Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
carry the US/UK Poseidon missiles with their Multiple Independent Re-entry Vehicle
warheads (how nice to find something that claims to be Independent that actually is).
It's a big place full of impressive buildings. There's one colossal shed that can house
an entire mega-sub, and then raise the whole 30,000-tonne bulk of the thing right out of
the water. So, massive, Thunderbirds-worthy machinery, entirely worth the ten billion of
hard-earned taxeroos that went into the whole system. The base is full of helpful people,
too; we'd limped in with a flat tyre on the Drambuie 911 after some arguably over-op-
timistic road-bagging on some very small and badly maintained roads in the hills not far
away, and the guys from the base Engineering section helped me change the wheel (for
one of those horrible space saver tyres - we had to crawl back to Fife at 50. I almost fell
asleep).
Meanwhile the guys in the Officers' Mess were, Ann reported, to a man unfailingly
courteous, pleasant and witty. She loved the way they called Katrine 'Ma'am', too.
Tyre changed, we had lunch with the base commander, another deeply professional
and quietly impressive guy, with a good line in deprecating, humanisingly funny stories
about the base, like how the government gave him more money per head to feed the guard
dogs than the men, and how some bored MoD police, sent out to a distant part of the site
to make sure traffic was sticking to the base speed limit, had turned their radar gun on a
guy out running, and put him on a charge for exceeding said speed limit (if I recall cor-
rectly, he was let off and they were reprimanded for wasting a superior's time).
We had a good lunch in stimulating company and as we left to make our slow way
home, past the peace people's caravans outside the gates, I remember thinking that, given
the fact that we had these weapons of mass destruction, and the whole Poseidon missile
and sub system to house, deploy and launch them, the men and women we'd met on the
base were exactly the sort of responsible, sensible, well-trained, eminently sane and thor-
oughly capable people I'd want to be in charge of them.
The point - for crying out bleedin loud - is that we shouldn't have the damn things in
the first place. They're a moral obscenity, and it's only one of their less poisonous con-
sequences that all these smart, capable people devote their undoubted talent, sometimes
their entire careers, to maintaining such horrors in preparation for a day they too hope
will never come. I have enormous respect for these people, but, frankly, when I hear some
bunch of bag-arsed feminist nutters have thrown a load of equipment off a Navy barge,
or taken hammers to the nose cones of fighter bombers on an airbase, they're the ones I
truly admire.
I suppose my dad would say they were pissing into the wind, too. But that's not the
point.
The ugliness that is the whole McNuke Statelet takes a long time to go; there are further
jetties up Loch Long, fuel tanks for conventional ships dotting the hillsides below the
