Under Pressure. Richard Humphreys

Under Pressure - Richard Humphreys


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the fuss was about. Even though I’d had three months of training, this was the first time I’d ever stepped aboard a nuclear submarine. I was shitting it. The main access hatch was a straight drop down a ladder of about 10 to 12 feet, starting off vertical, then halfway down kicking out towards 1 Deck, as the top deck of the submarine’s three decks was known. The first thing I noticed was the claggy heat as I reached the bottom and turned 180° to carry on down to 3 Deck, where my locker and bunk were located. There was a distinctly stale odour down here: the ghosts of farts long dead, mixed with heat, oil and the CO2 absorption-unit chemicals they used to recycle air back into oxygen. Add to that special cocktail the collective sweat of a crew of 143 men and bingo, you had the submarine smell. It was grim all right.

      The second thing to strike me was what lay immediately above my head – and the need to duck. I cracked my forehead on the overhang of the steps down to 3 Deck, giving me a nice egg of a swelling above my left eyebrow. Although Resolution was the biggest submarine built by the Navy at that time, it was hellishly cramped in terms of living space, and moving around its tiny passageways required all manner of contortion. The raison d’être of the submarine is first and foremost machinery and functionality, with the bodily needs of men coming a distant second. I noticed valves, gauges, low ceilings, wires, switches and dials all round, and wondered how in hell I was going to cope learning the mechanics of all of this.

      The walls started to close in as panic got a hold of me, so I ran to the toilets to take some deep breaths. Christ, we hadn’t even left the dock yet and I was getting into a state. I just needed to regroup a moment. Anyone who tells you they’re not nervous when they first step on board a submarine is talking nonsense; the machinery, claustrophobia and alien smells, it’s not good for the uninitiated.

A group of four submariners relax in their cramped sleeping quarters.

      Submariners hanging out in 9 Berth, where I spent my time in the land of nod. My bunk was the top one in the middle rack of three, never the bottom. (Wood/Express/Getty Images)

      It was still the height of the Cold War, with Gorbachev only recently having come to power, and the Soviets were hard at it. The Navy’s hunter-killer nuclear subs tracked their aggressive submarines across the North Atlantic, in the waters between Greenland, Iceland, Scotland and the Arctic Ocean, while our diesel-electric O-boats penetrated Soviet waters via the Barents Sea. It was like time had stood still for the last 15 years, each side trying to gain the upper hand.

      The Americans, too, in their ‘Los Angeles’ fast attack submarines, were playing cat-and-mouse games in the Pacific, with Reagan well into his second term as president and hawkish as ever, despite the apparent friendly overtures from the Soviets now that the affable Gorbachev wielded power.

      The coxswain, like every other submariner on board, does more than one job. The leading steward, for example, will serve the captain his meals, then half an hour later will be on the foreplanes helping to bring the submarine to periscope depth. The beauty of this is that all qualified submariners can do their own jobs very well, but unlike other members of the armed forces they’re also proficient at everyone else’s. I might have been the nearest person to an emergency – be it fire, flood, hydraulic burst or ruptured air pipe – and I had to know how to deal with it and isolate the various systems involved in order to make the boat safe. This level of responsibility is unique within the services. Everyone here is in the same boat, and as JFK said, ‘We all breathe the same air’ – quite literally on a submarine, and for three months with no escape. You have to get along with each other.

      Resolution was 425 feet long by 33 feet wide and pulled a draught (distance from waterline to keel) of an inch over 30 feet. Her displacement when surfaced was 7,700 tonnes, and while diving 8,500 tonnes. The speed of the boat was roughly 20 knots surfaced and 25 knots submerged. The tear-shaped hull of a submarine is designed to be more aerodynamic when it is surrounded by water on all sides, hence it is faster underwater. The optimum depth to which the submarine can dive is over 750 feet.

      As for her armaments: six Mk 24 Tigerfish torpedoes with a maximum range of 39 kilometres, travelling at a speed of around 35–40 knots, and 16 Polaris A-3 ballistic missiles with two Chevaline warheads per missile, with a staggering nuclear yield of about 225 kilotonnes. To put that into perspective, ‘Little Boy’, the Hiroshima bomb, yielded around 13–18 kilotonnes, while ‘Fat Man’, the Nagasaki bomb, weighed in at 20–22 kilotonnes. A deeply sobering


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