HMS Tireless (S88): Thirty Years Under the Ice

Built and Commissioned

HMS Tireless was launched in March 1984, sponsored by Sue Squires, wife of Admiral 'Tubby' Squires, and commissioned in October 1985, a Trafalgar-class fleet submarine that spent the closing years of the Cold War on anti-submarine patrols in the Atlantic before going on to a long and varied postwar career.

Meeting at the Pole

On 19 April 2004, Tireless rendezvoused with the American submarine USS Hampton beneath the Arctic ice and the two boats surfaced together at the North Pole, a striking image of Anglo-American cooperation in one of the most inhospitable environments any submarine could operate in.

It was not the first time the two navies had managed it. HMS Superb had met USS Billfish and USS Sea Devil at the Pole in May 1987, at the height of the Cold War and for very different reasons. By 2004 the point of going was largely scientific and diplomatic rather than a demonstration aimed at Moscow, but the navigation problem had not got any easier: finding another submarine at a spot on the earth with no landmarks, under a moving ice sheet, without either boat being able to take a satellite fix, remains one of the harder things a navy can be asked to do.

Tragedy Beneath the Ice

Tireless's Arctic work came at a genuine cost.

On 21 March 2007, while she was working under the Arctic ice, an explosion aboard killed two of her crew and injured a third. They were Leading Operator Maintainer Paul McCann, who was thirty-two, and Operator Maintainer (Weapon Submariner) Anthony Huntrod, who was twenty. They were the only lives lost aboard Tireless in the whole of her thirty-year career.

The cause was a self-contained oxygen generator. A SCOG is a backup air supply: a sealed canister of chemicals that is lit, burns, and gives off breathable oxygen as it does so, carried in case the main oxygen plant fails. One was being lit during a routine drill when it exploded. The board of inquiry could not establish the mechanism with certainty but found the likeliest cause to be significant oil contamination inside the canister, possibly made worse by cracking in it, and concluded the contamination had most probably happened aboard a submarine rather than in storage ashore.

The inquiry made thirty-five recommendations, and the immediate consequence across the whole submarine service was that SCOGs were restricted to genuine emergencies only. They are no longer lit for practice. Two men died in a drill for a situation that was not happening, which is the particular cruelty of it, and the change that followed means it cannot happen in the same way again.

She had also suffered a serious leak in her nuclear reactor's primary cooling circuit in May 2000, requiring extended repairs at Gibraltar that kept her out of service until she departed on 7 May 2001, and collided with an iceberg on 13 May 2003.

That episode deserves considerably more than a subordinate clause, because it became an international incident. A leak in the primary cooling circuit is about as serious as a peacetime defect gets: the primary circuit is the closed loop of water that carries heat out of the reactor core, and it is radioactive. Her reactor was shut down and she made her way to Gibraltar on backup power, arriving on 19 May 2000.

She was supposed to be there three months. She was there until 7 May 2001, very nearly a year, and the delay turned a repair job into a diplomatic problem. Spain objected in increasingly strong terms to a damaged nuclear submarine being worked on at the end of a peninsula joined to Andalusia; the regional government and the mayors of the neighbouring towns demanded she be taken back to Britain; the matter was raised in the European Parliament; and tens of thousands of people demonstrated in Spain about it. The Royal Navy held its ground on the entirely reasonable grounds that towing a submarine with a cracked primary circuit across the Bay of Biscay was a worse idea than fixing her where she was, but the argument did the Gibraltar question no good at all at a delicate moment.

The cause was traced to cracking in welds in the reactor cooling system, and the same fault was then looked for across the rest of the class. It was not quite the end of the story either. In February 2013, thirteen years later, Tireless developed another coolant leak inside her sealed reactor compartment while she was off the west coast on a training run for new officers, and had to break off and return to Devonport. Nothing was released to the environment on either occasion and nobody was hurt, but two coolant leaks in one boat is a record no submarine wants, and it is a fair part of why she paid off the following year with rather less ceremony than a thirty-year career might have earned.

The iceberg on 13 May 2003 belongs to a different theme, and it is one that runs right through her class. Trafalgar-class boats did a great deal of work under and around the Arctic ice, and the ice repeatedly got the better of them: Tireless struck a berg in 2003 and was working under the ice cap when the explosion happened in 2007, and HMS Talent came home in 2015 with a six-foot gash across her fin and a great many acoustic tiles missing after hitting ice while tracking Russian ships. A submarine can be made almost undetectable, given enough money and enough care. Nothing anybody has yet built makes one able to see through several feet of frozen sea.

A Final Search

In one of her last significant operations, Tireless arrived in the southern Indian Ocean on 1 April 2014 to take part in the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, putting her underwater listening capabilities to a very different use than the anti-submarine work she had been built for.

She was formally decommissioned on 19 June 2014, and was moved in 2020 to the storage basin at Devonport dockyard informally known as the graveyard, closing out three decades of service that had taken her from the height of the Cold War to the search for a lost airliner.

The MH370 search makes an odd last entry in a submarine's record and a fitting one. What she brought to the southern Indian Ocean was the thing she had spent thirty years perfecting: the ability to listen very carefully to a very large volume of water. She had been built to hear Soviet submarines in the Atlantic and she finished by listening for the locator beacon of an airliner's flight recorder, four kilometres down, on behalf of the families of two hundred and thirty-nine people. Nothing was found.

She lies at Devonport now with HMS Trafalgar, HMS Triumph and the rest, waiting for a dismantling programme that has so far taken apart exactly one boat, HMS Swiftsure. The graveyard is the crews' own word for that basin and it is a fair one, though the boats in it are not dead so much as indefinitely detained.