(Russian fast attack submarine in the Barents Sea. Photo Provda online.)
I know I have at least two people that read this drivel, since they wrote to ask whether I had got tired of assaulting the sensitivities of my friends and fellow travelers.
In my defense, yesterday was the day from hell. I had to be at the bank before eight to get a fat check to re-finance the farm, then the maids showed up early and I had to find a place to go offload the morning coffee, then I had to go and get beat to crap by Christina-the-Dominatrix and Torturer at Physical Therapy, then back to do office stuff and then close on the re-financing. In the midst of all that, I saw something that made me sit right up.
I have told you that I missed the old Soviet Threat. It was a reliable and comfortable old shambling bear, and the rules, learned by hard experience over decades, made things fairly comfortable.
Oh, that is not to say that we didn’t almost cross the line to mass annihilation once in a while. I can think of twice that people talk about, and another couple that happened deep under water where only a few were ever aware of some tactical events with strategic significance.
(Hero Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov. Photo Wikipedia)
The Cuban thing really did have potential. A Soviet naval officer named Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov saved the world, as we know it, one humid Caribbean day during the Missile Crisis. He was aboard the FOXTROT-class diesel submarine B-59 that was depth-charged by an aggressive task group of US Navy destroyers in an attempt to force the boat to the surface for identification.
You can understand the concern on the part of the Russians, since a depth-charge is an aggressive sort of signal, and not readily amenable to nuance. There was an argument between the three officers empowered to launch the nuclear torpedo in the lower tubes. They were authorized to fire the nuke if they agreed unanimously. Only Vasili demurred, and thus saved the world.
Another hero of World Peace is alcoholic first president of the Russian Federation, loveable Boris Yeltsin. You may (or may not) remember the day we all almost got incinerated or the launch of a Norwegian weather rocket.
That may not qualify specifically as a Cold War thing, but so are some other unsettling things going on.
Gone but not forgotten, you might say. Back in 1995, a team of US and Norwegian scientists were launching a Black Brant XII sounding rocket our of the Andoya Rocket Range on the northwest coast of string-bean shaped nation. They intended to study the phenomenon of the Northern Lights, and the best profile to do that was a lofted trajectory to the north.
Oops. The team published a NOTAM- notice to Airmen and Mariners- and the Russians received it, but did not pass it down to their ballistic missile crews. When the launch happened, the trajectory traveled through an air corridor that includes the Minuteman-III sites in North Dakota. The weather rocket was headed toward apogee at 900 miles above the earth as the Russian detection system flashed a warning that did not include the ambiguity of which direction the rocket was headed. Russian Strategic Rocket Forces went to full alert- and remember, time of-flight for a Trident Missile sub-launched missile or a Minuteman is about ten minutes to Russian soil.
By the time the armed nuclear-command-and-control football got to President Yeltsin- first time that happened in either Super Power, there were only about two minutes left to decide whether to pour a stiff vodka or end civilization, or both.
(Black Brant II rocket. Photo Wikipedia.)
I don’t know whether he got a drink or not, but Mr. Yeltsin’s indecision through the projected time of impact allowed us all to survive, and thus he enters into my pantheon of heroes.
All that seems a long way away, but apparently it is not as far as it seems. Submarines are strange and wondrous things. Since the height of the Cold War, the Russian sub-surface force has had its casualties. There is still some muttering about the loss of the big OSCAR-II cruise missile boat K-141 Kursk, and whether or not there were British or USN units in the Barents Sea at the time the boat was lost with all hands.
I am comfortable that the Kursk disaster was caused by a hyper-speed torpedo cooking off in a forward tube and detonating, but blaming others is a classic way to avoid responsibility for your own mistakes. Just last month a DELTA-IV ballistic missile boat caught fire in dry dock, and it took a day to extinguish. There is some uncertainty about whether or not she still had her missiles on board.
I am not bashing my former adversary here, at least not exclusively. The US Navy just announced a $400 million dollar fire on the LA-Class USS Miami was caused by a shipyard worker being treated for anxiety, and who wished to go home early.
I used to be in the submarine hunting business, looking for Soviet boats lurking below the waters of the vast Pacific Ocean. Accordingly, Robert Tilford’s recent piece in The Examiner caught my eye with some information I found quite astonishing. He outlined the news in this copyrighted story.
In more succinct terms, Russian Navy chief Vladimir Vysotsky announced that his forces would begin to patrol the world ocean again this month in response to the American threat to world peace.
It is an interesting proposition, and the number of things patently absurd in the story are legion. For example, Ballistic Missile Submarines- Boomers- operate best when they are protected by geography and waters contiguous to their bases. The missiles the carry are designed to be fired from these “strategic bastions” with the boats immune from prosecution. It makes little sense to place them off the coasts of the United States, closer to the attack submarines of the adversary.
I will likewise be interested to see if there is a spike in tattle-tale operations by Russian fast-attack boats. That would be an interesting development.
I do vividly recall the deliberate decision by the Soviet leadership to burn up the reactor cores of the Soviet YANKEE and DELTA force in the days of “analogous response” to the Reagan-era decision to place medium-range missiles in Europe. It drove the Soviets nuts, since it so radically reduced warning times of an attack that the very doctrine of deterrence was in jeopardy, which would, in the theory of the time, be destabilizing.
I don’t know about that, but it certainly was scary.
One of those adrenaline-charged days in the early 1980s, we were looking at some information that possibly indicated a Soviet Boomer was operating south of Baja California, an area never patrolled before.
We used the term “unprecedented” which nearly always was wrong, but quite true in this instance. There were skeptics aplenty, until one of the really smart guys sniffed and said “we will never see it coming. One boat could take out the whole West Coast, launching to the north.”
The room got real quiet. Then we got serious about seeing if we could find the boat in the warm and tranquil Mexican waters.
So, seeing this commentary about the American threat and the Russian response got my blood going. Mr. Putin’s people say that the US is guilty of serious war crimes, including “crimes against humanity, wars of aggressions, violations of international laws, genocide, terrorism, (and) financing terrorism.”
I suppose that is one interpretation, though I am left with the inescapable conclusion that Mr. Putin is trying desperately to prop up his last client in the Middle East, Syria, and is afraid he might be stopped in trying to supply more weapons to the Assad Government to slaughter his own people.
It certainly got my attention. Submarines are like underwater mines: all one has to do is announce that they are there, and leave your adversary to prove that they are not.
Still, I wonder how high the price of oil has to stay to enable this new Russian high seas, high stakes adventure? One pal in the business says the price of mischief is any world oil price higher than $77 dollars a barrel.
So, ready for a new ride on an old pony? I said I missed the Russians, and must have forgotten that you really do have to watch out for what you wish for.
(Soviet FOXTROT SS, forced to the surface in the Cuban Missile Crisis, and which did not, by 1-2 vote, start the end of the world. Photo USN.)
Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com