Don’t get the wrong idea, I know no classified information and I have never worked for any government in my not very long as of yet life. However quite a bit of information has leaked out on the subject since the end of the cold war. The US navy operated a series of modified nuclear submarines as special projects boats, the missions of which included underwater search and recovery of Soviet missiles. The USN even went so far as to build the very small nuclear submarine NR-1 specifically for this role. USS Jimmy Carter is simply the latest submarine to have the job, she’s a modified Sea Wolf class SSN with an additional 100 foot plug in the hull to hold the special equipment like remote controlled underwater vehicles it requires. A whole lot of modern underwater exploration technology was developed for this purpose, and NR-1 herself is now sometimes used for underwater archeology.Intio wrote: Now that interests me. Can you discuss details more? Are/were you in a position to know what kind of information could be gleaned from recovering the spent debris from such thing?
I suggest reading the book Blind Mans Bluff for a look into some of the missions special projects submarines have conducted in the past, and the almighty Project Jennifer in which the CIA spent 500 million dollars in a failed attempt to steal an entire sunken Soviet ballistic missile submarine in 16,000 feet of water. Nova also made a special on the operation in 2003.
A test doesn’t even need to go awry for this to work. The key thing is, items made by man are not easily destroyed. Broken into thousands of tiny pieces sure, but very little is actually destroyed even when a missile blows up or hits the ocean at supersonic speed. If you spend long enough searching the seafloor you’ll find most of those peices, and if you spend long enough in a lab you can put the object back together. It might not work, but you can still learn a whole lot about how it should work and what it might be able to do. This is done all the time in the civilian world, for example police will put terrorist bombs back together from the fragments, and airliners are extensively reassembled after crashes.
Has any navy tried to do this to the United States or European navies, whose tests have gone awry?
The Soviet Union certainly engaged in the same kind of activities, spurred on by leaks on US projects through spies and the publicized failure of Project Jennifer. Several classes of dedicated small special mission nuclear submarines are known to have been produced, though few if any are now operational owing to Russia’s perpetual lack of money.
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- PeZook
