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.