Читать книгу Under Pressure. Living Life and Avoiding Death on a Nuclear Submarine онлайн

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The Royal Navy newspaper Navy News visited the submarine to celebrate 21 years of the deterrent patrols in 1989. Here’s me posing for photos next to one of the torpedo tubes. (Navy News/Imperial War Museum)

When the boat was on patrol, there was a separate team of electrical engineers who kept vigil over the nuclear missiles in a cordoned-off area in the missile compartment. As well as loading the missiles onto the boat at the armaments depot, they packed the conventional torpedoes at the forward end of the boat and maintained them throughout patrol in the lower end of the fore ends, or ‘Bomb Shop’ as it was known. The team was supplemented by radio operators who looked after all the communications coming from the Command Centre at Northwood in north London, and who were based in the wireless room.

The engineers ensured that the nuclear weapons and torpedoes were safe through a system of round-the-clock, fail-safe checks. Their thoroughness and knowledge were vital, for at any time before a patrol began the men from the ministry in the form of the NWI‡ team could arrive for a snap visit and ask some pretty awkward questions, under the auspices of a weapons inspection. This could result in the WEO or any member of his team being relieved of their duties. This actually happened on Resolution, where a WEO was removed due to a perceived lack of knowledge on the day. At the time, we thought his had been a strange appointment, as the individual concerned had come from a Special Forces background and was thought to have been a serving member of the elite SBS. While that’s great in its own right, it hardly qualified him for a life under the sea in charge of nuclear weapons.