HMS Sceptre (S104): The Cold War Boat That Rammed a Soviet Submarine and Blamed an Iceberg

Built at Barrow for the Cold War

This later HMS Sceptre, carrying the pennant S104, has no connection beyond her name to the earlier wartime S-class submarine of the same name.

Built by Vickers Shipbuilding and Engineering at Barrow-in-Furness, ordered in November 1971, laid down in February 1974 and commissioned in February 1978, she was a Swiftsure class nuclear powered hunter killer submarine, the tenth such boat to enter Royal Navy service, built specifically for the demanding business of tracking Soviet submarines through the North Atlantic and Barents Sea during the tensest years of the Cold War.

The Swiftsures were the first British nuclear submarines designed with the benefit of hindsight. Dreadnought, the Valiants and the Churchills had been built in a hurry by a navy learning the trade as it went, and by the end of the 1960s the designers at Barrow knew exactly what they wanted to change. Sceptre and her five sisters came out some thirteen feet shorter than a Valiant and a good deal fuller in the hull, with the forward hydroplanes moved further ahead, one torpedo tube fewer at five rather than six, and a greater diving depth. Shorter and fatter sounds like a step backwards. In a submarine it is the opposite: a stubbier pressure hull is a stiffer one, and a stiffer one goes deeper.

The change that mattered most was at the other end of the boat. Every Swiftsure except HMS Swiftsure herself was given a shrouded pump-jet propulsor in place of the multi-bladed screw, the first in Royal Navy service. A propulsor is a rotor turning inside a duct, and the duct earns its keep by holding the water pressure across the blades high enough that they do not cavitate. No collapsing bubbles, no noise. It is reckoned to be as much as half again as efficient as a propeller, which means the same speed at fewer revolutions, which means a quieter boat. That is not a detail. It is the whole reason the Royal Navy was willing to put boats of this class where it put them, and the reason HMS Sovereign could sit behind a Soviet ballistic missile submarine for forty-nine days without being shaken off.

A Collision Blamed on Ice

Sceptre's most extraordinary moment came on 23 May 1981, while operating off the Kola Peninsula, when she collided with the Soviet ballistic missile submarine K-211, a Delta III class boat.

K-211 Petropavlovsk was not something Sceptre bumped into by accident. She was a Delta III, five hundred feet of ballistic missile submarine with a raised casing running along her back to house sixteen R-29R missiles, each of them carrying three independently targeted warheads. Following a boat like that out of the Kola inlets and into her patrol area was about the most valuable thing a British hunter-killer could be doing in 1981. It was done at close range, on passive sonar, from the one position a submarine cannot hear out of: directly astern, in the churn of the target's own wake.

That deaf arc is called the baffles, and every submarine commander in the world handles it the same way, by turning periodically to sweep the water behind him. K-211 did precisely that. Sceptre, holding station astern on her Type 2001 sonar, lost the contact at the moment the Soviet boat began her turn and carried on into water she had every reason to believe was empty. She was not wrong about the water. She was wrong about where the submarine had gone.

The collision tore Sceptre's forward outer casing and fin, though her inner pressure hull remained intact, and reactor safety systems reportedly triggered an automatic shutdown that her commanding officer chose to override to get the boat safely home.

The shape of the damage tells you how close astern she had been. One of K-211's five propeller blades went into Sceptre's forward casing and opened it up along something like twenty-three feet, taking the top off her fin as it went. The distinction between casing and pressure hull is the whole difference between an embarrassment and a disaster. The casing is a light outer skin wrapped around the real hull, carrying ballast tanks, sonar fittings and free-flooding space, and it can be ripped open without a drop of water reaching anybody. The pressure hull is the tube the crew live in. Had that gone at depth in the Barents Sea, there would have been no interview in 1991 and no argument about icebergs.

The Soviet boat came off better, though not unmarked. K-211 surfaced to find the rubber anechoic tiling scraped away from her stern, an after hydroplane damaged, an after ballast tank punctured, and, embedded in her starboard screw, fragments of metal that were plainly not her own. The screw had to be replaced and the stabilising fin repaired. Two nuclear submarines, one of them carrying forty-eight warheads, had collided at depth and both had got home, which is a good deal closer to luck than either navy cared to say at the time.

Rather than reveal the true circumstances of a notably alarming Cold War near miss, the official cover story attributed the damage to a collision with an iceberg, a piece of quiet, deliberate misdirection, with the real story finally becoming public in September 1991 when her former weapons officer, David Forghan, gave a television interview.

The cover story is worth dwelling on, because it worked twice over and in opposite directions. At home, Sceptre came in visibly damaged and the explanation offered was a collision with a detached glacier, a phrase that sounds authoritative largely because nobody is quite sure what it means. Pressed in Parliament, a minister contrived to neither confirm nor deny that a British submarine had been in a collision at all, which is a position the Ministry of Defence has never really abandoned.

In Moscow the deception was not even needed. The Soviet investigators had the metal out of the screw and concluded from the angle and the pattern of the damage that they had been struck from below and astern by an American submarine of the Sturgeon class. So the Royal Navy's most closely held operation of that year was credited by its victim to a different navy and by the British press to a piece of floating ice. The truth waited ten years and arrived in September 1991, in the weeks the Soviet Union was coming apart, when a former weapons officer evidently decided the secret had outlived the state it had been kept from.

Three Decades of Cold War and Post-Cold War Service

Beyond that single dramatic episode, Sceptre's long career included a fitted improved reactor core in 1987, a coolant leak at Devonport in 1990, a fire while moored at Faslane in 1991, an aborted patrol due to a propulsion fault in 1995, and a reactor defect discovered in the late 1990s later attributed to small original manufacturing imperfections.

In February 2005 she required emergency cooling system repairs at Gibraltar, a visit that triggered a formal diplomatic protest from Spain, echoing an earlier and far longer running controversy involving the Trafalgar class boat HMS Tireless some years before.

The comparison flatters Sceptre considerably and is worth being precise about. She came into Gibraltar on 4 February 2005 with a fault in the cooling system of a diesel generator and left on 9 February, five days later. HMS Tireless had arrived in May 2000 with a crack in a reactor cooling circuit and was still there in May 2001, a full year, through street demonstrations on the Rock and a sustained Spanish campaign to have her moved. One was a broken generator. The other was the nuclear plant.

The protest came anyway. The Spanish foreign minister registered a firm objection with Jack Straw and asked that Sceptre be the last British submarine repaired at Gibraltar. Part of the irritation was procedural rather than nuclear: London had described the work as external and had not thought to mention that a cooling system was involved, which in a territory still recovering from the Tireless year was an unfortunate omission to be caught in.

Her final major operational deployment came in 2010, an eight month, roughly thirty one thousand mile voyage through the Indian and Atlantic Oceans that included support for the Falkland Islands garrison during a period of heightened tension with Argentina over oil exploration rights.

She came up the Hamoaze into Devonport for the last time on 25 May 2010, and the work behind her had been about presence rather than action. Desire Petroleum had begun exploratory drilling north of the Falklands that February, Argentina had responded by requiring permits for shipping moving through its waters to the islands, and part of the British answer was a nuclear submarine somewhere in the South Atlantic whose position was not published and was not going to be. That is the ordinary use of the thing. Nobody is meant to know where she is. They are meant to know she could be anywhere.

Correcting a Common Mix-Up

It is worth correcting a claim sometimes attached to this submarine, that she holds the record for the longest submerged patrol ever completed by a Royal Navy vessel.

That distinction in fact belongs to HMS Warspite, a Valiant class boat and no relation of Sceptre's, which spent 111 days continuously submerged and unsupported in the South Atlantic between 25 November 1982 and 15 March 1983, covering 30,804 nautical miles. That record has not been broken. It stands as the longest submerged patrol the Royal Navy has ever made public and is recognised as such by Guinness World Records.

The figures usually cited against it come from a different category altogether. HMS Trenchant came home in May 2013 from three hundred and thirty-five days away, the longest single deployment any Royal Navy hunter-killer has made, beating the deployment HMS Tireless had completed across 2010 and 2011 by twelve days. Those are days at sea rather than days submerged, and a deployment of that length necessarily includes port visits and time on the surface. HMS Turbulent shows the gap between the two measurements plainly: two hundred and sixty-eight days away, of which a hundred and ninety were spent entirely underwater. Warspite's hundred and eleven is a count of unbroken submergence with no support of any kind, and nothing published since has come close to it.

The mix-up is understandable enough once you see where it comes from, which is not the names. Warspite wore S103 and Sceptre S104. Both were built at Barrow, both were nuclear boats of the same Cold War generation, and both ended their days laid up at Devonport waiting on the same dismantling programme. They have one further thing in common, and it is rather more pointed: in October 1968 Warspite collided with a Soviet Echo II submarine in the Barents Sea, and an iceberg was blamed for that one as well. Sceptre herself holds no endurance record, which takes nothing away from what she did do.

Retirement

HMS Sceptre was decommissioned at Devonport Naval Base on 10 December 2010, the last of her class still in service, having carried around fifteen hundred sailors across her thirty two year career.

Four hundred and fifty people came to watch her pay off at Devonport and the service was taken by a naval chaplain. Among the guests was the Mayor of Wigan. The connection is not obvious from a map, Wigan being about as far from blue water as an English town can arrange, but the affiliation had run for years and it illustrates a durable naval habit: attaching a warship to an inland town that will never see her, so that a long way from any sea there are people who follow what she is doing and turn out at the end of it. She was the last of the six Swiftsures in commission, six years after HMS Splendid had gone and eighteen after the lead boat of the class paid off in 1992.

She remains today in long term afloat storage awaiting eventual dismantling, part of a substantial backlog of retired Royal Navy nuclear submarines still working their way through the Ministry of Defence's ongoing disposal programme.

She joined a queue rather than a scrapyard. Laid-up nuclear submarines are held afloat at Devonport and at Rosyth, several of them older than Sceptre, and exactly one has so far been taken apart: HMS Swiftsure, lead boat of her own class, serving at Rosyth as the demonstrator for a process that has to be invented before it can be repeated. Sceptre lies at Devonport with HMS Courageous, HMS Warspite and the rest, defuelled, monitored and waiting. Thirty-two years in commission and now well over a decade tied up, which is the part of a nuclear submarine's life that nobody designs for and everybody inherits.