It’s easy to think of these boats, built in the Eighties, as expensive and outdated Cold War toys, but they are still perfectly designed for stealthy surveillance and potential attack. The only limit to its endurance is carrying enough food, which means 90 days. The boat can stay well over 1,000ft down and undetected for months, producing its own oxygen and drinking water from the sea. On board is an extraordinary, confined, calm and ordered world with its own rituals and routines and even its own language, ‘Jackspeak’. Live was given exclusive access to nuclear-powered submarine HMS Talent for five days during her latest seven-month deployment. Within minutes the whole crew are up and alert. Officer Of The Watch and the Lookout on the bridgeĪt 3.20am, there are three short, loud blasts of the ship’s siren. But working six hours on and six hours off, you soon learn to try to catch any moments of sleep whenever you can. The most common are that the beds above are collapsing and set to crush you, or that you have been buried alive as you turn expecting to open the curtain and instead your hand hits steel. The bunks are so cramped that submariners talk of ‘coffin dreams’. Many of the junior submariners still ‘hot bunk’ too, sharing with someone on an opposite shift. Most of the 125-man crew live crammed into three-tier bunk spaces, their only privacy a tiny green curtain they can pull across. The ‘bomb shop’ is an overflow sleeping space. There’s also only one washing machine and tumble dryer. Water is at a premium, and only the chefs and some crew from the engine room are allowed a shower every day. The air smells surprisingly fresh, although there are hints of oil, wet towels and stale feet. The only sounds are the whirring of the ventilation and snoring from young trainees who have just come off shift at 1am. Sonar operators track ships and submarines in the sound room they can tell just by the sound the class of vessel, and can sometimes even identify a particular ship All I can see, looking back past my feet, is a round steel door surrounded by illuminated dials and marked ‘Torpedo Tube 2’. They do at least provide comfort from the heat – my left leg is slumped over the aluminium capsule of the Tomahawk while my right arm hugs the cool torpedo. This is the weapons stowage compartment, or ‘bomb shop’, where I am trying to sleep alongside £20m-worth of live weapons. Nine inches above my nose is a steel rack, which holds in place four more 20ft-long missiles ready for loading, while just a few feet below me, beneath the submarine’s pressure hull and steel outer casing, is the Red Sea. Saturday is steak night if it was a roast lunch then pizza in the evening it’s Sunday. The only way to distinguish the days of the week is by remembering what you have eaten. There’s no way of knowing whether it’s night or day, or where, or how deep underwater you are. To the other is a no less menacing Spearfish heavyweight torpedo. To one side lies a Tomahawk land attack cruise missile. The only way into the 2ft-wide bunk is to commando-crawl headfirst into the darkness. The only limit to its endurance is carrying enough food, which means 90 days HMS Talent can stay well over 1,000ft down and undetected for months, producing its own oxygen and drinking water from the sea.