To the Soviets the crisis highlighted the limitations of their existing naval power and under the stewardship of the head of their navy, Admiral Sergey Gorshkov, they thereafter built a navy capable of global power projection, spearheaded by a force of nuclear submarines, which culminated in numbers and capability in the late 1980s.
In 1963 the Royal Navy commissioned HMS Dreadnought, the first British SSN. Although built at Vickers Barrow, in order to hasten its entry into service the hull design and entire propulsion plant were of American origin. This very beneficial transfer of technology had been negotiated by Lord Louis Mountbatten, who was First Sea Lord during the period 1955–59 and who had excellent relations with his American opposite, Admiral Arleigh Burke. The first nuclear submarine of British design was HMS Valiant, which entered service in 1966. Although also constructed and fitted out by Vickers, her powerful reactor was of American design but built in Britain.
Great Britain was to build up to a force of twenty nuclear submarines in the 1980s but, contentiously, at a cost to the remainder of the Royal Navy. In particular, there were limited resources available to expend on air defence for the Fleet, including its anti-aircraft missile systems and carrier-embarked fighter aircraft. This vulnerability was to be emphatically demonstrated in the Falklands War, when the fragility of the Royal Navy’s air defences resulted in the loss of important ships, which severely prejudiced the conduct of the operation and very much threatened its successful outcome.
During the late 1950s it was evident that Britain’s V-bomber nuclear strike force with its freefall bombs was becoming increasingly susceptible to destruction before reaching its targets. Accordingly, a much less vulnerable stand-off capability to deliver the nuclear warheads was sought and, after desultory efforts to develop a home-grown version were abandoned, the RAF put its hopes upon the American Skybolt air-to-ground missile programme. This was cancelled in 1962 and, unless an alternative to the V-bomber was urgently developed, the United Kingdom faced the prospect of an ineffective nuclear deterrent.
At a meeting between President Kennedy and Prime Minister MacMillan in Nassau in the Bahamas in October 1962, the former agreed that the United States would provide Britain with Polaris missiles and technology. Six years later the first British SSBN, HMS Resolution, the lead vessel in a class of four, deployed on patrol on time and on budget. In 1969 the V-bomber force was stood down from providing quick reaction alert to counter the threat of nuclear attack. Since that date there has been at least one British SSBN on patrol at sea, ready to fire its missiles at short notice. From the mid 1990s Trident submarines assumed the role of providing the United Kingdom’s independent deterrent.
Meanwhile, in the 1960s the SSN, the nuclear attack submarine, had established itself as the West’s premier means of countering the Soviet submarine threat. Stealthy and fitted with first-rate listening sonars, they were to have marked acoustic superiority over their Soviet opponents. A further big advantage to the West was the very highly classified seabed sound surveillance system (SOSUS), listening and tracking acoustic arrays established on the seabed in the deep water of strategic areas of the oceans. SOSUS exploited an acoustic phenomenon known as the deep sound channel. It was capable of detecting the presence of a potentially hostile submarine over immense distances, sometimes exceeding thousands of miles on early classes of Soviet nuclear submarines. Nevertheless, it had its weaknesses: it was not feasible to set up in shallower or more confined seas, such as the Mediterranean, and could have been easily destroyed or debilitated in war. Furthermore, it lacked the ability to acquire an accurate bearing and therefore made the exact positioning of a submarine impossible.
In consequence, the location of a SOSUS contact by anti-submarine forces could take a long time, sometimes without success.
When in the 1970s the West’s SSNs were fitted with passive listening sonars towed astern on long arrays, British and American boats gained the ability to make long-range acoustic detections of Soviet submarines. At this time the counter-detection capability of Russian submarines was very limited, enabling NATO submarines to follow or, in the jargon, trail, Soviet boats for prolonged periods undetected, sometimes for weeks or even months. Trailing of Russian SSBNs was a priority because it both gathered intelligence on their mode of operations and conferred on the pursuing submarine the ability to destroy its quarry before it was able to launch a nuclear strike in the event of hostilities. Thus successful and persistent trailing offered a further advantage in this risky but essentially defensive counter to any Soviet aggression. But the boot was occasionally on the other foot: Soviet counter-detections did occur and a Russian commander could become aggressive, turning directly towards the following submarine and making use of speed and active sonar to harass the hunter — now turned prey.
For their own part, the Soviets explored different avenues of submarine technology. In the 1970s they introduced the Alfa-class SSN. Highly automated, with a small number of crew (about forty instead of the 120 typical in British or American nuclear submarines), the Alfa was far faster than its Western counterparts. With its high-power liquid metal cooled reactor it could do over 40 knots, whilst its titanium hull enabled it to go to more than twice the operating depth of the West’s deepest diving submarines. However, the liquid metal cooled reactor incurred severe technical problems and there were costs for its performance in terms of safety and quietness. Furthermore, the titanium hulls were immensely costly and consequently this class of boat was not successful.
Of course, the Soviets did not sit on their hands regarding the West’s superiority and what they could not develop themselves they sought through espionage. In the 1950s they established a spy ring, the ringleaders — Lonsdale, Houghton and Gee — at Britain’s Portland Underwater Research Establishment acquiring access to very valuable sonar technology. Perhaps most damaging was the Walker/Whitworth spy ring operating in the United States from 1968 to 1985. These individuals, being communications specialists, were able to select and pass ultra-secret signal traffic to the Soviets, in the process revealing the extent of the West’s huge acoustic and anti-submarine superiority. In response, the Russians undertook a noise-quieting programme in their newest classes of submarines as a matter of the highest priority. Later Russian submarine classes have consequently been much quieter and the West’s marked acoustic advantage was eroded from the mid 1980s onwards.