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.