In today’s newspaper, the celebrated columnist Peter Hitchens was looking nostalgically to the certainties of the Cold War years.
He inferred that, with the well-understood strategy of mutually assured destruction, and before the proliferation of nuclear weapons, you could sleep more easily in your bed at night.
My particular memory of those times is of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when we were berthed in an Australian port and almost ready to sail, fully laden for the UK, and home.
The news appeared darker each day and the master was getting more worried, muttering about his “sealed orders,” which would dictate the conduct of the ship in the event of hostilities. We smiled politely at the crew of a Soviet freighter berthed astern of us, who smiled politely at us.
A couple of us had, some months earlier, attended a defence course in London aboard an old ship in the Thames and wished we had listened more closely. All we recalled was the importance of sealing up all the openings with strips of brown paper and glue, which seemed to have limited utility in the event of Armageddon.
Our crew was increasingly restive, with talk about refusing to sail, and staying safely down under until the dust had settled. The master was anxious to quash this defeatism and we duly departed, to the accompaniment of the better news about the Soviet missile carriers having reversed their course. Normality returned to the Cold War.
“Certainty” was not entirely a description I would recognise of those times, but with all that is going on in the world today, its opposite stalks the lives of too many of those at sea whose course takes them into hazardous waters, on account of the numerous conflicts spilling across important maritime trade routes.
This is no notional or imaginary concern; practically every day there are reports of ships being hit by drones, missiles and mines around the Strait of Hormuz, the Gulf of Oman, and within the Arabian Gulf. Seafarers are being killed and injured in these attacks, ships damaged and sunk, too often not even producing the briefest report in mainstream media.
In short, attacks on merchant shipping, in Middle Eastern waters and also in the Black Sea, have become “normalised” and just a routine strategy for those in their drone bunkers, or with itchy trigger fingers on the launch buttons of Hellfire missiles.
Even more uncertainty now attaches to a Red Sea passage, sowing doubts in the minds of anyone bound north or south through the Suez, with the Houthi conflict threatening to spill over from the fighting on land around Bab el Mandeb.
If the reaction of the Iranians, after the US Israeli attacks earlier in the year, was to fire missiles indiscriminately at all their near neighbours, and to close Hormuz, why would hard-pressed Houthis not replicate this in the Red Sea?
And while few would suggest that there is any great strategist in their ranks, they have, with their Iranian armaments, proved to be a force to be reckoned with in their battles with the Kingdom. The lives of seafarers, as the Iranians have so clearly demonstrated, are not regarded as especially valuable in these regions.
And if there are more places where well-armed people feel quite prepared to kill and injure seafarers in pursuit of their aims, there are a growing number of regions where state actors, criminals and various hackers are trying to wreck their ships.
There are regular and explicit warnings about electronic disruption of all kinds, with jamming and spoofing now so prevalent in many areas that this too has become normalised, requiring a fall-back to traditional navigation methods.
Who recalls the well-publicised demonstration some years ago where a large motor yacht was brought under the control of an operator some distance away, changing its speed and course? It was inevitable that the bad guys would latch onto this technology and there have even been recent reports of whole ship systems being effectively “captured” by unidentified hostile agencies, requiring external assistance.
With navigation and propulsion systems seemingly so vulnerable, and too many people prepared to do seafarers harm in the periphery of today’s hostilities, the certainty of a safe and uneventful voyage is in short supply.
