Author’s Note: On 3 May 2019, a Thanksgiving Service was held in Westminster Abbey, attended by senior members of the Government and Royal Family, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Continuous At-Sea Deterrent (CASD)—charmingly known as ‘Operation Relentless’—of the Royal Navy’s nuclear-armed submarines.
As you read this, one of His Majesty’s four Vanguard-class submarines (Vanguard, Victorious, Vigilant, and Vengeance) is on 24/7 patrol, carrying around 40 thermonuclear warheads on eight US Trident II D5 missiles, each warhead up to 100 kilotons in yield, over six times as explosive as the 15 kiloton bomb dropped on Hiroshima: four megatons of Bomb in a vessel 150 meters long, 13 meters wide, crewed by 130 people.
In December, I interviewed two people who served for many years in the Belly of a Beast—the British naval nuclear war machine—both now devoutly wish to see dismantled. But before I share their views, I would like to share their stories.
Retired Commander Robert Forsyth’s ‘war machine’ was HMS Repulse, a nuclear-powered submarine armed with Polaris nuclear missiles ready to be fired at 15 minutes notice. As the vessel’s 2nd in command (and, on two occasions, temporarily in command), Forsyth shared responsibility for turning the ‘permission to fire key’ launching up to 48 300-kiloton warheads. He left the Navy in 1981, after 24 years’ service. When the Cold War ended he “fully expected”—as he wrote in the Author’s Note to his 2020 book Why Trident? —“the UK to give up its nuclear deterrent as yesterday’s weapon.”
Throughout that ‘yesterday’ Forsyth believed he would only be ordered to fire “if UK/NATO was under attack with nuclear weapons,” only to discover, as recently as 2016, “that First Use had, secretly, always been part of UK planning but had not been declared to us at sea or to the nation.” Forsyth was sure he “would have withheld permission if I had any reason to think we were being ordered to launch a first strike,” and was “ not prepared, under any circumstance, to start a nuclear war based on an intelligence assessment that the Soviets might be on the point of launching a nuclear attack.”
In his introduction to Why Trident?, international law professor Nick Grief noted that this assertion was denounced by some as violating “the principle that military leaders do not subvert their democratic political leadership.” This “very serious allegation,” Grief argues, is “wholly unfounded, especially as Rob is quite clear that First Strike was not an option they were briefed about.” More importantly, Grief argues, Forsyth’s stance “begs the question: how do we define patriotism? Does love for one’s country mean…: ‘The love that asks no question’?”
On December 6, Forsyth asked more difficult questions of his country’s government in a widely publicized blogpost entitled ‘Extra-Long Trident Patrols: Heightened Risks for Crew Wellbeing and Nuclear Safety,’ published by the British American Security Information Council (BASIC). Responding to evidence produced by the UK peace group Nukewatch that Trident submarine crews are being subjected to extra-extraordinary pressures during CASD tours of 150+ days—five months compared to the traditional average of under half that time—Forsyth wrote:
Had I been invited to conduct patrols of these lengths on a regular basis then I would have been seriously concerned as to the crew’s ability to withstand the inevitable additional psychological pressures. It is, therefore, appropriate to consider the human factor—by way of the crews’ reactions to these excessively long patrols—and how they might be affected in any way that increases the risk of a serious nuclear weapon or submarine incident.
Robert Green’s ‘war machines’ were carrier-borne aircraft: navigating a Buccaneer nuclear-armed fighter bomber with a designated target of a Soviet military airbase outside Leningrad (St. Petersburg); and an anti-submarine helicopter armed with nuclear depth charges.
In 1978, after 16 years active service, he was promoted to commander and transferred to the ‘corridors of power,’ where he assisted the admiral responsible for nuclear strategic planning and ran a 40-strong team in the Joint Forces HQ at Northwood, northwest London, providing round-the-clock intelligence support to the Polaris force, as well as the rest of the Fleet. Then came the Falklands War (1982), a tragic time he described to me in a November 29 email:
I personally briefed the Commander-in-Chief of the Fleet who, assisted by Flag Officer Submarines, directed the operation to recover the Islands from Argentina. In so doing, I learned from the inside that this was a bizarre, unnecessary war which came close to stretching the Navy to breaking point in order to save a Prime Minister’s [Margaret Thatcher’s] faltering career. This experience persuaded me to accept early redundancy in 1982, offered as part of the PM’s defence cuts needed to pay for replacing Polaris with the hugely more expensive, over-capable Trident force.
In 1984, Green suffered a grievous loss with the brutal murder of his aunt, 78-year-old Hilda Murrell, a prominent anti-nuclear campaigner, who he became convinced (by reliable sources and detailed evidence) had been killed with the connivance of British security forces. Certainly, as celebrated defense barrister Michael Mansfield wrote in his review of the 2013 edition of Green’s book A Thorn in Their Side, the “questions come thick and fast,” suggesting at a minimum that the 2005 conviction of a petty criminal, Andrew George (16 in 1984), was unsound. In Green’s own words (in his 29/11 email):
My pursuit of the truth about my beloved aunt and mentor Hilda led me to the dreadful conclusion that it qualified as an assassination by my own country’s deep state. Uncovering this appalling betrayal gradually radicalized me to break from my own deep state of indoctrination to pro-nuclear ‘deterrence’ beliefs.
From 1991-96, Green was UK Chair of the World Court Project, seeking an Advisory Opinion from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague on the single, momentous question: “Is the threat or use of nuclear weapons in any circumstance permitted under international law?” Tantalizingly, the ICJ affirmed that “the threat or use of nuclear weapons would generally be contrary to the rules of international law,” but failed (by a single vote) to “conclude definitively” whether such threat or use would be lawful “in an extreme circumstance of self-defence, in which the very survival of a State would be at stake.”
Green is the author of Security Without Nuclear Deterrence, now in its second edition, dedicated to exposing the delusions of nuclear deterrence, proposing alternative, non-nuclear, truly defensive security thinking, and building bridges between the military and the peace movement. In 1999 Green emigrated to be with his new family in nuclear-free Aotearoa-New Zealand where, with his wife, Dr. Kate Dewes, he runs the Disarmament and Security Centre in Christchurch.
You’ll find my interview with Forsyth and Green here, in Part II.
Sean Howard is adjunct professor of political science at Cape Breton University and member of Peace Quest Cape Breton and the Canadian Pugwash Group. He may be reached here.