Email this page to friends About the Author A former partner in a top-10 global management consulting firm, Joe Buff is a seasoned risk analyst and professional writer on national security and defense preparedness. He is also a novelist of tales of near-future warfare featuring nuclear submariners and Navy SEALs in action at their bravest and best. Two of Joe's non-fiction articles on future submarine technology and tactics, which appeared in The Submarine Review, received literary awards from the Naval Submarine League. His recent novel Crush Depth made the Military Book Club's Top 20 Bestseller List after being selected as a Featured Alternate of the Club in late 2002. Tidal Rip was released from Wm. Morrow in hardcover in November, 2003, and quickly made the Amazon.com Top 100 General Thrillers Bestseller List (paperback edition due in October, 2004). Joe's next book, Straits of Power, is scheduled for hardcover publication in November, '04. Joe is a member of the Society for Risk Analysis, a non-partisan international scholarly body headquartered in McLean, VA. He is a Life Member of the following organizations: U.S. Naval Institute, the Navy League of the United States, the Fellows of the Naval War College, CEC/Seabees Historical Foundation, and the Naval Submarine League. Joe's father was an enlisted man in the Navy (Seabees in the Pacific Theater) from 1946 through 1951, and his uncle was a merchant mariner on the North Atlantic convoys late in World War II, before being drafted into the U.S. Army to serve in the Occupation of Nazi Germany. In August, 2004, Joe was made an Honorary Life Associate Member of the Navy Seabee Veterans of America, partly in recognition of his pro bono work for Operation Seabees Knowledge. Joe Buff Article & Column Archive Joe Buff Contact Info: readermail@joebuff.com http://www.JoeBuff.com Joe Buff Books: Straits of Power Tidal Rip Crush Depth Thunder in the Deep Deep Sound Channel Related Links Submarine Guide Military Opinions Index

September 2, 2004

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Somewhere in the Northeast U.S., within striking distance of New York and Boston, too close for comfort to the vital New London Naval Submarine Base -- and well inside American territorial waters -- sits a weapon of war that all too recently carried not one, not two, but five enemy H-bombs aimed at our homeland and our strategic interests abroad.

I bet that got your attention. What the heck am I talking about? I'm only half pulling your leg. Seriously, there's an opportunity here to have loads of fun while enjoying a unique chance to learn, first hand, what the Cold War's high-stakes game of "Blind Man's Bluff" under the sea was all about. Last month, some friends and I visited the Russian Sub Museum at scenic Collier Point Park on Narragansett Bay, in Providence RI. On display, open to the public, floating in the water at a pier and beautifully maintained, is the ex-Soviet Union's former nuclear-attack cruise missile submarine known to NATO as Juliett 484 -- commissioned at the USSR's Krasnoye Sormovo shipyard in 1965 as K-77. Her architects called her and her fifteen sister ships the Project 651 class.

K-77 is a diesel submarine, at nearly 4,000 tons submerged displacement and 32 feet wide one of the biggest diesel subs ever built. Walking through her well-lit and well ventilated interior now is a pleasure, and completely safe, though you do have to negotiate a series of steep ladders and narrow hatchways. No need to worry about balky Russian nuclear reactors here! Ironically enough, K-77 starred on the silver screen alongside Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson; scenes from "K-19: The Widowmaker" were shot aboard her. K-77 has been a museum ship in Providence now for two years. (See www.juliett484.org for more information.)

K-77 is, to my mind, powerfully emblematic of the decades-long Cold War struggle itself. ICBMs aplenty to the point of planetwide overkill, and heroic submariners jousting far from the public eye, were two consistent features of that contest in deadly earnest. But as in all major wars, the technology and tactics changed with time, and the service record of K-77 reflects this vividly. The Soviet Union's submarine designs in the '60s and '70s were years behind NATO's, so the Kremlin made up for this in sheer numbers. At its peak the Russian submarine fleet boasted some three hundred vessels, both nuclear- and diesel-powered. Our side could never muster more than a hundred or so, before drastic "peace dividend" cuts in the 1990s. That three-to-one advantage would have hurt us if the Cold War had ever gone hot.

As a case in point, K-77 has impressive features in the all-important areas of stealth, survivability, and armaments. Her hull is designed for a very low magnetic signature. It's a "double hull," with an outer streamlining layer of strong steel plus an inner pressure-proof "people tank," and that inner hull is divided into eight separate watertight compartments -- a robust scheme that could take quite a beating from NATO torpedoes and depth charges. She's coated with an outer layer of thick rubber, too, helping quiet her on both active and passive sonars. Creeping along submerged, with her crush depth of 1,200 feet and running on her gigantic batteries, she could slowly cover eight hundred miles very silently. She could also make sudden dashes this way at almost twenty knots, to evade pursuers hunting her from the surface.

K-77 sports six torpedo tubes near the bow, and four more tubes at the stern between her twin screw shafts. (In contrast, the Los Angeles-class fast-attacks have only four tubes, all near the bow.) K-77 bore 22 torpedoes, one of which was always nuclear armed. On the upper part of her hull, fore and aft of her sail (conning tower), are four large pressure-proof hangars for supersonic cruise missiles. Targeting data for those missiles would have been relayed from Russia by satellite. Yes, our old adversary's military communications systems were surprisingly sophisticated.

During her thirty year life, K-77's weaponry was upgraded and her strategic mission changed. At first she carried four P-5 (SS-N-3A Shaddock) nuclear-tipped cruise missiles, turbojet propelled with folding wings, not too different from the early American Regulus, nor really dissimilar in concept from the modern Tomahawk. In her prime she patrolled the waters near the U.S. eastern seaboard. The targets for those inertially-guided missiles, which weren't very accurate over their cruising range of three hundred miles, were American cities like Washington or Miami.

"Juliett 484" is open to the public at the Russian Sub Museum, Providence, RI. (Photo by Sheila Buff)

Eventually the USSR acquired a vast array of reasonably accurate land-based long range ICBMs, while the U.S. got ever better at antisubmarine warfare. The Soviet Union also gradually perfected her nuclear-powered subs, and gained huge technical advances in both quieting and sonars from the Walker spy ring combined with native engineering talent.

K-77 and her sister ships were therefore redeployed, closer to Soviet home waters. Their job became to tail, and destroy, American carrier battle groups operating near the North Sea or Baltic. Their cruise missiles were upgraded to the P-500 Basalt, NATO designation SS-N-12 Sandbox. These weapons did Mach 1.7, and their warhead yields were 350 kilotons -- about twenty times that of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki. If just one of the salvo of four P-500 cruise missiles had gotten through a carrier's layered defenses, and detonated even miles away from its intended target, that carrier's planes would have been smashed and her flight deck put out of commission for months. The lethal radius of a 350 kiloton air burst set off at optimum altitude vastly exceeds the range of even a modern supercarrier's close-in conventional defensive systems (Phalanx Gatling-guns, Sea Sparrow anti-missile missiles).

The fact that the P-500 could also be armed with a one-ton high explosive warhead instead of a hydrogen bomb only complicated things for carrier-group commanding admirals and the White House -- you can't tell which type of warhead the missile is carrying until it explodes. With scant minutes between initial launch detection and inbound "vampire" impact, in some scenarios where shooting broke out our side might have wound up, by misunderstanding or by accident, being the first to go nuclear. Yikes!

Inside the museum ship that K-77 is today, you're allowed to sit in the seat at the missile control console. It might easily have been from this exact chair, with this instrument panel in front of you, that those weapons would have been fired had the order ever come down from the Kremlin. It's enough to send a shiver up your spine. It certainly did so for me.

On the minus side in K-77's design, she needed to stay on the surface for almost fifteen minutes to launch her missiles. This made her vulnerable to counter-attack. The P-500 missiles were radar guided. While a Soviet aircraft or surface ship might have provided this in-flight guidance, K-77 was able to do it herself -- at the forward edge of her sail, as visitors can see when they visit her in Providence, is a big titanium radar dish. One has to ask, then, whether K-77's tasking would in practice have been a suicide mission.

Probably, for most of the Julietts, their 82-man crews would not have survived a concerted battle against NATO fleets and air power. But it isn't the culture of Russian warriors to flinch in the face of death when ordered to fight to defeat their foes. The threat once posed by K-77 should not be trivialized. Walking through her narrow, low-ceilinged compartments, crammed as they are with equipment and a multitude of fittings, you realize her officers and men were a hardened, determined breed. When you see the crude sleeping arrangements, and peer into her tiny galley (kitchen) and her rather primitive heads (toilets), you'll be reminded much more of "Das Boot" than of "Red October."

And this is perhaps the most moving and memorable aspect of a visit to K-77. You will, literally, get to walk the same decks as her crew once did, sit on the same seats and benches, look out through the same periscope, and see the same knobs, dials, meters, and switches all labeled in Russian Cyrillic. Those hardy sailors would have given their all for their sacred motherland. Their sacrifices during combat could have caused America and Western Europe terrible agony.

So, is K-77 now a war trophy? Perhaps, indeed. After all, our side did win the Cold War. Is K-77 a warning of possible things to come? I'm compelled to say Yes. Despite myths to the contrary, Russia continues to deploy a handful of very good nuclear submarines. Remember that the Kursk, a cruise missile attack sub herself, was lost due to a faulty torpedo, not because of any serious flaw in the vessel herself. And Russia built eleven of the Oscar II class of which Kursk was only one. That means ten are still in commission, at a time when the U.S. Navy's carrier fleet -- the Oscar II's prey -- is slowly dwindling due to budget constraints and unavoidable wear and tear.

Advanced submarine technology is proliferating rapidly worldwide, at the same time that the U.S. isn't building enough new submarines to meet all projected operational requirements. Will enemy submariners, in any potential future conflict, be well-equipped and brave? Almost certainly. The advantage America had at the end of the Cold War, when Russian subs were scrapped or left to rot at the pier by the dozens, is being eroded by modern diesel subs with air-independent propulsion that can remain totally submerged for weeks or months at a time. Experts project that soon, globally, there will be more than a thousand such diesel boats in different nations' hands, their capabilities greatly enhanced by miniaturization and automation. (Ultra-sophisticated group simulator training, run on supercomputers in shadowy facilities on land, can season new crews enough to be a serious danger to us, before they even leave their own harbors or venture beyond their home littorals.) This raises the specter of America's nuclear powered fast-attack SSNs having to compete anew for waterspace dominance if current alarming trends do go too far. The leading exporter of hyper-modern diesel subs right now, interestingly enough, is Germany -- the same country that brought us the U-boat threat in two world wars. What could happen if just a few aggressor diesel subs become armed some day with homegrown tactical nuclear weapons, or stolen ex-Russian H-bombs?

Visiting K-77 when you're in the Providence area will certainly give you eerie reminders of all-too-recent history, yield you food for thought about the volatile world's uncertain tomorrow -- not to mention provide you and your family (ages 6 and up) with some good clean honest fun. I highly recommend it!

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© 2004 Joe Buff. All opinions expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily reflect those of Military.com.