![]() If that hatch had been hit or damaged-it’s about 2’6” in diameter-if that had been ruptured, then the fore ends would have shipped water which would have made the boat very heavy. ![]() “That tear started about three inches from the forward escape hatch. Upon finally surfacing, the British submariners discovered the horrifying extent of the damage, as Cundell described: Emergency bulkheads were sealed as the wounded submarine fled the scene, believing itself to be pursued by a Soviet submarine for two days.Ĭhief Petty Officer Michael Cundell recounted in The Silent Deep, “We just made a sharp exit and escaped under the ice without a trace.” Normally, such damage would have triggered an automatic shutdown of the submarine’s reactor, but Sceptre’s captain engaged a ‘battle short’-a manual override of the safety system for emergencies-to keep his 5,500-ton submarine under control. It was probably on a couple of seconds or so. That noise lasted for what seemed like a lifetime. “It started very far forward, sort of at the tip of the submarine, and it trailed back. In The Silent Deep, by James Jinks and Peter Hennesy, one officer recalled: One of the Soviet submarine’s five-bladed propellers chewed into the front hull casing of the Sceptre, tearing a 23-foot long chunk off its bow and ripping off the front of its conning tower. The British submarine continued cruising ahead when its bow smashed into K-211’s tail from below. That May, the Sceptre had been trailing K-211 for some time using her Type 2001 sonar, which had an underwater detection range twenty-five to thirty miles or six to seventeen miles while moving fast, when it abruptly lost its sonar contact-around when K-211 shifted its position to clear its baffles. All but the lead ship used a shrouded pump-jet propulsor instead of a conventional propeller for quieter running, and had their internal mechanisms isolated with rubber to further decrease acoustic signature. The Swiftsures were shorter at 83 meters and broader than the UK’s first-generation Churchill-class SSNs, and boasted retractable diving fins on their bows instead of on their conning towers. Sceptre, or SS-104, was the fourth of six Swiftsure-class nuclear-powered attack submarines launched by Vickers in the 1970s. Only a decade later in September 1991, the Sceptre’s former weapons officer David Forghan described very different circumstances for the accident when interviewed on the television program This Week. The Soviet commission might have been highly interested in British press reports later that year that the Royal Navy’s hunter-killer submarine Sceptre had returned to base in Devonport with damage from a collision from a “detached glacier.” Mindful of this threat, at half past seven that evening K-211’s commander halted his sub and pivoted it around so that its MGK-400 Rubikon bow sonar array could attempt to pick up any submarines sneaking behind it in the ‘blind spot’ of its wake-a maneuver known as “clearing the baffles.” However, the SSBN’s hydrophones did not report any contact. The quieter SSNs also awaited only a signal of war, an event in which they would attempt to torpedo the Soviet subs before they could unleash their city-destroying weapons. K-211’s mission was hair-raisingly straightforward: to cruise undetected for weeks or months at a time, awaiting only the signal that a nuclear war had broken out to unleash its apocalyptic payload from underwater on Western cities and military bases up to four thousand miles away.īritish and American nuclear-power attack submarines (SSNs), or “hunter-killers,” were routinely dispatched to detect Soviet ballistic missiles subs (SSBNs) leaving from base to discreetly stalk them. ![]() ![]() The huge 155-meter-long Delta III (or Kalmar)-class submarine was distinguished by the large boxy compartment on its spine, which accommodated the towering launch tubes for sixteen R-29R ballistic missiles, each carrying three independent nuclear warheads. On the Soviet submarine K-211 Petropavlovsk cruised quietly at nine knots, one hundred and fifty feet below the surface of the Arctic Barents Sea.
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