For the most port, nations armed with nuclear weapons have tried to make those weapons as secure as possible. However, sometimes they fail. I have blogged in the past about some accidents involving nuclear weapons that were suffered by the U.S. Today, I am going to blog about an accident that happened to the Soviet Union in the early days of nuclear submarines.
The Soviet Union began working on nuclear attack submarines in the 1960s. The November (Type 627) class were their first effort. Thirteen November class submarines were built. They displaced about four thousand seven hundred and fifty tons when fully submerged and could carry twenty torpedoes. They could reach a maximum speed of thirty knots which is equivalent to about thirty-five miles per hour. They resembled the design of earlier diesel-powered submarines but were even noisier than the old diesel submarines.
The November class submarines were originally designed to carry a massive nuclear torpedo called the T-15 for use in attacks on NATO naval bases. The torpedo was so big that each submarine could only carry one. Ultimately, it turned out that the U.S. developed sophisticated detection systems that the noisy November class submarines could not be used for their intended purpose.
The Soviets rearmed the November class submarines with nuclear torpedoes with smaller warheads that allowed the November submarines to carry more than one each. The November class was reassigned to more conventional anti-ship attack duties. The November class could have threatened convoys of ships and sunk many, but they would have been destroyed by surviving escort ships. The Soviets never really considered them as effective for hunting enemy submarines because they were so noisy, and they had inadequate sonar systems.
The third November class submarine constructed was referred to as K-8. On one of her first missions in the Barents Sea, there was a problem with the coolant system that could have caused a meltdown of the two reactors. The crew managed to rig an emergency cooling system which saved the sub. Some of the crew members were exposed to dangerous amounts of radiation from leaks of radioactive gas. The crew managed to save the submarine and it limped back to port for repairs.
In spring of 1970, K-8 was involved in a massive Soviet military exercise called Okean 70. One purpose of the exercise was to demonstrate the reach of the Soviet Navy to the rest of the world. They also wanted to work on coordinating navel maneuvers far from the Soviet Union. Okean 70 was one of the biggest navel exercises that the Soviet Union ever held. About two hundred Soviet Navy ships participated from the Northern, Baltic, Black Sea and Pacific fleets. K-8, carrying four nuclear-tipped torpedoes, was part of the forty submarines from the Northern fleet in the war game.
On April 8, there were two fires aboard K-8 that shut down both reactors. The submarine surfaced and the captain gave the order to abandon ship. Eight crew members were trapped and died. A Soviet repair ship came to the aid of the K-8 and began towing it back to port. The weather was rough and most of the crew went back aboard the K-8 and tried to save it. There was no opportunity to recover the four nuclear torpedoes.
The combination of power loss aboard the K-8 and the high seas caused by the rough weather turned out to be too much. On April 12, K-8 sank and took forty crew members with it to the bottom of the Bay of Biscay north of Spain, about fifteen thousand feed deep. The location made any attempt to recover the torpedoes impossible.
The Soviet Navy probably learned valuable lessons about the construction and deployment of nuclear submarines, but it also learned about the cost in lives that failure could mean. The K-8 and her nuclear torpedoes remain at the bottom of the Bay of Biscay to this day.
K-3, another November class Soviet submarine:
