An Accident

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via The Presurfer

The Collision of Submarines Underwater In the Atlantic

How could it happen? Two Submarines, British and French, collide under water in the Atlantic? Do they have lanes there? What happened? These were the questions I was asking myself.

What happened?

HMS Vanguard, the lead boat of Britain's fleet of four V-class submarines hit Le Triomphant, the flagship of the French nuclear strike force. Taken together, the two were carrying 265 crew and 32 intercontinental ballistic missiles.

What was the risk?

The two submarines were armed with nuclear warheads- enough to bomb Hiroshima 1248 times.

Try this for size:

The submarine was nearly the length of two football pitches and had nearly the height of a three-storey building. Yet it went undetected. -Thanks to -The Independent.

But how could this happen?

• The point of the submarines is that they should remain undetected. So neither boat will have been using active sonar, because that would have given their position away. Modern Western submarines are deliberately made very quiet in operation - so much so that they are very difficult indeed to detect using passive sonar. If both the submarines, Vanguard and Triomphant, were patrolling very slowly and listening as hard as possible they might still miss each other entirely.

• Submarines with nuclear warheads are built to be undetected. So it should come no surprise that it happened. US and UK trust each other, so they have set up a joint traffic-control system- this means that the submarines are given deconflicted, preplanned moving boxes of sea within which to stay. This avoids British and American boats crashing into each other.

(Obviously, this arrangement is not there between UK and France).

-Thanks to -Lewis Page at The Register..

So, even though this incident could have been a terrible accident, it is not a disaster, but in all probability, an unanticipated success!