My Bloody Efforts: Life as a Rating in the modern Royal Navy

In May 2000 the British nuclear ‘hunter-killer’ submarine HMS Tireless limped into Gibraltar using emergency propulsion and with her nuclear reactor shut down. Days earlier, while traversing the Straits of Sicily the crew had discovered a crack in one of the nuclear reactor pipes, requiring the immediate shutting down of the reactor to prevent a potential reactor accident, an operation never before conducted on a British submarine at sea. Th e previous six days had been a difficult time for...