Naval supremacy still rules the world

About a year ago I found myself 100 metres beneath the waves of the North Sea. I was down the inside of one of the 16 concrete ‘legs’ of an oil platform. There the roar of the pumps, which work at pressures of up to 10,000 pounds per square inch, is deafening. If, with your earmuffs on, you manage to hear the alarm, you’ll know that you have to get out quick. The lift has been immobilised and, to escape poisoning by hydrogen sulphide and plain old asphyxiation, you must don breathing apparatus with only 35 minutes of oxygen in it. Then, to avoid being caught by a fire of oil, you must make your way up countless steel stairs to the surface.

By this time the dials on the pumps fairly bulge with hysteria. The dials are dials because at the bottom of the North Sea technology is relatively primitive. There are no digital displays here.

Going down a leg of an oil platform is a chastening finale to a trip that begins with a two-hour, 300-mile flight by Chinook helicopter from Aberdeen, plus a landing among air traffic that makes the oil-field almost as busy as Heathrow. On deck there are photocopiers and Saturday night cinema showings of the German submarine movie Das Boot; in the engineers’ offices, books titled Mud Data rub shoulders with Roget’s Thesaurus. But down a leg, things are not so civilised. Down a leg, man is still fighting for mastery of the sea.

A lot is happening at the bottom of the sea nowadays. This year Britain is set to import electricity to the value of two nuclear power plants via an undersea cable attaching it to France’s electricity grid. In Japan, the Marine Science and Technology Centre in Yokosuka has plans to build robot submarines capable of picking up minerals from the floor of the Pacific nine kilometres beneath the sea surface. While Japan prepares to mine the oceans, it has joined with France, West Germany, the United States and Britain in opposing United Nations and Third World attempts to control seabed mining companies through stricter international maritime law. Finally the Channel Tunnel promises to be a potent symbol of Western Europe’s control over the sea – if it is ever built.

Who could have suspected this new lease of life for things nautical? Two-thirds of the earth’s surface is still covered by water, but few of us see much of it these days. Cars, trains and planes have made ships a rather old-fashioned means of transport. But, against all the evidence – and having, let it be noted, no special affinity for life afloat – I believe that we are in for an era of excitement on the high seas.

The crisis of the international shipbuilding industry, of course, seems to belie all this. Even in Japan there is massive overcapacity. About the 3500 redundancies at British Shipbuilders announced early in May, the Financial Times was icy: ‘While there is still a market for specialised and naval craft’, an editorial argued, ‘the building of ordinary cargo carriers is a dead trade for the industrialised world for the foreseeable future’.

Despite the buoyancy of world trade today, shipbuilding and shipping appear doomed. Industry minister Paul Channon explains to Parliament that ship orders from Cuba would be a great help. Unions complain of management spies in their meetings (newly-privatised Swan Hunter), management ship hijackings (Townsend Thoresen’s Doric ferry), unfair profit-sharing schemes (Tyne Shiprepair), cuts in monthly pay-packets from $1000 to $800 (P&O Cruises) and a Chunnellers’ conspiracy to wreck Hull, Liverpool, Glasgow and all the ports of the south coast.

Alex Ferry, general secretary of the Confederation of Shipbuilders and Engineering Unions, has called for government support for British yards ‘as an essential element of the UK economy and an island nation’. In this he has much in common with Sir Edward Du Cann, the influential Tory backbencher; but little with the Financial Times, which ridiculed ‘the ritual protests about our seagoing heritage and the importance of taking the longer view’. So who is right? Are ships vital to Britain’s future or are they not?

On this occasion it appears that the unions, Du Cann, James Callaghan, John Smith and many others may be right, and the cynics wrong. Among military thinkers, at least, fleets of every description have never been more important.

As its name suggests, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation takes the sea very seriously. For Atlantic Alliance forces in Western Europe, indeed, early shipborne re-supply with American fuel, rations and weapons will be critical, should tension around the Iron Curtain ever begin to rise dramatically. The Soviet navy is held a mortal threat to such re-supply; but so is the USA’s shortage of tankers that can take petroleum products more immediately usable than crude. More broadly, over-capacity in the world’s civilian shipyards does little to solve NATO’s naval problems.

Over the years, international shipping has moved, for cheap registry and cheap crews, to non-NATO countries such as Liberia. Meanwhile the relentless march of containerisation has rendered many NATO-flag merchant fleets unsuitable for the carrying of tanks, helicopters and artillery. Result: it becomes essential to boost NATO’s merchant fleet support.

Chez NATO, therefore, even civilian ships retain a significance all their own. But if the run-up to the First World War is anything to go by, the ships of navies have another, almost iconographic significance.

As Barbara Tuchman reminded us in The proud tower, Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, president of America’s Naval War College, proclaimed the need for his country to turn outwards, toward the sea, as early as 1890. Mahan’s The influence of sea power on history had a profound effect on Theodore Roosevelt and Kaiser Wilhelm alike. Less than three years after it was published, the United States sent – by ship, of course – the marines into Hawaii. By 1895 the US could follow successful trials of its first battleship, the Indiana, with a presidential brandishing, against Britain, of the Monroe doctrine.

The Indiana was a 10,000 ton battleship with a speed of 15 knots, a range of 5000 miles, four 13-inch guns and eight 8-inch ones too. The British were impressed with it; but they were even more impressed when Germany announced plans to launch 19 rather like it. Britain’s riposte was to build, in 366 days flat, HMS Dreadnought, an 18,000 ton machine with 10 12-inch guns. In the world’s first high-technology arms race, a single ship design by Britain in a stroke made Germany and America’s military apparatuses impotent and obsolete. Announcing that navies were for defensive purposes alone, the Liberal government of the day ordered three more Dreadnoughts at once.

Multilateral negotiations at the Geneva of the day, The Hague, were dominated by navies. In socialist circles, the pro-Navy and anti-Navy stances taken by the English jingo, Hyndman, and the Clydeside’s revolutionary, John Maclean, caused international reverberations. In the First World War itself, the submarine, a technology born of Germany’s need to make up for her inferior surface-fleet position, got the better of its designers. By turning her U-boats on American ships, Germany brought America into the war. The U-boat’s very powers helped seal the Kaiser’s fate.

Ah, you say; that just goes to show that navies have dwindled in importance since 1914. But this is not the case. The future of nuclear deterrence lies with the nuclear–armed, nuclear–powered submarine. Meanwhile, the projection of conventional military power in the trouble-spots of the Third World is an exercise that very much depends on ships. One of the few sectors of industry to be favoured for the throw-money-at-it treatment by Mrs Thatcher will be, she has indicated in Parliament, the yards making Type 23 frigates. Labour’s 1984 policy pamphlet, Defence and security for Britain, likewise pronounces: ‘A non–nuclear defence strategy requires a strong navy’.

George Orwell used to say that pacifists could only afford the luxury of their views because they were protected by strong navies. The US Navy is a case in point. By 1990 it will have 15 aircraft carriers worth $3.4billion each. The modern ones are 1000 feet long, 90,000 tons in weight, crewed by 6000 men and equipped with 90 planes. To this, add the battleships New Jersey, Iowa, Missouri and Wisconsin, which, from a total of 36 16-inch guns, could shoot 2700lb shells from one side of the Channel to the other, if their captains so wished. Then count in 52 nuclear-powered Los Angeles attack submarines, each capable of 35 knots underwater, and you have most of Mr Reagan’s 600-ship navy. Construction budget, in fiscal year 1983 alone: nearly $90billion.

Boats are back. But what we are talking about here is not so much boats as a general supremacy over the sea. A month ago, I found myself atop the shiny and sublime Lloyds building, a vertiginous feat of metalwork by the architect Richard Rogers. Outside, it is like the derrick on my oil rig. Inside, it is like a ship. There, from 1600 individually air-conditioned trading desks, 1600 underwriters insure the world’s merchant shipping, and the world’s fleet of space satellites, too. You don’t have to have a propeller to rule the waves today: you can do the same from terra firma. Either way, ruling’s the thing. Who controls the seas, it appears, controls the Earth.