Whoops! Nuclear Collision...
- 17 February 2009 08:3915589Act one: scene one..clipped english only.
"I say Basil! whats that up ahead?"
"Well it looks like a shoal of herring captain"
"Herring Basil?"
"Yes herring Captain."
"It looks rather large to be herring Basil, Im thinking larger fish, perhaps Mackeral."
You could be right Sir..mackeral, yes mackeral"
With that a loud bang is heard.
"Oh bugger Basil youve hit a frog"
"But sir you told me it was mackeral.
"No I didnt Basil , it was you who distinctly said it was mackeral"
"well no sir I said...."
"Dont argue with your captain Basil"
Well no sir...but...(pause) you said it was mackeral(under breath)
Take a memo to the Prime Minister Basil...
Dear Prime Minister Brown
I know you are up to your eyewatering eyeballs with a load of bankers at the moment, but just to make your day complete, I must inform you that we have just hit a french nuclear submarine...and yes we are out in the middle of the vast atlantic..but there's more traffic out here than Sainsbury's carpark on a saturday afternoon. Yes its true between us we have more firepower than 1238 Hiroshima bombs. The good news is that we have not exploded! The bad news is that we have a ticking noise coming from the bomb deck!
email: dover7@msn.com - Terry Nunn
- Location: London Road, Dover
- Registered: 12 Mar 2008
- Posts: 4,302
17 February 2009 09:4315596To me it's really surpising that it hasn't happened before. Subs don't use sonar anymore, that ping is a dead give away. Instead they use microphones to listen for other subs. Problem is that the subs are ultra quiet, that's the whole point of stealth. They were both on an exercise and were presumably trying to find each other.
Go back a few years when there were scores of Russian subs in the Atlantic and the outcome may have been vastly different.
The real point is surely that the French announced it on a website and the MOD covered it up at first. Speaks volumes doesn't it?
TerryQuis custodiet ipsos custodes? - 17 February 2009 10:2115602It was inevitable that this would happen one day despite being a million to one shot.
These subs these days are necessarily quiet and in fact I understand that the only way to detect a Trafalgar sub moving at low speed is by looking for an absence of noise, what you might call a black hole in the sea. Not an easy task.
I also understand that American and British navies exchange information on patrolling routes for their subs to eliminate this problem while the Russian subs remain noisy enough to be detected. That just leave the French boomers as a possible problem. It has been suggested that the british and French navies should exchange patrol route information as well but I have always said we need the boomers because of the French and not the Russians so that would destroy the effectiveness of our deterant
- 17 February 2009 11:2615605Hard a starboard, no port, Oops! Luvvit! With so much traffic, its amazing it hasn't happened before, but it has, in the case of subs and trawlers, often will tragic consequences.
This could have been another MOD cover up, annoying that we found out about this from the French and not our own navy, we should by rights notify all allied navies if we are in the same area.
Note: Use indicators next time
- 17 February 2009 13:3915612What bang....oh that BANG !!!!!!!!If you knew what I know,we would both be in trouble!
- Brian Dixon
- Location: Dover
- Registered: 23 Sep 2008
- Posts: 23,940
17 February 2009 16:2915616a classic case of the navy lark. - 19 February 2009 03:0515671The chances of two submarines being at the same depth in the same place in the middle of the North Atlantic seem vanishingly small, even given the fact that ICBM submarines lurk in suitable underwater canyons which may reduce the odds to millions to one. Obviously employing active sonar would immediately show the location of the other submarine but would reveal the transmitting boats own position and defeat the object of the mission, to remain completely invisible.
The highly sophisticated passive sonar arrays can detect an aircraft carrier proceeding at speed on the surface a couple of hundred miles away but locating another submarine at depth in stealth mode is a different matter. The fact that neither of these appear to have detected one another is a testimony to all the advances in quiet running - gearing, propellers, anechoic tiles, anti-sonar equipment etc - or just possibly they were playing games.
Incidentally, there is no truth in the comment in the Sun that the French submarine surrendered after they felt the impact.
There is bound to have been much more to this than we have been told. The world of the submariner is esoteric and cloaked in secrecy. Throughout the Cold War and beyond, British and American submarines have been engaged in a deadly game of hunt and seek with their Soviet counterparts.
I remember reading an article in the old Nautical Magazine about the Hughes Glomar Explorer when she was constructed several decades ago purportedly to harvest manganese nodules from the seabed at enormous depths. It was a very long time before I discovered that this was only a cover for a clandestine CIA-funded mission to recover a sunken Soviet nuclear submarine from the floor of the Pacific. The Americans knew her position from their seabed underwater listening arrays but the Russians were in the dark. The wreck broke in half on the way up but they still recovered a lot of useful stuff.
Similarly, I was enthralled when Dr Robert Ballard located and photographed the wreck of the Titanic. It was only much later, when the information was declassified, that he revealed that he had been funded by the US Navy but only on condition that he first located and recorded the wrecks of the two USN nuclear submarines which had sunk in the North Atlantic, USS Thresher and USS Scorpion.