A Deep-Diving Sub. A Deadly Fire. And Russia's Secret Undersea Agenda.

[Zorro]

Few want to talk about how 14 sailors met their deaths on a Russian engineering marvel. Fewer still want to talk about what they were doing off Norway’s waters.

There could hardly have been a more terrifying place to fight a fire than in the belly of the Losharik, a mysterious deep-diving Russian submarine.

Something, it appears, had gone terribly wrong in the battery compartment as the sub made its way through Russian waters 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle on the First of July.

A fire on any submarine may be a mariner’s worst nightmare, but a fire on the Losharik was a threat of another order altogether. The vessel is able to dive far deeper than almost any other sub, but the feats of engineering that allow it do so may have helped seal the fate of the 14 sailors killed in the disaster.

The only thing more mysterious than what exactly went wrong that day is what the sub was doing in a thousand feet of water just 60 nautical miles east of Norway in the first place.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/20/world/europe/russian-submarine-fire-losharik.html

[SheltieLover]

1. K&R!

[marble falls]

2. US technology leaves the Russians in the dust. This sort of thing could happen to us, too.

[3Hotdogs]

5. I believe the sub was The Thresher and it was ours and was lost.

[marble falls]

6. Thresher, Cochino, Stickleback, Scorpion ...

Thresher and Scorpion were in the 60's and were Nuclear. There is some belief they both suffered seawater leaks into the reactors and they shut down and without power they dove past crush depth and imploded. Not enough power to blow main balast and emergency surface.

Ex-bubble head here. I remember learning about it. Reaction times at the bottom of design depths is literally seconds.

Thresher was in '63 and Scorpion in '68. It was pretty recent stuff when I was in Submarine "A" School at New London in 72. Both were fast attacks, I was on a boomer. They scrapped my ride in '84.

No one was lost on Stickleback. One civilian and four or five sailors were lost on Cochino.


The Russians have lost quite a few. You want to read an interesting story look up the Glo-Mar Explorer. The CIA leased it (actually contracted Howard Hughes to build it) and attempted and partially succeeded in raising a Russian Nuclear Missile sum near the Marianas Trench in '73-'74. Almost got he whole thing but the half behind the conning tower (with the reacter) fell back into the sea and we got the front half with Russian sailors. I think we buried them back at sea and sent footage to Russia.

[3Hotdogs]

7. My mom worked in a small electronics shop in Summit. N.J.

She assembled a small part that went into the Nautilus.

[marble falls]

8. That's cool! Start of the nuclear Navy stuff.

[dalton99a]

3. Kick

To understand why these men may have found themselves on a submarine that can dive to perhaps 20,000 feet — more than 10 times deeper than manned American subs are believed to operate — consider what crisscrosses the floor of the North Atlantic: endless miles of fiber-optic cables that carry a large fraction of the world’s internet traffic, including trillions of dollars in financial transactions. There are also cables linking the sonar listening devices that litter the ocean floor.

Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, and his commanders have increasingly stressed the importance of controlling the flow of information to keep the upper hand in a conflict, said Katarzyna Zysk, head of the Center for Security Policy at the Norwegian Institute for Defense Studies in Oslo.

No matter where in the world a conflict might be brewing, cutting those undersea cables, Professor Zysk said, might force an adversary to think twice before risking an escalation of the dispute.

“The Russian understanding is that the level of unacceptable damage is much lower in Europe and the West than during the Cold War,” she said. “So you might not have to do too much.”

Russian generals, for example, speak openly of sowing chaos in the government financial system of an adversary, Professor Zysk said, and disrupting seabed cables “would certainly fit into the objective.”

[Haggis for Breakfast]

4. In 2015, the NYT published an article

about precisely this kind of Russian Naval activity in the vicinity of trans-atlantic cables near the Arctic. It was unnerving to say the least.

If the Russians ever attempt to sabotage these networks of communication, it will be considered by NATO and especially the US as an act of war.