hours in developing papers which supported their case, whether it was dealing with strategy or procurement, often without any successful outcome.

One of Conley’s major responsibilities was the development of the target plans for Trident. He recalled that, on reviewing the plans for the first time alongside the existing Polaris targeting options, the hairs on the back of his head rose as he contemplated the almost unthinkable consequences of these devastating weapons being used. However, he fully appreciated that nuclear weapons would not constitute an effective deterrent unless they were complemented by plans for their actual use, no matter how horrific this eventuality would be. The British Trident system is committed to NATO and, therefore, his remit required developing plans that would meet both national and alliance requirements.

In all situations, the ultimate decision to use the United Kingdom’s nuclear weapons lies with the prime minister or, in his absence, a designated member of his government. It is within this context that the prime minister, on taking up office, is invited to write his personal instructions in a sealed envelope provided to the commanding officer of each SSBN. This is provided in the event of all communications and command and control being totally lost through a devastating nuclear attack upon Great Britain. An early task of Conley’s was to liaise with the Cabinet Office to produce the outline of options for the then Prime Minister, John Major, in order that he could set out the requisite sets of instructions for the new Trident SSBNs then coming into service. This remit was completed with much greater ease than was the case with Jim Callaghan’s instructions for the use of Polaris when he assumed office in 1976. Callaghan had prevaricated from making a decision on his chosen option for several months so that — at least in theory — for a period the commanders of the SSBNs on patrol were devoid of instructions for the ultimate use or otherwise of their Polaris missiles in event of a nuclear strike against the United Kingdom.

The targeting of nuclear weapons in Great Britain is subject to an extremely rigorous process which involves the input of several agencies, including national intelligence. Not surprisingly, accuracy and quality control are absolutely paramount and an independent organisation scrutinises both the effectiveness of the completed plans, together with the capability and availability of the patrolling SSBN. For his part, Conley managed a small cell of nuclear targeting experts who worked within the concrete complex deep beneath the Ministry’s main building. Very professional and committed, this unsung and unknown group of naval officers worked very hard in doing their part to deliver the targeting plans which ensured that the national deterrent remained totally credible.

Conley’s first tour of the underground bunker revealed a Cabinet room with an identical table to that in Downing Street. Moreover, the prime minister had his own compact bedroom upon the walls of which were watercolours of scenes of the British countryside. He wondered who had thought of this level of detail.

As part of his wider induction, his responsibilities took him to the Atomic Weapons Establishments (AWE) at Aldermaston and Burghfield, where the nuclear warheads are manufactured and assembled. These two sites, whilst modern, did not initially meet his vision of immaculate, high-tech facilities populated by persons of grave and serious mien. Instead, he encountered a relatively small-scale establishment, retaining an enduring recollection of:

a very large man on the warhead assembly line who bore a very strong resemblance to ‘Jaws’ of James Bond fame and of a middle-aged woman who opened the storage vaults to show me a number of the RAF’s nuclear bombs. She had a visage and demeanour which would not have been out of place in Macbeth’s witches. I was later advised that people who work in the very tense environment of handling explosives all day long are no ordinary types.

Conley’s main contact at AWE was a scientist who, in support of the targeting process, had been contracted to investigate the effectiveness of nuclear blast upon different land topographies. One of the scientist’s key experiments involved purchase of a large number of Christmas trees which, planted in the ground at Shoeburyness firing range near Southend in Essex, were subjected to the effect of 20 tons of TNT, and then assessed for the scaled-up damage of a nuclear blast upon a wooded area. In sum, AWE was not the high-powered, technologically advanced organisation the captain had envisaged, though it appeared that it worked well, with safety absolutely paramount.

In 1994, as a savings measure, the decision had been taken to phase out the Royal Air Force’s free-fall tactical nuclear bomb, the WE177, with a version of the Trident missile which would be configured with a much lighter warhead payload. Known as Sub-Strategic Trident, this would allow politicians the flexibility to use nuclear weapons in a limited strike, of particular importance in circumstances of escalation to a nuclear exchange without recourse to a massive attack. This flexibility reinforced the credibility of nuclear deterrence, although it could be argued that it might be more likely to induce the decision to ‘go nuclear’. Conley observed that some of the higher strategists of the RAF attempted to reverse their loss of capability and the exit of their Service from the ‘nuclear club’ of which they had been a member for over forty years. These officers pointed out the very strong deterrent advantage of highly overtly deploying nuclear-armed Tornado bombers to forward air bases as part of a NATO strike force, as opposed to a SSBN deployed unseen and unheard in the depths of the oceans.

In a cash-constrained ministry, where the cost of nuclear weapons had to be reduced, the no-cost Sub-Strategic Trident argument won the day. However, it bemused Conley that one entrepreneurial wing commander had attempted to secrete some WE177 bomb casings in an airbase store, just in case this capability needed to be restored in a hurry.

Owing to the ending of NATO nuclear weapons war-gaming exercises, where communications networks and command and control procedures were tried out, once a year the Nuclear Policy Directorate organised a tabletop nuclear war game in the command and control room of the MoD bunker, where politicians, senior civil servants and the heads of the three Services were presented with conflict scenarios which were geared towards them debating and considering the use of nuclear weapons. Conley had already come to the conclusion that most senior military officers within the ministry demonstrated a distinct disinterest in nuclear deterrence, seeing nuclear weapons as essentially a political capability of limited military utility. In view of this, his departmental heads considered the three-hour annual war game to be very important, as key participants included the most senior decision-makers, including the chief of the defence staff and the single Service heads. During the course of the war game these officers would be compelled to consider the many complex political and military factors which would govern their recommendation to the prime minister as to whether to deliver a nuclear strike. It was the norm for the Secretary of State for Defence to chair such exercises.

For a number of the reasons the first of these war games that Conley attended did not go well. Ever the Scottish lawyer, Secretary of State Malcolm Rifkind was most unenthusiastic at being presented with information during the course of the exercise with little time to grasp its detail. Clearly angry, he challenged the efficacy of the structure of the exercise, after which the whole process went downhill.

The following year the directorate head, licking his wounds, instructed Conley to organise and direct the war game. Having learnt lessons, he ensured that there would be no surprises of the type which, at short notice, challenged the intellect or knowledge of the participants. To this end, Conley’s written and verbal briefing packages were very comprehensive. The BBC were in the process of making a documentary about the United Kingdom’s defence organisation, including one episode devoted to Trident. It was, therefore, agreed that the production team would film the opening few minutes of the war game, set at an unclassified level and taking advantage of this unique ensemble. The military staff working in the main building do not normally wear uniform, but as this did not align with the public’s perception of ‘top brass’, the Service participants were invited to be dressed in military attire. Beneficially in the dim lighting of the command room, the uniforms engendered a much more realistic ambience as the exercise got underway.

Michael Portillo had succeeded Rifkind as Secretary of State for Defence and on the morning of the exercise Conley met him at his office and escorted him down to the bunker. As they descended, exchanging general conversation, Portillo remarked how daunting it was going to be for him to both face the television cameras and chair a war game with the heads of the Services, addressing a difficult subject which a few weeks previous he had known little if anything about. Conley concluded that in an increasingly complex world there were very high expectations upon those politicians holding ministerial post. On his arrival in the command room and taking his place at the head of the gathering, the minister spotted a large brass key on a plinth in the middle of the conference table. Before the cameras rolled he enquired whether this was the nuclear release key. He was assured that it had been presented by the contractor who had built the bunker as a memento and had no military significance whatsoever. However, this little cameo did illustrate to those gathered the everyday challenges of being a high-level politician in the public eye.

Despite a number of the participants unduly striving to impress the Secretary of State, this second war game, set in highly plausible scenarios which were very professionally briefed, went well and led to the very difficult and daunting decision by the participants to use Trident in a sub-strategic mode. As Conley emerged afterwards into the fresh air of a pleasant sunny spring afternoon with people enjoying their lunch in nearby gardens, the proceedings of the previous three hours seemed chillingly possible, but very surreal.

Meanwhile, Conley had become involved in the arrangements for phasing out Polaris. The latter had been updated in the 1980s under the secretive ‘Chevaline’ programme, where the warhead package incorporated a range of decoys to enable penetration of the Moscow anti-ballistic missile defences. This was an ingenious system which involved a team of talented people who had unique knowledge and expertise in the physics and engineering of ballistic flight. Because of Trident’s much greater capability, there was no future requirement for the decoy package and the team was being disbanded. In the process of attending meetings to wrap up the programme, Conley came across some members of this very dedicated and committed group of mathematicians and engineers. ‘Most were destined for early retirement, looking forward to golf or tending their roses — such a sad waste of talent and skill.’

In June 1996, in the absence of apparent interest from anyone else in the MoD, Conley sent a message to the prime minister’s office, informing him that as the last Polaris patrol had been completed, and as two Trident submarines were fully operational, the scrapping of the Polaris weapon system would commence. It seemed to him that times had markedly changed from the heady days of 1967 when he arrived at the Clyde Submarine Base in its final phases of construction to be able to support and base HMS Resolution, in an era when the nuclear deterrent was very much at the forefront of the nation’s attention and interest.

Since the 1950s the United Kingdom has enjoyed very close links with the United States in all aspect of nuclear weapons technology. As part of this relationship, the British Nuclear Policy Directorate and its Pentagon equivalent met twice yearly to discuss a wide range of issues, the venue alternating in each country. These talks were always frank and forthcoming with few, if any, security classification constraints. However, Conley got the impression that the Americans did not always put their best and most talented people into the field of nuclear policy, despite the fact that the United States’ team was led by a very impressive senior civil servant named Frank Miller, who clearly had a wealth of experience, coupled with an excellent intellect and the ability to think laterally. Moreover, he was a great friend of the British and a supporter of its nuclear weapons programme. The United States continued to possess a ‘triad’ of nuclear weaponry, submarine-launched missiles, land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and bombs delivered by aircraft. However, the START I nuclear weapons treaty limitations, which constrained the number of warheads and delivery platforms on each side, were beginning to bite. Although the United States Navy’s SSBNs were considered to be the ultimate deterrent, under the provisions of the treaty their numbers were being reduced by four to fourteen. For the ambitious and talented American naval officer, the nuclear programme, in long-term contraction, was not seen as a desirable posting.

These talks, normally spread over two or three days, included visits to each country’s nuclear weapons facilities or bases and involved a social gathering aimed at providing a unique cultural experience to the visiting delegation: a visit to Wimbledon greyhound racing and a junior league baseball match featured as events during Conley’s time with the directorate. Whilst the British range of facilities of interest was very limited, in America there was plenty to see in their bases or nuclear weapons laboratories.

One of the series of talks Conley took part in incorporated tours of the Los Alamos and the Sandia laboratories, both facilities in New Mexico, the first of which had seen the development of the first atomic bombs. The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (finally adopted by the United Nations in 1996), which prohibited the detonation of nuclear weapons either in the atmosphere or underground, was engendering the twin challenges of ensuring that existing stocks of warheads remained reliable, and that the capability of developing new warhead designs was retained. Accordingly, the Americans had started putting resources into these areas. At Los Alamos the British delegation were shown round a very ambitious and costly facility which enabled the sequence of the conventional trigger explosion in a nuclear device to be recorded to very fine degrees of accuracy. This was complemented by a presentation by a physicist explaining the concept of the National Ignition Facility which, by using high energy lasers, would enable experiments to be achieved examining the complexity of nuclear fusion — turning an atomic detonation into a much more powerful nuclear explosion. This controversial facility in terms of value was to become operational in 2009 at a cost of several billion dollars, but it would ensure the maintenance of a baseline of expertise in nuclear weapon design. Such facilities put into context the relatively small scale of the British nuclear weapons maintenance programme.

The lecturing physicist also presented a large number of viewgraphs, the content of which was mostly incomprehensible to the British visitors. This contrasted with the clarity of a talk the following day about nuclear warhead design delivered by a Chinese-American scientist, Wen Ho Lee. Remarkably, a few years later he was arrested by the FBI on allegations of providing nuclear weapons design information to China; in the event these charges were never proven and he was released.

On completion of their visit to Los Alamos, the British party travelled by road through the New Mexico desert to Sandia Laboratory, which was of specific interest in that it provided support to testing and ensuring the reliability of the Trident warhead fusing and detonation components supplied to the Royal Navy. However, perhaps of most interest at Sandia was an insight into the ongoing American programme aimed at improving the safety and security of former Soviet nuclear weapons and materials, thus reducing the risk of unguarded proliferation. This programme included helping former Soviet republics destroy their nuclear weapons delivery vehicles. In a related effort, the United States and Russia had agreed to co-operate in converting highly enriched uranium from former Soviet weapons into reactor fuel for possible sale to the United States. It was a surprise for the visitors to learn that the United Kingdom had provided financial support to the security element of the programme, but even more remarkable for them was viewing real-time images of nuclear warheads in a Russian storage facility, where the Americans had set up surveillance cameras as part of the nuclear weapons security enhancement initiative.

All this was a very different scenario to the confrontation and abrasive relationships of the Cold War. Indeed, in an illustration of changed times, whilst being given a tour of the facilities in the Trident Base, in Kings Bay, Georgia, Conley observed his hosts to be concerned over something. Once the tour was over, it was explained by an American officer that a Russian START inspection delegation was about thirty minutes ahead on a similar tour route, and there was concern that the two sets of visitors would get mixed up. Asked about any problems with the Russian delegations, the response was that they tended to quickly empty the minibars in their US paid-for hotels and accordingly because of the horrendous hotel bills incurred, use of this facility had been banned.

Since the British nuclear deterrent is primarily committed to NATO, joint target planning was conducted at the headquarters of Strategic Command (STRATCOM), at Offutt Airforce Base, Omaha, Nebraska — right in the centre of continental USA. The Royal Navy provided a captain and lieutenant commander as liaison officers. These were lonely postings, as the representatives of other NATO nations that had a tactical nuclear capability had been gradually withdrawn; the two British officers fulfilled a role more symbolic than substantive, in almost complete isolation in a well-appointed suite of empty offices within the base’s large underground complex. That said, during Conley’s periodic visits to STRATCOM, he noted that the hostnation staff were very hospitable and welcoming. He particularly recalled the large screen presentation in the command centre of a simulated all-out nuclear strike, ICBMs being made ready, SSBNs being sent on patrol, and the dramatic scrambling of B-52 bombers — all to very upbeat music with no suggestion that Armageddon was just round the corner. Memorably, the visiting officer accommodation was to the highest standard he had ever encountered. General Curtis Le May, the controversial head of the US Strategic Air Command in the 1950s, had ensured his aviators were very well looked after when not flying.

Conley happened to serve in the Ministry of Defence at a time which coincided with rekindled interest on the part of the French in taking forward nuclear weapons co-operation with the United Kingdom. France had developed an entirely independent nuclear deterrent and retained a triad of SSBN, land and air based missiles — the Force de Frappe — although the land-based missiles were being phased out in the mid 1990s. As France was not a member of the NATO military structure, there was no joint targeting or exchange of information upon each other’s systems, and co-operation had historically been confined to low-level talks of little substance. Needless to say, as Britain was completely dependent upon the United States for its missile system, great care had been exercised to ensure there was no compromise of the unique bilateral relationship.

However, perhaps owing to the advent of Trident, it was evident that the French were keen to explore all viable avenues of enhanced co-operation and had sent delegations to the MoD to oil the wheels, prior to a formal visit by the directorate’s staff early in 1996 to the French naval air station at Istres, near Marseilles. This was the base for a squadron of nuclear-capable Super Étendard attack aircraft.

The delegation, which included Conley and was led by an air vice-marshal, flew to Istres on an Andover aircraft of the Queen’s Flight. In Istres they were feted for two days by their French hosts, embarking upon a culinary adventure at each meal and being enthusiastically shown the base facilities and the actual nuclear missiles. After lunch on the final day, having been softened up with excellent food and the finest of wine, the rear admiral heading the French side put the case forcibly for significantly escalating the level of nuclear weapons co-operation between the two countries. Although the British team had an interpreter, the French, as is their practice, conducted their part of the talks in their national language and, being highly technical, most of the content of their presentations floated above the heads of Conley’s colleagues. Nevertheless, the British visitors got the general thrust and took away the remit for looking at ways and means of taking forward the joint initiatives which the French clearly sought.

Conley was directed to take forward options and accordingly devised a number of very innocuous proposals, including each country’s SSBN participation in submarine rescue exercises and an exchange of port visits. Also, it was to be agreed that an improved ‘hotline’ be set up between the MoD and the French military headquarters in Paris. Subsequently, the general principles of enhanced nuclear weapons co-operation were agreed between Prime Minister Major and President Chirac at the May 1996 Anglo-French talks in London. It was evident, however, that the French wanted the British to go much further towards developing a European nuclear deterrent and tabled much more ambitious options such as the possibility of sharing communications systems and exchanging information concerning SSBN patrol areas to ensure no chance of inadvertent encounter between submarines on patrol. For a number of very sound reasons, some of which arose from the British relationship with the United States, and perhaps an underlying historical distrust of the French, such proposals were resisted. The wisdom of this conclusion is understandable but, as an incontrovertible footnote, in 2009 HMS Vanguard and the French SSBN Triomphant collided when on patrol in the same area in the eastern Atlantic, neither vessel realising the close proximity of the other before impact. Fortunately, the damage incurred was not serious. On the other hand, it was agreed by treaty in 2010 that the United Kingdom and France will share in developing nuclear warhead reliability-proving facilities in Valduc, France and at AWE Berkshire.

There was one final twist to Conley’s time in the Ministry of Defence. The complex customised software which supported the targeting process had been supported by a private contractor. For a number of years this company had done an excellent job in terms of its competence and responsiveness to problems but, as the contract term was due to expire, there was the necessity under MoD rules to place the contract re-renewal under a competitive tendering process. In ministry terms it was a very modest deal of about £10m in value at 2013 prices spread over five years. The contracted company put in a very acceptable proposal but a second firm also submitted a tender which happened to be below the price of the former. Despite the fact that this second company was known to Conley’s staff as not having the competence or expertise under the existing competition rules, it was they to whom the contract was to be awarded.

Conley accordingly raised his serious concerns with the department responsible for placing and awarding the contract. In due course he was summoned by the head of naval equipment procurement, the Controller of the Navy, to explain his concerns. In a somewhat confrontational set-up, the controller — an admiral — flanked across a table by a number of senior civil servants and a second admiral, the head of the strategic systems executive, he was asked to explain why the cheaper company should not be awarded the contract. Conley outlined the ramifications of the Trident targeting software failing and his serious reservations about this company’s ability to deliver against the contract specification when set against a very satisfactory and proven track record of the existing contractor.

Having heard out Conley’s misgivings, the controller sought advice from his head of contracting who was emphatic that as the undercutting company’s proposal was entirely compliant with the contract criteria, and as its price was below that of the incumbent, by law it must be awarded the contract. The controller agreed and stated that there was no alternative. For his part, Conley was completely astounded by the total absence of common sense, and in the contracting process by the lack of incisive deliberation regarding the ability of the new firm to fulfil the specification.

This divorce from reality in the contracting process was but one minor occurrence in a culture of incompetent defence procurement by the Ministry of Defence, which was to result in the effective bankrupting of the United Kingdom’s defence organisation a decade later.

Conley left the Ministry of Defence shortly afterwards to take up appointment as captain of HMS Dolphin. He learned a few months later that, as he had anticipated, the new contractor had failed to fulfil the requirements of the contract, which had accordingly been terminated and awarded back to the original contractor. He recalled that:

In the interim, lack of competent software support had caused a great deal of extra effort and frustration on the part of the targeting team and, of course, did nothing for their confidence in the MoD organisation. Neither of these two factors, of course, was measured or reported, and no one was held accountable for the very poor contracting decision. The whole set-up was truly that of a Madhouse.

Epilogue

THE SUMMER OF 1996 found Conley back at HMS Dolphin in Fort Blockhouse as captain of the shore base, his appointment at the Ministry of Defence thankfully behind him. However, it was a very different Dolphin from the one he had joined twenty-nine years earlier as a trainee sub lieutenant, and now was an empty place echoing with past glories. The submarines had gone, the berths were empty and the workshops lay silent; his posting would be a short one, preparing the establishment for handover to the Royal Defence Medical College and other tri-Service medical training organisations.

For the time being, however, his staff was accommodated within the old submarine headquarters and he was ensconced in what once had been Flag Officer Submarine’s office. The last link the establishment had with submarines, the Submarine School, also lay within his bailiwick, but plans were already well advanced to relocate it to the training establishment HMS Raleigh in Torpoint across the River Tamar from HM Dockyard Devonport.

Conley was also responsible for heading up the Fleet Warfare Development Group (FWDG) which was a recent amalgam of the surface fleet, air and submarine tactical development organisations. The Submarine Tactics and Weapons Group (STWG) had been divided, the weapons element remaining in Faslane. This distressed Conley, as he viewed one of STWG’s great strengths to have been the co-location of the separate disciplines of tactical and weapons’ development. He found the FWDG to be an organisation which lacked a sense of direction and focus, with many of its staff neither possessing the requisite analytical competences nor being adequately motivated in what they did. It too was also on the move, to be co-located with the Maritime Warfare Centre in the training establishment HMS Dryad situated just outside Portsmouth. Time was therefore against him achieving any significant changes to the quality of either its output or effectiveness.

In early September 1997 Captain Dan Conley, the last captain of HMS Dolphin, and his wife were given a very convivial farewell lunch by the wardroom officers. On leaving the building they both took up positions astride a large model of a nuclear submarine on a trailer roped to a contingent of officers. To a loud cheer from the assembled gathering, they were pulled out of the parade square; it was not quite a going into retirement, but to Conley the occasion effectively and poignantly marked the end of his career in submarines.

Despite the decline he found all around him, he had taken part in the Submarine Flotilla’s greatest ever peacetime expansion and had witnessed a period of unprecedented technical change and challenge. He had served in the highly successful Swiftsure-class SSN and had been at the cutting edge of the Royal Navy’s undersea confrontation with the Russian submarine force. He had also been involved in the introduction into service of the less successful Upholder and Vanguard classes amid the shrinking of Britain’s industrial and shipbuilding capacity, factors adversely affecting the country’s ability to maintain a home-built nuclear submarine force.

There had been the very rapid downsizing of the Flotilla in the 1990s, spurred on by the end of the Cold War and the marked diminishment of the Russian submarine threat. Accordingly, he concluded that he had enjoyed almost certainly the best and most professionally satisfying of times for a peacetime submariner. Furthermore, he had immensely enjoyed working with highly professional and committed officers and ratings.

Conley had one more job in the Royal Navy, as a director of the United Kingdom Hydrographic Office (UKHO) in Taunton, a quasi-commercial agency which remains the world’s leading producer of nautical charts. The United Kingdom’s maritime triad of the Royal Navy, Merchant Navy and the fishing fleet might all have drastically diminished in size and capability, but the UKHO still provides the charts of many other countries’ navigational waters, and is renowned for the quality and accuracy of its Admiralty chart series and other supporting products.

However, like all organisations, the UKHO faced change, and in particular the conversion of thousands of paper charts to a digital format. Included in his responsibilities, Conley was in charge of the electronic navigational chart (ENC) development and production project. Early on he had to take the unpopular and unprecedented initiative of outsourcing elements of the paper chart conversion to an Indian company. This was for reasons of both cost and skilled manpower availability, demonstrating that even the very successful UKHO could not escape financial and efficiency pressures.

At the same time, he and his team had robustly pressed the Ministry of Defence to make a modest outlay for the provision of digital charting systems to all ships in the Fleet. A basic system cost as little as £10,000 and with highly accurate navigational positional input from the American global positioning system (GPS) and the availability of an automatic alarm facility providing warning should a hazard be approached, digital charts significantly enhance navigational safety. But this was not agreed by a key civil servant in the Ministry decision-making chain, who rejected such a proposition with a counter assertion that: ‘There is no evidence to support the case that digital charts enhance navigational safety’. Consequently, the few million pounds of expenditure required to fit all ships of the Fleet with this equipment was turned down on both the occasions that Conley made a submission to the Ministry, notwithstanding that the First Sea Lord at the time, Admiral Sir Nigel Essenhigh — himself a former Hydrographer of the Navy — was an ardent advocate of digital charts.

Captain Dan Conley left the Hydrographic Office and the Royal Navy in October 2000. Less than two years later, the destroyer HMS Nottingham grounded on rocks off Lord Howe Island to the east of Australia. The ship was only saved by exceptional damage control efforts and the cost of the repairs was over £40m. The cause of the grounding was sloppy navigation, but it would not have occurred if a digital charting system had been available. Eight years later, in 2010, the brand new £1bn submarine HMS Astute went aground off the Isle of Skye during contractor’s sea trials and incurred over £2m of damage. The cause of this extremely embarrassing accident, where the submarine was televised well and truly stranded, was a poor navigational and pilotage organisation. Incredibly, Astute did not have an electronic chart facility, which again would highly likely have prevented the grounding. To Conley, by then deep into retirement, both incidents reflected just one more procurement debacle, evidence of a system which was well and truly broken.

He had not quite hung up his seaboots, as on leaving the Royal Navy he was back to his fishing roots, joining the Royal National Mission to Deep Sea Fishermen as its chief executive. Fishing remained the nation’s most dangerous industry, its 13,000 seafarers suffering on average sixty fatalities or serious injuries each year during Conley’s eleven years with the charity from 2001 to 2012. Moreover, vessel losses in the 6,000-strong fleet averaged two a month, largely due to flooding or groundings; there was, therefore, much work for the society to do in supporting the bereaved and injured, while proactively contributing to a range of safety measures.

In the early 1950s, the British fishing industry employed over 50,000 fishermen, but for a number of reasons, including loss of the right to fish Icelandic waters and more effective catching systems, it had declined significantly in size, like the Royal and Merchant Navies. Most of the great fishing harbours of the past, such as Grimsby, Hull and Fleetwood, had in effect ceased being fishing ports.

During his time Conley was to witness further downsizing, as the catch quota system imposed by the European Common Fisheries Policy bit harder each year, driving boat owners out of business and perversely causing tens of thousands of tons of perfectly good fish to be dumped at sea each year. Another colossal enigma involved the decommissioning of fishing boats in some countries, including the United Kingdom, while the European Union subsidised the building of new vessels in other countries, most notably the Republic of Ireland and Spain. The fishing villages of the northwest of Scotland were particularly badly affected, such remote communities as Mallaig, Lochinver and Kinlochbervie losing not only jobs but a centuries-old way of life. Towards the end of his time in the Fishermen’s Mission, on return to his childhood town of Campbeltown, Conley observed that its fleet of boats had also virtually gone. It was a truly depressing sight.

The coalition government’s Strategic Defence and Security Review of 2010 heralded more draconian reductions in the armed forces with entire areas of capability, such as the maritime patrol aircraft squadrons, being disestablished. The Royal Navy was reduced to a mere nineteen frigates and destroyers, its aircraft carriers either mothballed or disposed of, and its manpower decreased to about 30,000 personnel compared to the 100,000 when Conley joined in 1963. The Submarine Flotilla was spared the worst of the cuts and a force level of four Trident SSBNs and seven Astute-class SSNs is envisaged.

Reviewing his career, Dan Conley reflected that he had been very fortunate in being an officer in a navy which had had a worldwide outreach. He also considered himself privileged to serve in the Royal Navy’s Submarine Flotilla during the height of the Cold War, at a time of continuous tension when there was a clear and evident threat, and when maritime matters were much more prominent in the national conscience. However, he is certain that today’s submariners face similar challenges to those he had confronted, that there is probably still a ‘Black Pig’ somewhere within the Flotilla, and somewhere close by are young men capable of mastering her.