What is life really like when board a submarine?

Submarines entered the Royal Navy in 1901; some felt them to be a highly unsporting tool of war - “Underhand, unfair and damned un-English”, as one Admiral put it. Life on board was, and remains, uncomfortable and claustrophobic.

A Royal Navy Trafalgar class submarine is eighty-five metres long, 10 metres wide and 10 metres high. In this unit 130 men live and work together. It takes a particular type of person to be a submariner – self-contained,

imaginative and good at ‘spinning a dit’ (telling stories to keep others entertained). Anyone suffering from, or identified as likely to develop, claustrophobia is eliminated in the selection process wherever possible but still, some submariners do go stir-crazy and occasionally need sedating until they can be got ashore.

As you’d expect, submariner’s humour is slightly surreal and very dark. They also have their own slang – a diver is a ‘bubblehead’, if you’re pretending to be tremendously busy working then you’re ‘diddly-dossing’ and a regular highlight is anyone flushing the loo while the sanitary tanks are being blown overboard, which results in a veritable explosion of toilet paper and lavatory contents all over the flusher.

Claustrophobia aside, until recently living conditions were unhealthy. The boats smelt of oil, men were not allowed to use deodorant because of air filtration (that rule has thankfully changed now) and had to sleep in their clothes to enable them to act quickly in the event of an emergency. Conditions are marginally better now but still far from comfortable. 

The weapons storage area is the most pleasant place to be as it has more space and is cooled – there are reports of beds being installed on top of warheads. The lack of space means lack of bunks, so the men ‘hot-bunk’ – climbing into a bunk that’s just been vacated by another submariner. Rotas are strictly six hours on, six hours off.

So where does Radio 4 come in? Well, once a submarine surfaces, if it is unable to pick up Radio 4 for a set number of consecutive days, then the captain is permitted to assume that Britain may have been the victim of a nuclear attack. This caused a major panic in 2003, when because of a fire alarm at Broadcasting House, an interview with Tessa Jowell cut out and classical music was played instead for fifteen minutes. Luckily normal service was resumed, and a crisis averted.

But say normal service wasn’t resumed. Assuming the submarine commanding officer was still listening to Vivaldi three days later, what happens then? On board each of the four British ballistic missile submarines is a safe, and inside that is an envelope, containing hand-written orders from whichever Prime Minister is in place at the time, called the Letter of Last Resort. 

The letter gives the commanding officers a list of options to be taken on the assumption that an enemy nuclear strike has destroyed the British government and has killed or otherwise incapacitated both the Prime Minister and the designated "second person" (a high-ranking member of the Cabinet). The last of these options of Last Resort is the launching of a nuclear strike. Once a Prime Minister leaves office, these letters are destroyed, unopened, keeping their contents a secret.

Obviously not being able to hear Radio 4 is not the only factor in opening the Letter of Last Resort. No-one’s going to launch a nuclear strike because they can’t hear Gardener’s Question Time, (although The Archers is obviously a different matter) but it’s nice to feel Radio 4 is still playing its part.