Living on a nuclear submarine does your head in

Richard Humphreys spent a good part of five years, between the ages of 18 and 23, living inside a nuclear submarine, which he describes variously as ‘sleek, black and athletic looking’, and ‘this fierce black messenger of death’, and ‘this huge, black leviathan’, and ‘a killing machine’, and ‘silent as death’. The first time he sets foot on it, he tells us, ‘I was shitting it.’ This is not the last we will hear of his negative emotions, or the state of his bowels.

We are in the latter part of the Cold War. Humphreys is a sailor. The submarine is HMS Resolution, part of the Polaris fleet. It is 425ft long, 33ft wide and 30ft from top to bottom. Humphreys describes it as ‘cigar-shaped’. From the outside it looks huge; from the inside it feels tiny. It carries nuclear missiles that are, we are told, more powerful than all the bombs dropped in the second world war put together. But Resolution is not just a bombing machine; it’s also a hiding machine. Nobody knows where it is — including almost everybody on it. You’re under the sea, within firing range of Moscow. That’s it. It does your head in.

Lots of things about living on a nuclear submarine do your head in. The payload; the fact that you’re carrying the payload; the fact that you don’t really want to fire the payload; the fact that you might; the fact that, if you did, most of the people you love might already be dead. Also, the other submariners: their proximity; the relationships that develop between them when they have to live together in a steel tube under the sea for ten weeks at a time. Plus: the farts, the smell, the masturbation of others; the bullying; the lack of sunlight and vitamin D; the whittling away of privacy to a tiny nub.