Navy had builders cram all kinds of goodies into the Seawolf submarine,” Brent Eastwood wrote. The US Navy received what they paid for the Seawolf was larger, faster, quieter, and more impressively armed than its predecessor, the Los Angeles-class. The Seawolf is a nuclear-powered, fast attack sub that cost $5 billion per unit (in 2018 terms). ![]() With their naval advantage mitigated, the US did what one does in an existentially motivated arms race – spent heaps of money to design the best submarine in the world. The Soviet’s newest sub seemed superior to the US Navy’s workhorse sub, the Los Angeles-class. The Akula deeply concerned US war planners. But by the 1980s, the Soviets (with the help of the Japanese and Norwegians) were able to produce a submarine with much improved sonic qualities – the Akula-class sub, which featured a significantly quieter seven-bladed propeller. The Americans were able to easily track the bumbling November-class subs, without being tracked in return. But they had a conspicuous flaw: they were a lot noisier,” my colleague Sebastien Roblin wrote. “The Soviet Navy’s nuclear-powered submarines – starting with the November-class attack submarine – could dive twice as deep as most of their American counterparts and often had higher maximum speed. ![]() On land, and in the air and sea, both nations rushed to out-design and out-produce their nemesis, with an urgency and paranoia that seemingly only existential conflict can produce.Īt the time, the two rivals were the only nations in the world equipped with nuclear weapons – and each nation placed a special emphasis on systems within the nuclear triad.īeneath the sea, each nation fielded nuclear-power submarines capable of firing nuclear warhead-tipped missiles. What makes the Seawolf-Class so special? During the Eisenhower administration, as the Cold War peaked and the world order hung in the balance, the Soviets and Americans were locked in a grueling arms race.
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