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.

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.

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.

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.

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, much longer running controversy involving her sister submarine HMS Tireless some years before.

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.

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 her sister Swiftsure class boat, HMS Warspite, which completed a 111 day submerged patrol in the South Atlantic during 1982 and 1983, a record later broken by HMS Tireless and then decisively surpassed by HMS Trenchant's 335 day patrol.

Given how similar the two sister ships' names and service periods are, the mix-up is an understandable one, but Sceptre herself holds no such record.

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.

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.