Last updated 11:01, Thursday, 03 April 2008

Dick Raaz talks about his life as a submarine commander, helping a Hollywood blockbuster - and how he wants to help West Cumbria

• View more pictures...

classic connery: The poster for The Hunt for Red October

THE jovial but hard-edged American in charge of the nation’s radioactive waste repository at Drigg is used to running a tight nuclear ship – but not always on dry land.

Richard D. Raaz has spent much of his working life below the waves as commander of a United States Navy’s nuclear power attack launch submarine with its missiles trained on the Soviets.

The “cold war” for Captain Raaz, one of the US Navy’s high ranking officers in the Pacific Fleet, was a daily reality.

But Raaz has another claim to fame for playing a major role behind the scenes in the making of a Hollywood blockbuster film, The Hunt for Red October, in the late 1980s.

It not only captured the tension between the world’s two superpowers but also brought to life the secret and silent world of preparing for potential nuclear warfare.

Raaz rubbed shoulders with the movie’s biggest star Sean Connery and other famous actors such as Alec Baldwin, Scott Glenn and Sam Neill, but his main job was to provide the warfare hardware: nuclear submarines, frigates, helicopters and (last but not least) the sailors. Reality was the name of the game as Paramount Pictures splashed out $30 million to turn Tom Clancy’s first best-seller into an international hit.

Director John McTiernan was already famous for Die Hard and Predator.

Virtually all the sea action was filmed off San Diego, home to many of the Pacific Fleet’s nuclear submarines and where Richard Raaz’s regular job at that time was to command the United States’ submarine training facility on Point Loma.

His Hollywood role was to co-operate with Paramount Pictures as Navy coordinator in the film’s production to make sure that The Hunt for Red October was as realistic and as accurate as possible without divulging military secrets. It worked both ways and, although the Cold War is over, the movie is still popular today.

Captain Raaz was appointed MC for the film’s world premiere in San Diego in March 1990 – a special Navy screening for all those who took part.

Sean Connery could not attend but Alec Baldwin who played Jack Ryan, the daring CIA agent, was present.

Talking to The Whitehaven News this week, Dick disclosed that Connery wasn’t originally lined up to play the part of Marko Alexandriovich Ramius, the captain of Red October, the Russian submarine on which he was attempting to defect to the West by faking a nuclear accident on board.

The role was to have been filled by a German film star: Klaus-Maria Brandauer.

Recalls Raaz: “Klaus had been booked in for several months during the pre-planning I had been involved in – as far as we were aware he was going to play Ramius. Suddenly, right near the end just before they started filming, we heard Sean Connery was coming in. Everybody was excited about being in the movie to start with but when Sean arrived it all went crazy and the media went instantly into overdrive.

“It emerged later that while Klaus had been chosen for the role he needed 14 days free to finish another film but there obviously wasn’t time to hold back the shooting, so that’s why the man who played James Bond came in.

“The director suggested Sean Connery, but the producer (Mace Neufeld) didn’t seem too overjoyed. ‘Are you crazy? He’s Scottish, no one will ever take him for a Russian,’ he said.

“Alec Baldwin himself was a pretty big draw in America, but Connery of course was already international box office. From where I was sitting that might have been part of the reason for him being brought in at the very last minute. It was none of my business but certainly his presence made it even more exciting.

“On the first night of filming we were sitting in those classic canvas-back directors’ chairs when my daughter was asked whether she had ever met Alec Baldwin. Then she was whooshed through and shook his hand.

“Sean’s participation was swift: he had 40 days in which to do his scenes and he was good, he was a very nice guy and very professional, as they all were, but Sean was one of the few who didn’t have to go out to sea.

“I was impressed about how seriously they all took their work.

“Submariners spend a lot of time at sea so we were all kinda movie buffs but we had no idea how much effort went into making a movie of this scale. When I went up to Hollywood to look at the sets I was flabbergasted by how real everything looked.”

Dick gave Paramount full marks for a dry dock construction and a mock up of Red October which was modelled on a 500-ft long Soviet Typhoon-class ballistic missile submarine.

At the film’s premiere, Captain Richard Raaz, master of ceremonies, told the glittering gathering: ‘Tom Clancy’s best-selling novel is hailed as the first seagoing yarn to bring to the general public a true taste of the high-tech, cloaked-in-secrecy world of the fast attack nuclear submarine. In the film the crew of the USS Dallas is faced with a situation where they and indeed every US submarine must be able to engage and win. Despite the Star Wars nature of the equipment and hardware it is the men who are the heroes of this story, and that is consistent with the real world where our submarine crews routinely face stresses and demands equal to those dramatised in this film.’

“What a night,” said Dick. “Hunt for Red October was a very exciting time. I had never been involved in anything like that.”

Nevertheless he had first-hand experience of the Cold War? – “Yeah, but the scenes and dialogue in Red October were very real.

“I commanded a US submarine with the mission to keep those missiles ready for launch if called upon, a fast attack submarine like the USS Dallas in the film.”

So he was preparing for the day nobody wanted to happen? – “It’s hard to think about it, but those sailors on our subs did have to live with that thought all day, every day. When they are out there on patrol, we exercised them routinely to monitor performance and ensure they were going to perform.

“When you start the exercises nobody knew whether it was real or not, you don’t know until you get further into breaking the messages and the codes. We didn’t want them to know. The weapons systems were put in to exercise the countdown and see if the crew can perform most of the tasks – fortunately not all.

“Most of it was needed for a tactical launch. After the patrols the tapes and records were handed over to the bosses to go through and make sure the navigation and weapons systems were ready as advertised.”

What were the chances of a mistake, missiles being launched? – “Extremely unlikely, extremely, because of the safeguards built into the systems and the crews trained to unbelievably high standards.

“It was difficult to find a way to escape the pressure, there was no way to say ‘time out’ so you lived under stress. If you couldn’t cut it, then you were gone.”

Any scary moments when he thought he was going to have to make a launch? – “Not really, but over the years there were some very tense moments between us and the Soviets. We called these defence conditions, cancelling leave and that kind of thing and increasing your readiness to respond.

“The old tension levels start climbing when that happens.”

Based on the success of Hunt for Red October, Dick later became a big on-screen character in an American mini-series for the Discovery channel called Sharks of Steel – playing himself as a nuclear missile sub launch commander.

Dick quit the US Navy when he was 50 for another nuclear field, this time on dry land, which eventually took him from US clean-up sites to the New Mexico desert where he managed WIPP – the waste isolation pilot plant – for Washington, the only licensed underground repository for intermediate level waste in the United States.

So how did he get from New Mexico to Whitehaven? – “Well, it’s like this: Our president, Preston Rahe, developed a habit of calling me in whenever he had a tough assignment, but this time instead of his very formal introduction Preston said: ‘Hey babes, when was the last time you were in the UK?’ I took this to mean something exciting was happening and I had to go. I was like a kid I just couldn’t wait to get up there to Cumbria.

“Washington and its partners were in the early stages of putting in its tender proposals to the NDA for taking over the running of the low-level waste repository at Drigg and I am happy to say now that it was a winning proposal.”

From this week the Drigg site has come under the control of the Washington-led Nuclear Waste Management Ltd consortium for which Richard Raaz is the boss (or, in American terms, the ramrod).

He says: “Everybody up here has been very gracious and friendly and for us it’s all about community trust.

“There’s lot of benefits from a programme like ours. We hope to play a big role in the community, are not coming here with a bagful of tricks to solve all the problems but we have a lot of experience; it’s going to take years of hard work but we are ready and know we can’t do this without the support of the community.

“I love community involvement and as we are very dependent on community support for success, you must get out and work with local citizens and organisations.

“I’m already being asked: ‘How important is safety?’ It is No1 priority – you can’t waste time recovering from foolishness, you have to demonstrate that you are extremely safe and not put people in harm’s way.

“There are a number of things we intend to do for the community. The simplest is to contribute to worthy causes (that’s cash usually) and done in an efficient way so you get maximum benefit for West Cumbria.

“Part of it will be making some of our contract workforce available for community efforts on a limited basis like we did in New Mexico where the US Department of Energy also thought it was a good thing using specialist skills. It would be wonderful to help out on things like that up here. At the same time we think we can capture some of the lessons learned in the US which can save the British taxpayer a considerable amount of money.

“But I repeat we can’t do this without co-operating with the community, they just won’t tolerate it otherwise – we are not in a war.”