Combat history Both
Splendid and
Spartan were ordered to sail south for the
Falkland Islands two days before the
Argentine invasion of the islands on 30 March 1982.
Spartan was the first boat to arrive in the islands and began to enforce a
maritime exclusion zone imposed by the British. Shortly after,
Spartan sighted Argentine merchant shipping mining the harbour at
Stanley, but was not ordered to attack. This was partly due to British concerns about escalating the war too early, but also to avoid scaring off more valuable targets such as the Argentine
aircraft carrier . Unlike , neither
Spartan nor
Splendid fired in anger during the
Falklands War, but they did provide valuable reconnaissance to the British Task Force on Argentine aircraft movements and the submarines' presence effectively restricted the freedom of action of the
Argentine Navy which spent most of the war confined to port. In the late 1990s,
Splendid became the first British vessel to be armed with American-built
Tomahawk cruise missiles. In 1999 the
BBC was allowed on board the boat to record her firing Tomahawks in battle against
Yugoslav targets in
Belgrade during the
Kosovo War, becoming the first British submarine in the conflict to do so. She again fired these weapons against Iraqi targets in the
2003 invasion of Iraq.
Incidents In the early 1980s
Sceptre collided with a
Soviet submarine and her reactor's protection systems would have performed an automatic emergency shutdown (scrammed the reactor), but her captain ordered the safety mechanisms overridden (
battleshort enabled). The crew were told to say that they had hit an iceberg. This incident was disclosed when David Forghan,
Sceptres former weapons officer, gave a television interview which was broadcast on 19 September 1991. The Soviet submarine involved was probably
K-211 Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky of the
Delta III class, which on 23 May 1981 collided with an unknown submarine, identified at the time as an unknown American .
Sovereign underwent an extensive refit in the mid-1990s and was rededicated in January 1997. Cracks were discovered in the tailshaft during post-refit
sea trials and she was sent to
Rosyth for 14 weeks of emergency repairs in June 1998 before returning to
Faslane. On 6 March 2000
Sceptre suffered a serious accident while inside a drydock at the
Rosyth yards while undergoing trials towards the end of a major refit. The test involved flooding the drydock, and running the main engines slowly with steam supplied from the shore. However, too much steam was used and the engines over-sped.
Sceptre broke her moorings and moved forward off the cradle she rested on. The steam line ruptured, scaffolding buckled, a crane was pushed forward some , and the submarine moved forward some inside the dock. On 26 May 2008,
Superb hit an underwater pinnacle in the
Red Sea, south of the
Suez Canal. She remained watertight, and none of the 112 crew were injured; however, she was unable to resubmerge due to damage to her sonar. After undertaking initial repairs at the
Souda Bay NATO base on
Crete on 10 June 2008, she passed through the
Mediterranean, with a pause (at night) some miles off
Gibraltar to disembark some less critical crew.
Superb then continued back to the UK, arriving at
HMNB Devonport on 28 June 2008. After surveying the damage, the Royal Navy decided to decommission
Superb slightly ahead of schedule on 26 September 2008. ==In fiction==