Before joining Resolution I was security vetted to within an inch of my life by a bespectacled, ruddy-faced man in a double-breasted pinstripe suit in a small office somewhere in HMS Dolphin. The office was well lit and looked particularly unforgiving as I entered: two chairs, his across from mine, two plastic cups and a notepad on my side laid out on a plain white table. Initially I heard footsteps in the distance – sharp, unforgiving strides as the man’s steel-tipped shoes announced his imminent arrival from some distance away, reminding me of Lee Marvin in Point Blank. Am I going to be on the receiving end of those? I wondered. He entered the room, we shook hands and he proceeded to inform me that he was a vetting officer. Vetting officer, my arse. He was a member of the security services based in London, and it was his job to make sure I was of sound temperament and had no skeletons in my closet that would make it impossible for me to serve on the nuclear deterrent.
He asked a wide variety of questions, some about politics, others about family, starting with, ‘Are you a communist?’
‘Nyet,’ I answered in Russian.
That went down well.
More questions followed, about my sexual orientation, whether I liked a flutter on the horses, and whether I could keep secrets about operations and the submarine. Then the Irish wing of my family – my mum’s side – who hailed from the Catholic south, found themselves in his crosshairs. The Troubles were still in full swing – bombs, murder and misery across the water in the six counties – and he asked if I had any Republican sympathies. I replied that the notion of a united Ireland was a noble idea to aspire to, but the way it was being played out on the streets by lunatics on each side was ridiculous.
I detested the way the Irish had been treated by the British, the casual racism that they suffered, particularly after the Birmingham pub bombings; the endless Paddy jokes about how thick they were, told most nights on television by misogynistic, racist comedians. My grandfather was from Dublin. Crossing the water to find work decades earlier, he had grafted all his life and settled in the Midlands. I’m sure he must have witnessed this racism first-hand, but he never made comment about it. I relayed all this to the vetting man, who looked at me open-mouthed and speechless.
Then the final subject surfaced – nuclear weapons – and a series of questions designed to assess whether I was sufficiently sound of mind to be trusted to work in close quarters with a weapon that could wipe out a sizeable chunk of humanity. I, of course, kept schtum, too frightened to speak in case I said the wrong thing. All things considered, it was a topic best not to have too firm an opinion on and I hadn’t really given it much thought until that point, there in that spartan room with a complete stranger sitting in front of me. All I knew about nuclear war came from nonsensical 1970s public information films. I didn’t want my career to be over before it had even started, but presented with the scenario that at the age of 18 I might be party to delivering the most lethal weapon system in the history of warfare and play a role in the destruction of nameless millions was a little off-putting, to put it mildly.
‘Are you comfortable with the use of nuclear weapons?’ he asked directly.
‘Yes,’ I eventually answered.
The vetting man looked me up and down, then jotted some final notes in his folder. A week or so later I was informed I’d been positively vetted to serve my country. My national security clearance was Top Secret.
I presume fledgling submariners would have seen their careers end with a wrong answer. I know for a fact that some officers who had passed Perisher, the notorious Submarine Command Course,† and who had subsequently been offered the captaincy of a Polaris submarine, had declined, as they couldn’t live with the awesome responsibility of having to fire their missiles in retaliation for a Soviet first strike.
Upon arrival at HMS Neptune I was met by two humourless MOD policemen, who proceeded to process my ID card for the base. Radiating machismo, they made it obvious that they were both armed – some sort of machine guns, by the looks of them – but I put it down to them not getting out much. It took more than an hour for them to register that a) I was indeed a human being and b) a new member of the ship’s company. On reflection, they probably needed the guns, as they looked so out of shape they wouldn’t have been able to chase down an intruder. I was led by these two charmers through three gates, all involving bag searches, then onto the jetty where I caught my first glimpse of HMS Resolution.
She lay there motionless, tied with ropes forward and aft, 80 per cent of her bulk hidden underwater. Sleek, black and athletic-looking, Britain’s ultimate war machine had more than a hint of menace about her, as if she knew the punishment she could inflict, quite aware that she could disappear like a ghost and travel undetected for months, armed to the teeth with weapons of unimaginable destructive power.
Resolution was a Polaris submarine built by Vickers shipbuilders in Barrow-in-Furness to the south-west of the Lake District. The other three Resolution-class boats – submarines are never called ships, reflecting a time when submersibles were taken out to sea on the back of ships like boats – in the squadron were Repulse, Revenge and Renown, Repulse also being built by Vickers, the other two by Cammell Laird in Birkenhead. The Polaris programme was born of discussions between President Kennedy and Prime Minister Harold Macmillan that took place in the Bahamas in 1962, and became known as the Nassau Agreement. This ended the programme of airborne-launched nuclear missiles, which had been used by the Americans since the 1950s.
Britain had joined the trans-Atlantic programme in 1960 but had struggled to revamp the newer missiles to its existing squadron of Vulcan bombers, the beautifully designed delta-winged, high-altitude strategic planes that had been Britain’s carrier of nuclear weapons since November 1953. With the withdrawal of airborne-launched ballistic missile systems, the plan was to switch to submarine-launched ballistic missiles, giving rise to the Polaris submarine programme. Britain would have their own submarines but would be supplied with American Polaris missiles. Building of the subs began in 1964, with Resolution being commissioned and finished in 1967, and completing her first patrol in 1968. Along with the other three subs comprising 10th Submarine Squadron’s Polaris fleet, until its decommissioning and replacement by Trident beginning in October 1994, Resolution was the most powerful weapon of war ever built in this country.
With the advances in missile defence made by the Soviets in the 1970s, it was deemed that the existing Polaris warheads were vulnerable to interception around the major Soviet cities, particularly Moscow. The way around this was to develop a system whereby the missiles on re-entry would launch a multitude of decoys and counter-measures that would offer too many incomprehensible targets, thus overwhelming Soviet anti-ballistic missile defences while the real warheads slipped through. This became known as the Chevaline Warhead System, and had been kept in strict secrecy by successive Labour and Tory administrations. It was a wholly British design and represented a fundamental shift away from methods used in the American programme. By 1982, Britain, with this new warhead in place, had a fully independent deterrent missile system.
Longer than a football pitch, narrow and forbidding, HMS Resolution lay silent as death as I looked on – no machinery running, no sailors or stores being loaded on board, no hustle and bustle in the neighbouring support depots, just quiet and still. Even Gare Loch was motionless – no birds or wildlife, only the tiniest swell lapping against her bow as if in reverence to this huge, black leviathan. She was a killing machine – everyone in this place knew it, most of all me. I was extremely nervous, almost a wreck by this point. On the jetty next to the submarine I exchanged forced pleasantries with the quartermaster