ES Lifestyle newsletter The latest lifestyle, fashion and travel trends Enter your email address Continue Please enter an email address Email address is invalid Fill out this field Email address is invalid You already have an account. Please log in Register with your social account or click here to log in I would like to receive trends and interviews from fashion, lifestyle to travel every week, by email Update newsletter preferences

In the next few weeks or months — and the odds are now it will be before Christmas — Parliament is to debate the renewal of the UK’s Trident submarine nuclear missile system. It’s a hot potato politically, not only because of the cost, initially £20 billion, but in all some £100 billion over 50 years according to Greenpeace, but because of where Britain stands in the world, with its allies and potential foes.

Aside from the politics the technology is bewildering: new submarines and missiles, guidance systems and command infrastructure, all wrapped in hardware more complex than that used in America’s Moon shots. Then there are men who currently crew the Submarine Service for the Royal Navy, who in the near future will be joined by women.

This new book, by veteran Cold War theologian and analyst Peter Hennessy and his research colleague James Jinks, must be the ultimate trainspotter’s guide to how Britain’s submarines and submariners work — and have done so since 1945. They write with the enthusiasm of addicts. Their pages are a cluster-bomb attack of acronyms, types and classes of boats and weapons, pennant numbers, the slang of the mess deck and the torpedo tube locker.

If you want to take Britain and her submarines since 1945 as your Mastermind special subject, this is your book. Submariners are an elite within the Royal Navy, rather as fast-jet pilots are in the RAF. Submarines today are used for surveillance and intelligence tracking, and launching teams of the Special Boat Service. Much of their time since 1945 has been spent chasing and evading Russian submarines, whose own marauding is now reaching new intensity.

The submarine commander’s training through the seven-month “Perisher” course is among the most demanding in the world. But with the recent reduction in Navy numbers there is now concern over maintaining standards — there is a shortage of engineers across all the services, aggravated by the cuts of the Cameron defence review of 2010. Some of this will be alleviated by allowing women to serve in submarines — despite previous fears about nuclear radiation causing infertility.

In 1982 the Navy’s submarines were suddenly pitched into a hot war in the Falklands. This books gives one of the most lucid accounts of the saga, from landing covert SBS patrols to how and why HMS Conqueror came to sink the cruiser Belgrano with the loss of 323 Argentine lives.

For all the barnacle-like festoons of jargon, acronyms and numbers, the book is radiated by Hennessy’s characteristic verve and wit. It is beautifully produced, with copious pictures, diagrams and cutaway drawings reminiscent of the Eagle comic of Hennessy’s (and my) youth.

The persistent theme that runs deep, and never quite silent, is Trident: its use, value and efficacy as Britain’s deterrent of choice. Both authors are convinced of the case for renewal. It must be approved soon for the first new submarine with a new version of Trident to be fully operational in 2032. The new system is needed because of the constant competition from rivals and their improvements in nuclear weaponry — with Russia, China, India and Iran heading the authors’ list. Little attention is given to the use of nuclear weaponry by wild-card elements, such as North Korea, and non-state powers such as al Qaeda and IS, who have shown an interest in all kinds of new “non-conventional and non-obvious” weapons including hybrid nuclear — dirty bombs — biological, chemical and maybe agents of genetic alteration.

How far would Britain’s possession of strategic nuclear weapons be a deterrent to these agencies with their gospel of global war and destruction, including their own? Some of these wilder shores of real possibility are not covered. Even so, there is so much in this bizarrely entertaining book to make one really stop and think.