HMS Valiant (S102): Britain's Second Nuclear Submarine

Constructed at Barrow

HMS Valiant was built by Vickers-Armstrongs at Barrow-in-Furness, ordered on 31 August 1960, laid down on 22 January 1962, launched on 3 December 1963 by Lady Thorneycroft and commissioned on 18 July 1966, Britain's second nuclear-powered submarine and the lead boat of the Valiant class, combining the forward hull design of HMS Dreadnought with an entirely British nuclear propulsion system based on the Dounreay prototype reactor.

That clause is the most important fact about her and it goes past far too quickly. HMS Dreadnought, Britain's first nuclear submarine, was a British boat with an American heart: her reactor and machinery came from the United States under an agreement negotiated with Admiral Rickover, and without it she would not have existed. Useful, but not independence.

Valiant was the first British submarine powered by a British reactor, designed and built in Britain and proved ashore first at Dounreay in Caithness, where a complete submarine propulsion plant was assembled inside a building and run for years to find out what would go wrong before anybody put one to sea. From Valiant onwards the Royal Navy could build nuclear submarines without asking anyone's permission, and everything since has descended from this plant.

Twelve Thousand Miles Without Surfacing

She proved the point almost immediately. In April 1967, less than a year after commissioning, Valiant came home from Singapore submerged: twelve thousand miles in twenty-eight days, without once coming up. It was the longest submerged passage any British submarine had made.

It is worth measuring that against what had gone before. A diesel boat making the same journey would have spent most of it on the surface or snorkelling, taken twice as long, and stopped to refuel more than once. HMS Grampus and her generation were still counting battery amps under the Arctic ice in the same decade. Valiant simply left Singapore and arrived in Britain, and the only thing that limited her was food.

She later became the first nuclear submarine refitted and refuelled at Chatham, the yard that had rebuilt itself around a nuclear complex for exactly that purpose. As HMS Opossum records, that decision eventually cost Chatham its conventional work and then, in 1984, its existence.

A Frightening Leak

In 1977, while trailing a Soviet submarine in the Mediterranean, Valiant suffered a saltwater pipe leak that flooded her reactor compartment, a remarkably dangerous incident that could have ended far more seriously than it did, and one that underlined the constant hazards inherent in operating nuclear machinery at sea, particularly during the kind of sensitive intelligence-gathering missions that defined so much of the Cold War submarine service.

What actually happened is more alarming, and more impressive, than that summary conveys. A salt water pipe failed and the reactor compartment flooded with seawater, and the reactor was shut down. That is the worst routine casualty a nuclear submarine can suffer short of an actual reactor accident: the compartment is full of the sea, the plant is off, and the boat is a very large object with no propulsion in the eastern Mediterranean while trailing a Soviet submarine that must not find out.

What her people then did is the part worth admiring. They pumped the compartment dry. They cleaned it up, at sea, in the middle of an operational patrol. And then they restarted the reactor and carried on. There was no dockyard, no shore support and no possibility of asking anybody for help without announcing where they were.

It also says something about the era that this only appears in the record as a paragraph. Trailing Soviet boats was the central business of the Cold War submarine service and almost none of it has ever been described in detail. What surfaces are the accidents.

The Falklands War

Valiant arrived in the South Atlantic on 17 May 1982 during the Falklands War and spent 101 days on patrol, transmitting more than 300 air-warning alerts back to the Task Force, a vital contribution to the fleet's air defence even without a single torpedo fired in anger. On 23 May 1982, she sustained minor damage when Argentine fighter jets jettisoned bombs nearby while attempting to evade her.

The figure to dwell on is the three hundred air warnings. Valiant was stationed between the Argentine mainland and the Task Force, and Argentine aircraft attacking the fleet had to fly over her to get there. A submarine at periscope depth can see and hear aircraft taking off and forming up, and she could report them long before the ships had any radar contact.

That is why she mattered, and it is why she never fired a torpedo. Every one of those three hundred reports bought the fleet minutes of warning, and in a war where ships were being lost to aircraft carrying Exocets, minutes were the difference between a Harrier at altitude and a burning frigate. HMS Hermes was the flagship receiving them, and the officer commanding the group had himself served in this submarine years before.

A hundred and one days on patrol is the other number. That is over three months dived, in the South Atlantic winter, and it is the kind of endurance only a nuclear boat has. HMS Conqueror was down there doing the more famous job, and between them the submarines kept the Argentine surface fleet in harbour for the entire war after 2 May.

The End of Her Service

Valiant ran aground in the North Norwegian Sea in March 1991, an incident that only became public knowledge in 2010, and was decommissioned on 12 August 1994 following engine trouble that June.

The 1991 grounding is worth noting for the nineteen years it took to become public. A nuclear submarine running aground in the Norwegian Sea is not a trivial event, and the fact that it stayed out of the papers until 2010 is a fair illustration of how these boats were reported on, which is to say not at all. There is no suggestion of a cover-up in any sinister sense. Submarine operations were simply not discussed, and a great deal of what these boats did in the 1980s and 1990s is still not.

She remains laid up at Devonport Dockyard, awaiting the long-term storage facilities needed to deal with her radioactive components, though some of her parts have already been salvaged to help restore the museum ship HMS Courageous, ensuring that a piece of the lead Valiant-class boat lives on in preservation.

She has now been waiting longer than she served. Valiant was in commission for twenty-eight years and has been laid up at Devonport for over thirty, defuelled but not dismantled, because Britain built nuclear submarines for decades before settling how to take one apart. The dismantling programme finally began in the 2010s and is working through a queue of boats at Rosyth and Devonport that has been accumulating since the 1980s.

The salvage for HMS Courageous is the cheerful footnote. Courageous is open to visitors at Devonport, and keeping a fifty-year-old submarine in a fit state for the public requires parts that nobody makes any more, so the lead boat of the class has been quietly donating components to her. It is not preservation exactly, but it is a good deal better than nothing, and it means the first genuinely British nuclear submarine is still doing something useful thirty years after she stopped.