At 3.00am on Friday (20th February) HMS Vanguard was moved, under cover of darkness, from the explosive-handling pierhead at Coulport on Loch Long into the nearby naval base at Faslane on the Gare Loch. The entire operation is thought to have taken around seven hours.

Vanguard was filmed by peace activitists as she came into the submarine base at Faslane with a heavy escort convoy of tugs, Royal Marine inflatables, Military Police boats and overhead helicopters.

The British nuclear submarine, carrying armed Trident missiles at the time, was involved in the now notorious collision on 3rd February with an equally armed French Navy nuclear submarine, Le Triomphant ,somewhere in the Atlantic. She was seen but not photographed coming into the Clyde on 14th February to unload her missiles at Coulport – and described then as bearing clear visual evidence of hull damage in dents and scrapes.

The ships’s move into Faslane in the hours of darkness is likely to be interpreted as an attempt by the MOD to disguise from the public the extent of the damage she has suffered.

For Argyll has already compared the widely varying return times to port of the two submarine’s involved and asked if this disparity can be interpreted by anyone as other than evidence that Vanguagrd was badly damaged and had to come home at very low speeds. She took over ten days to get back to Coulport from wherever the collssion occurred. Le Triomphant took three days to get back to her home port of Ile Longue near Brest in Britany.

So far, although our reports have received heavy viewing traffic, no one has come up with any other intrerpetation. It is hard to identify a possible location for the collision which would allow two relatively undamaged submarines, travellling at approximately the same speeds to return to these two ports in their respective known times.

All that the MOD has said of Vanguard’s post-collision condition is that the incident created ‘no compromise to nuclear safety’.