The other day I disclosed some of my history as a former, Cold War Era, Naval officer, with nuclear launch capability, specifically, the Navy's ASROC, anti-submarine rocket, in the comment thread of Lenny Flank's wonderful and important post, Fat Man and Little Boy: The Design of the Atomic Bombs. If one picture is worth 1000 words, this is what the Navy trained and assigned me to do:
The disclosure prompted
G2geek to propound a number of excellent questions about my service that I addressed fully in a
reply that ran to considerable length, ultimately leading me to ponder, and, in the course of things, explain, one unasked question that I had not previously thought of so much, and which I answer in the title of this post.
For those not wishing to click through, I reproduce that comment thread, worthy, perhaps, of a larger audience, out in the tall grass, along with a petit lagnaippe.
heh, i was about to ask...
... what military role was intended for those weapons.
ASW. Interesting. Against what types of submarines? Did the USSR have subs at that point that were equipped with ballistic nuclear missiles?
And in a general sense, how did we expect to locate those submarines in the event of hostilities?
What I'm thinking here is that a weapon that might ordinarily be seen as a tactical nuke, might have had a strategic deterrent aspect by way of countering a Soviet submarine threat, reducing the effectiveness of one leg of their triad.
How immune are our Tridents or current nuclear missile carrying submarines, from detection and targeting by other nations' equivalent ASW capabilities?
Lastly, what do you think about the implications of current and expected improvements in the Chinese Navy? Their littoral combat ships make sense in light of local & regional concerns, but their new submarines don't seem to fit into that picture. How should we be looking at these developments?
I replied:
I have some answers.
And in a general sense, how did we expect to locate those submarines in the event of hostilities?
In my day submarines were detected with hull mounted sonar generally used in active, i.e. pinging, mode. Better still to be operating in coordination with aircraft. Helicopters could carry a dipping sonar that could overcome the problem of an inconvenient thermocline (a boundary between two layers of water at different temperatures, causing sound waves to bend and bounce and distort) and also could drop active or passive sonobuoys. The problem with active sonar, is that a submarine using passive sonar can hear you long before you can "see" it, making you the target.
a weapon that might ordinarily be seen as a tactical nuke, might have had a strategic deterrent aspect by way of countering a Soviet submarine threat, reducing the effectiveness of one leg of their triad.
No, not really. Insofar as the RTNDC (rocket thrown nuclear depth charge) was concerned, ASROC was a ridiculously stupid weapon and, really useless. As ASW (anti-submarine warfare) officer it was always my intention to talk the CO (commanding officer) into using something else to attack the target, should we ever have gotten that deep into the shit.
The ASROC RTNDC had two major tactical problems. First, the solid rocket motor (the "thrown" of RTNDC) wasn't powerful enough, so, for my money, it was not able to throw that nuclear warhead nearly far enough to suit me. Anyone giving me an order to set that damned thing off so close to my very own ass was probably going to get an argument.
Second, the weapon was dumb as hell. Once released into the water it could only do 2 things, sink and go boom. That led to a serious tactical weakness. It made more than half of my other tools and information useless. It made me stupid, too.
Fire Control is the Navy term for everything (sensors, computers, controllers, operators) working to put the weapon on the target. Fire control inherently, no matter the weapon or target, involves a number of points where tiny errors can become magnified to cause wide misses. But to be effective, an ASROC RTNDC had to be detonated pretty close to the target.
Here is the simplified physics of that problem. Sea water exerts tremendous pressure at depth, approximately 1 full atmosphere per 33 feet of depth. One atmosphere is roughly equal to pressure of all of the approximately fifty mile high column of air sitting above your head, right now. Go down in seawater just 33 feet and you double that pressure. Go down 100 feet and increase it threefold. Go down 3000 feet, well you get the idea.
The hull of a submarine is designed to withstand the water pressure, up to a point. Every design has a "crush depth". The trick to destroying a submerged submarine is to create an "overpressure", at one or more points on the hull, to overcome hull integrity. A nuclear depth charge creates one hell of an overpressure wave. But, that wave expands spherically from the epicenter of the detonation. The pressure wave contains a finite amount energy distributed mostly on the surface of that sphere, which is constantly expanding. Consequently, the force at any point on the surface of the pressure sphere is decreasing exponentially as the distance from the detonation point increases. Before long, the force of that pressure wave becomes no greater than that from the warhead of a conventional homing torpedo, detonating right next to the hull of the submarine.
I had two different kinds of much smarter weapons I could use in an identical combat situation. They were homing torpedoes. I could throw them with the ASROC launcher or, for short ranges, launch them with deck mounted torpedo tubes. With smarter weapons, I could be smarter, too. With this kind of weapon a good ASW officer can adapt the weapon to the tactical situation and make fuller use available information. Although there was nothing I could do to control a RTNDC after it hit the water, I could program the torpedoes, and select weapons types, to control the weapon's depth, speed, heading, search pattern, sonar operation and type of attack, all to improve the chances that the weapon would sense the target and automatically home in before detonating a teeny-tiny (compared to a NDC) military grade high explosive charge right up next to the target's hull, hopefully blowing nice big hole in it.
You also raise a directly strategic issue regarding ASROC and the Soviet ballistic submarine fleet. In my day (up to 1975) ASROC was a destroyer/frigate weapon. Such ships protect convoys and carrier groups and other high value targets from attack. Their ASW role is built around keeping the other guy's submarines from sinking the carrier.
There is an entirely different part of the Navy that detects and tracks and stands by to neutralize an enemy's ballistic submarines (which, by the way, are far away from that Carrier Task Force, if they can help it). In my day the Navy operated a Worldwide network of underwater listening posts of astonishing capability and range (all classified, of course). There was a large force of hunter-killer submarines tasked to elude opposition ballistic missie submarines, track them and destroy them if ordered to to so.
How immune are our Tridents or current nuclear missile carrying submarines, from detection and targeting by other nations' equivalent ASW capabilities?
My views on this aren't especially well informed. I know that the reputation of our respective U.S.-Soviet submarine fleets was that our enormously superior noise abatement and signal processing technology kept the probabilities of detection for our ballistic submarines near zero and the POD for theirs near 100%. Since our runaway military spending has not abated and the Soviet Union is no more and Russia a pale military shadow of the former USSR, I doubt that has changed.
what do you think about the implications of current and expected improvements in the Chinese Navy? Their littoral combat ships make sense in light of local & regional concerns, but their new submarines don't seem to fit into that picture. How should we be looking at these developments?
I claim no expertise in Chinese naval matters. But China is no longer poor. It is a great nation with a huge coastline. Great nations that can afford them and some that can't will build great navies. China has great scientists and engineers and has a pretty good reputation (if I may call it that) in industrial and military espionage, so I would expect their newest submarines to carry better noise abatement and signal processing technology along with other technological improvements. China is the World's No. 2 military spender (about 1/3 of US spending) and plans to increase that by 15%.
It's hard to know what China's military spending really amounts to. They could be exaggerating or hiding spending in a tightly controlled economy. I can readily imagine China wishing to possess an impressive Fleet to show their flag to the World. Teddy Roosevelt did something similar with the "White Fleet" at a point in history when the US occupied a similar place to today's China as an emerging World power. With equal ease, I imagine China wishing to defend its coasts and all of its off shore claims against interdiction or harassment by forces of any other nation, including us. Circling back to your previous question, if I hear of China investing in a fleet of hunter-killer submarines, I will start to rethink the effectiveness of our own ballistic fleet.
Here is one question you didn't ask, that the reflection necessary to writing all of the above caused me to ask myself:
Would you ever have pressed the button?
Yep. If I had no more torpedoes or couldn't fire them and it was him or me? Sorry but, yeah. I would have yelled "shoot" into the sound powered telephone and turned the ship to hightail it out of there as fast as possible, fingers crossed, both hands.
That's a fantasy situation, though. By the time it came to that, the "target" would have already blown my ship to smithereens, along with me and my RTNDC's.
So, I'd push the button on almost exactly the same terms that the Last Scion would "date" Jay in the cult classic, Dogma, see from about 2:48 - 3:12 in the clip below.
Thanks for asking
Le petit lagnaippe:
The extraordinary young woman who gifted me with this iconic image of Buddy Christ (also from
Dogma), was a contemporary of my older daughter who ultimately graduated from the same law school as me. I am proud of her like she was one of my own daughters.