HMS Dreadnought (S101): Britain's First Nuclear Submarine Surfaces at the North Pole

Launched on Trafalgar Day

HMS Dreadnought was built by Vickers Armstrongs at Barrow-in-Furness, launched by Queen Elizabeth II on 21 October 1960, fittingly on Trafalgar Day, and commissioned on 17 April 1963.

She was Britain's first nuclear-powered submarine, a genuine landmark in naval engineering, combining a British-designed hull and combat systems with an American S5W reactor supplied under the 1958 US-UK Mutual Defence Agreement, a piece of transatlantic cooperation that dramatically accelerated Britain's entry into the nuclear submarine age.

How Mountbatten Got the Reactor

Cooperation is a generous word for how that plant was obtained. The man who controlled American naval nuclear propulsion was Rear Admiral Hyman Rickover, who had built the programme almost single-handed, guarded it ferociously, and was entirely opposed to giving any of it to anybody, allies included. He would not even permit Lord Mountbatten to go aboard USS Nautilus and look.

What changed his mind was a visit to Britain in 1956, after which he withdrew his objections. Even then he intended to be careful about it: what he proposed to supply was the S3W, the third-generation plant fitted in the Skate class, which was already a generation behind what the US Navy was then building.

Mountbatten pushed, and this is where the story turns. Britain ended up receiving not the older plant but the entire machinery system of a Skipjack-class submarine, complete, with the fifth-generation S5W reactor: the newest and best propulsion plant in the world at that moment. It is difficult to overstate what that was worth. It saved Britain years of development and a great deal of money, and it meant her first nuclear submarine was not a cautious experiment but a genuinely front-rank boat.

The debt was repaid in the obvious way. Having seen a complete American plant working, British engineers built their own, and HMS Valiant followed in 1966 with a reactor designed and made in Britain. From that point the Royal Navy could build nuclear submarines without asking permission, and Dreadnought is the reason the gap was three years rather than fifteen.

Surfacing at the North Pole

Dreadnought's most celebrated achievement came on 3 March 1971, under the command of Alan Kennedy, when she became the first British nuclear submarine to surface at the North Pole, part of an exercise codenamed Sniff. The ice took its toll on the boat, damaging her propeller, bow and fins in the process, but the achievement itself stood as a genuine milestone for the Royal Navy's fledgling nuclear fleet.

The wording of that claim is worth noticing, because it is careful and correct. Dreadnought was the first BRITISH nuclear submarine to surface at the Pole, not the first submarine. USS Nautilus had crossed the whole Arctic basin submerged in 1958 and USS Skate came up through the ice at the Pole itself in March 1959, twelve years before. It is an easy claim to inflate and this one has not been.

The damage tells you what the achievement cost. Surfacing through polar ice means finding a thin patch, coming up slowly underneath it and using the boat herself as the icebreaker, driving the fin and casing up through several feet of ice from below. Dreadnought came away with a damaged propeller, bow and fins, which is the ordinary price of the manoeuvre rather than a sign anything went wrong.

It also shows why nuclear power changed the Arctic completely. A reactor needs no air, so under the ice a nuclear boat is simply somewhere cold and dark. HMS Finwhale had been pushing diesel submarines under the same ice a few years earlier and the arithmetic she faced was entirely different, and a great deal more frightening.

A Global Cold War Career

Dreadnought took part in joint exercises with American and Canadian forces in 1964 and departed Rosyth on 19 September 1967 for a high-speed run to Singapore, covering 4,640 miles surfaced and a further 26,545 miles submerged, demonstrating the truly transformed reach and endurance nuclear propulsion offered the Navy.

In 1977, she took part in Operation Journeyman in the South Atlantic, a deployment intended to deter Argentine aggression against the Falkland Islands, a full five years before the war that Operation Journeyman had been meant to prevent.

The Deterrent Nobody Was Told About

Journeyman is worth setting out, because it is one of the strangest episodes in the run-up to 1982 and it was kept quiet for nearly thirty years. In November 1977 about fifty Argentine "scientists" landed on Southern Thule in the South Sandwich Islands, and the Callaghan government took the view that this might be the start of something larger.

So a task force went south under heavy security: Dreadnought, the frigates HMS Alacrity and HMS Phoebe, and the auxiliaries Resource and Olwen. The submarine was the point of it. A nuclear boat can be off the Argentine coast without anybody knowing, stay indefinitely, and sink whatever is ordered, which is precisely the argument HMS Conqueror settled permanently five years later.

And here is the contradiction at the heart of it. A deterrent only works if the other side knows it exists. The British government wanted Argentina to understand exactly what was down there, while keeping it from the British public and Parliament, and the result was an operation so secret that it is still argued whether Buenos Aires ever properly registered it. The files were not released until 2005.

The uncomfortable question hangs over the whole thing. If Argentina did notice in 1977 and was deterred, then the same force in early 1982 might have prevented the war. If Argentina never noticed, then the deterrent was never a deterrent at all, and a great deal of effort bought nothing. Both readings have had serious support, and the war happened either way.

Withdrawal and an Uncertain Future

HMS Dreadnought was withdrawn from service in 1980 following machinery damage, and remains laid up in afloat storage at Rosyth Dockyard, part of the Ministry of Defence's ongoing Submarine Dismantling Project, with hopes that she might eventually go on display as a tourist attraction in Barrow, the town where her pioneering career began.

The name is the last thing worth saying about her, because very few carry this kind of weight. HMS Dreadnought (1906) was the battleship that rendered every other battleship in the world obsolete the day she was completed, and gave her name to a whole category of ship. Giving that name to Britain's first nuclear submarine in 1960 was a deliberate statement about what was being launched.

It has since been used again. The ballistic missile submarines now building at Barrow to replace the Vanguards are the Dreadnought class, and the first of them will carry the name into the second half of this century. Three ships, three moments when the Royal Navy thought it was changing the terms of naval warfare, and the same word on all of them.

In the meantime she sits at Rosyth, afloat, defuelled and waiting, as she has since 1980. She was in commission for seventeen years and has now been laid up for over forty-five, which is the common fate of the early nuclear boats and the reason the dismantling programme exists. Barrow would be the right place for her.