XPost: sci.military.naval, soc.history.war.misc, or.politics
XPost: seattle.politics

My computer had a absolute total failure.
I'm getting it back, kind of.
Right after I was under anesthesia for 3-4 hours.
If someone says "His head's not right!"
I can not argue right now.
Still making progress, but here goes:

Like Two Ships Not-Quite-Passing In the Night

The Atlantic Ocean is big — very big. It has an area of more than 40
million square miles (100 million square kilometers), which is more than
twice the land area of Asia. And, given that it’s ocean, very few people
live there. Sure, there are a lot of ships cruising throughout the seas,
and there are people on board those ships, but even if we were to treat
those people as permanent residents of the Atlantic (which I originally
typoed as “reseadent,” which kind of works!) you’d need more than 50 million of them to have a population density equal to Alaska, which is
easily the least-dense state of the 50 American states.

All of that is to say that you’re cruising around the Atlantic, chances
are, you’re not going to run into anything. That’s particularly true if you’re not in a port, where there are lots of ships moving in a small
area, or if it’s during peacetime, when ramming into another ship may be intentional. And it’s supremely true if you’re in a submarine — not only are there far fewer subs than there are ships on the water’s surface,
but you also add a y-axis to the equation.

So it must have been really strange when, on the evening of February 3rd
to 4th, 2009, the HMS Vanguard — a British submarine — crashed into something.

Oh, and potentially very dangerous, too, because the Vanguard was a
nuclear sub carrying a payload of atomic weapons.

Submarines are typically designed to be hard to detect. They travel
underwater (obviously) and are, therefore, already difficult at best to
detect from the surface or the sky. The easiest way to find a submarine
is using sonar (which, originally, was an acronym meaning “Sound
Navigation and Ranging”) — basically, you use listening devices to “look” for any sounds that don’t match the normal noises you’d expect to
find in the ocean. As submarines have motors and people — things you typically don’t find in the depths of the ocean — if you know what
you’re listening for, you can often detect an oncoming sub.

But over the decades, submariners have become better and better at
hiding from enemy sonar. The National Museum of the U.S. Navy’s website explains:

To increase stealth, submariners take advantage of how sound waves act
in ocean water. The speed of sound in seawater is greatly determined by temperature, pressure, and salinity. These three factors vary in
different locations and bend the sound waves accordingly. Because SONAR
depends on receiving sounds signals, the way sound waves bend determines
what can be picked up by SONAR. Submariners can find places between the
bending sound waves of active enemy SONAR called shadow zones. There,
subs can hide and watch the enemy without being detected.

And on that day, the Vanguard was likely taking efforts to hide itself —
the British military, understandably, has been mum on the details. Unfortunately for them, so was the Le Triomphant, a French nuclear
submarine. Le Triomphant happened to be in the same area, "conducting
routine national patrols in the Atlantic Ocean” according to the British Ministry of Defense (via the Guardian), and because the two submarines
were doing their best to hide, they didn’t detect one another. And,
despite the vastness of the ocean, they collided.

The collision happened at a very low speed and no one aboard was
injured, and thankfully for the rest of us, none of the nuclear stuff on
either ship went boom. The damage to the French ship was so minimal that
they claimed to have not realized they hit another ship; per the
Guardian, “On 6 February, France's defense ministry had said that the
boat "collided with an immersed object (probably a container)" when
coming back from patrolling and that its sonar dome was damaged.” (It wasn’t a container, unless you’re being very, very literal.) The French ship needed repairs to its active sonar dome while the British ship
suffered damage to the casing that held its missiles on its right side,
which is to say, the damage was pretty minor. That said, the repair
bills, according to the Telegraph, were “expected to cost up to £50
million in repairs,” or about $65 million for the two combined. (That’s
a lot, but the sub cost more than £3 billion to build, so it’s not outlandish.)

There were some calls after the event for the UK and France to better coordinate their efforts to patrol under the Atlantic, but neither
nation acknowledged if any efforts were being made to do so. The good
news is that such an event is unlikely to happen again, if for no other
reason than it was incredibly unlikely to have happened in the first place.


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