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From Cuban crisis: "First, Perry writes, the Soviet ships approaching the blockade imposed by the US had submarine escorts that were armed with nuclear torpedoe

From Cuban crisis: "First, Perry writes, the Soviet ships approaching the blockade imposed by the US had submarine escorts that were armed with nuclear torpedoes. Because of the difficulty with communications, Moscow had authorized the submarine commanders to fire without further authorization. When an American destroyer tried to force a submarine to surface, both its captain and the political officer decided to fire a nuclear torpedo at the destroyer. A nuclear confrontation was avoided only because Vasili Arkhipov, the overall commander of the fleet, was also present on the submarine. He countermanded the order to launch, thereby preventing what might have started a nuclear war." Another one of these 'almost nuclear' stories. There's only so many times humanity can roll the dice and come out clean. Scary stuff.

ams6110 10y ago
A nuclear torpedo to take out a destroyer? Seems like the proverbial swatting a fly with a sledgehammer? And what of the submarine? Torpedos are fairly close-range weapons, at least in those days. Would it have survived the blast?
- pm90 10y ago
  I may be wrong here, but a surface detonation is unlikely to damage a submarine that is deep underwater. That is the reason why a fleet of nuclear submarines are the best nuclear deterrent: hard to take out since they can be anywhere undersea, mobile and ready to counterattack at a moments notice.
  - narag 10y ago
    Can a submarine that is deep underwater launch torpedoes? I didn't think so. OTOH, a nuke doesn't need to yield several megatons. First devices were about 20 kilotons and it's possible to create smaller ones. I'm sure I've seen some video of 1 kiloton bomb. Also, intuitively, it doesn't seem that it would destroy a sub a few miles away looking at Baker test: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nWFx-zmI0k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nWFx-zmI0k Around 1:25 there's a brief fragment showing the explosion underwater with the usual expansion-contraction cycle.
    - ceejayoz 10y ago
      > Can a submarine that is deep underwater launch torpedoes? I didn't think so. The maximum depth for a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_48_torpedo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_48_torpedo is estimated at 800 meters.
    - vonmoltke 10y ago
      > Can a submarine that is deep underwater launch torpedoes? I didn't think so. Where did you get this idea from? Submarines can launch torpedoes at whatever depth the torpedo itself can operate at.
      - narag 10y ago
        Where did you get this idea from? Movies. On second thought, there was some submarine against submarine battle in Red October... most other submarine wartime movies were from WWII, always shooting at boats and at periscope level to aim. Oh, and speaking about wars, relevant nick :-)
    - reactor4 10y ago
      Ranger Able was 1kt.
  - elorant 10y ago
    Russians tested a 4.8 Kiloton T-5 nuclear torpedo in 1957. They used three decommissioned submarines as targets. The weapon was detonated at 20 meters below surface and sank two of the three submarines at a distance of 6.5 miles. As previously mentioned nuclear torpedoes of the era relied on blast damage rather than precision. The shock wave could easily break the hull of any vessel, be it underwater or on the surface.
  - graycat 10y ago
    > hard to take out since they can be anywhere undersea, mobile and ready to counterattack at a moments notice. When I was working in that stuff, the usual point about the SSBNs (the US long range missile firing submarines) was that they were darned difficult to find. Also, it was standard to assume that they moved in some variation on Brownian motion so that, even if did get some data on their location, it was not very useful for extrapolation. So, a major point about the design and operation of the SSBNs was that they be darned difficult to find -- via passive sonar, magnetic anomaly detection, active sonar, or anything else. Also, a big deployment of search resources that might be more able to find an SSBN would be regarded as provocative. Then there was the point: If the Soviets did find a US SSBN, now what? If they track it for very long, then that is provocative. If they don't track it, then they will soon lose it again. If they sink it, then there are all the other US SSBNs ready to fire back. So, the Soviets would have to find AND sink ALL the US SSBNs at the same time. Finding all of the SSBNs at the same time without being provocative was regarded as essentially impossible. So, maybe somehow there could be a nuke war but limited to sea. Then could pick off each SSBN as it was found one at a time. Then how long would the SSBNs last? Once I was asked to answer that! So, I derived some math, wrote some software, submitted my results, and the next day my wife and I went for a vacation in Shenandoah! Later my work was sold to a leading US intel group. I could tell you which one, but then I'd have to ...! Ah, the math wasn't either artificial intelligence or machine learning!
    - tr1ck5t3r 10y ago
      This was around https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOSUS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOSUS and better stuff is around today. Nothing like a big bang to scare the population into projectfear.
    - vonmoltke 10y ago
      > If they track it for very long, then that is provocative. Both sides spent the entire Cold War shadowing each other constantly. There was nothing provocative about it.
      - graycat 10y ago
- nxzero 10y ago
  Torpedo on the submarine was a T-5 and if the submarine was within 6-10 miles of the blast it would have ripped the submarine apart.
  - privong 10y ago
    > Torpedo on the submarine was a T-5 and if the submarine was within 6-10 miles of the blast it would have ripped the submarine apart. Do you have any additional info on this? A quick wikipedia search turned up a little bit of info[0], but suggests the targets destroyed were 6.5 miles from the submarine that launched the torpedo and presumably that the launching submarine was not destroyed: On 10 October 1957, in another test at Novaya Zemlya, S-144, a Whiskey class submarine, launched a T-5. The test weapon, code named Korall, detonated with a force of 4.8 kilotonnes twenty meters under the surface of the bay sending a huge plume of highly radioactive water high into the air. Three decommissioned submarines were used as targets at a distance of 6.5 miles. Both S-20 and S-34 sank completely, and S-19 was critically damaged. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_torpedo#T-5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_torpedo#T-5
    - beloch 10y ago
      I have no solid evidence to help you, but my intuition says this is believable. Pressure waves can travel a long ways in dense media, and it's the interface between media of different densities, such as water of the ocean and the air inside a submarine, where the most devastating effects are felt. Jelly-fish swimming next to a submarine might not feel a thing even while the submariners inside the submarine are being smashed to bits.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      - vonmoltke 10y ago
        Prior to WWII, that intuition led navies to greatly overestimate the lethal range of their depth charges. Once in combat, they discovered that they were way off, close to an order-of-magnitude in some cases.
- mikeash 10y ago
  A lot of weapons were nuclear (air to air missiles and anti-ICBM weapons are other examples) not because they necessarily needed the explosive power, but to make up for inaccuracy. Guidance in the 50s and 60s isn't what it's like today. When your weapon is likely to miss by several hundred feet, you can resign yourself to missing a lot of shots, or you can stick a nuclear warhead on it and take out the target anyway.
  - hackuser 10y ago
    > A lot of weapons were nuclear ... to make up for inaccuracy In fact, I've read that that's the real reason for even the large strategic nuclear weapons: The accuracy of missiles launched from thousands of miles away is (or was) dreadful, but if you used strategic nukes, you still could take out the targets: The Kremlin, the naval base, etc. I've even read that modern 'smart' weapons (the article discussed Perry's work on them and their accuracy) could make nuclear weapons obsolete.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - mikeash 10y ago
      That was definitely a large part of it. Another part was the desire to maximize what you got out of a particular shot: if you have one bomb per missile, then you want each missile to pack maximum punch. Improving accuracy and the development of MIRVs both contributed to less powerful bombs becoming more desirable. I'm not sure about precision conventional weapons making nuclear weapons obsolete. I can see it for some cases. Destroying a missile silo can probably be done with a large normal bomb delivered with sufficient accuracy. Destroying an airfield would require a lot of bombs, impractical if you're delivering them on ICBMs. And destroying a well built underground command post probably requires nukes. Worse, sometimes cities really might be targeted deliberately, at least as a deterrent. A war limited to military targets might be seen as acceptable, while having cities destroyed could make it unacceptable, so there's incentive to threaten retaliation against cities in the event of an attack. No amount of precision lets conventional weapons substitute for nukes there. (Note that MIRV and better accuracy does still push for smaller weapons, as many smaller weapons detonated over an area is more efficient at destroying things than a single large weapon.)
- graycat 10y ago
  > And what of the submarine? Very good point. When I used to work in that stuff, it was assumed that once know where a sub was, it was easy to kill it -- just pop off a nuke and let the resulting pressure wave in the water crush the hull of the sub. Sounds like the Soviet nuke torpedo was a very low yield nuke -- if the sub would survive, then the explosion would not have been big enough to have been a trigger of full nuke war like, say, a 10 megaton nuke over a major city.
- arethuza 10y ago
  Of course, they might not have expected to survive the blast - a lot of people (e.g. bomber crews) expected their trips to be one way. Also, from what I recall from One Minute to Midnight the conditions on that sub had been absolutely awful for quite a lot time (in particular, no cooling) so they might not have been thinking particularly rationally.
- vonmoltke 10y ago
  Torpedoes haven't generally been "fairly close-range weapons" since WWII (air-launched torpedoes notwithstanding).
paavokoya 10y ago
Having flashbacks of 2001: Space Odyssey.. At first the apes postured with intimidation tactics, then one finally took the leap and started using the weapon. It's quite terrifying to consider just how natural and statistically probable it is for nukes to be used again.
wnoise 10y ago
Really makes you consider the anthropic principle.
sehugg 10y ago
Also a (currently unconfirmed) account of a belayed launch order given to Okinawa missileers during that time: http://thebulletin.org/okinawa-missiles-october8826 http://thebulletin.org/okinawa-missiles-october8826 Whistling past the graveyard indeed.
IanCal 10y ago
> There's only so many times humanity can roll the dice and come out clean Here's a related video on that thought from Minute Physics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRnU0bqsyq0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRnU0bqsyq0
krylon 10y ago
That is scary. Even if the submarine had fired a conventional torpedo, that probably would have escalated very quickly. In "The Fog Of War", McNamara, who was Secretary of Defense at the time tells a story of a meeting between him, Castro, and the man who was commander of the Warsaw treaty troops at the time (I forgot his name, though, sorry). The US apparently knew there were missiles on Cuba, but thought there were no warheads, yet. At this meeting (~1992-ish, I think), the Russian tells McNamara there were indeed enough warheads on Cuba at the time to destroy all major cities on the east coast of the US. So McNamara asks Castro if he knew of that and if he would have advised the Soviets to use the nuclear weapons on Cuba to retaliate against a US attack. Castro, apparently knew of the warheads and had urged the Soviets to use them in case of an attack, knowing full well that Cuba would have been destroyed completely. (At least that is how I remember McNamara telling the story, and assuming, of course, McNamara remembers the incident correctly and is telling the story accurately.)

ams6110 10y ago

A nuclear torpedo to take out a destroyer? Seems like the proverbial swatting a fly with a sledgehammer? And what of the submarine? Torpedos are fairly close-range weapons, at least in those days. Would it have survived the blast?

pm90 10y ago
I may be wrong here, but a surface detonation is unlikely to damage a submarine that is deep underwater. That is the reason why a fleet of nuclear submarines are the best nuclear deterrent: hard to take out since they can be anywhere undersea, mobile and ready to counterattack at a moments notice.
- narag 10y ago
  Can a submarine that is deep underwater launch torpedoes? I didn't think so. OTOH, a nuke doesn't need to yield several megatons. First devices were about 20 kilotons and it's possible to create smaller ones. I'm sure I've seen some video of 1 kiloton bomb. Also, intuitively, it doesn't seem that it would destroy a sub a few miles away looking at Baker test: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nWFx-zmI0k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nWFx-zmI0k Around 1:25 there's a brief fragment showing the explosion underwater with the usual expansion-contraction cycle.
  - ceejayoz 10y ago
    > Can a submarine that is deep underwater launch torpedoes? I didn't think so. The maximum depth for a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_48_torpedo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_48_torpedo is estimated at 800 meters.
  - vonmoltke 10y ago
    > Can a submarine that is deep underwater launch torpedoes? I didn't think so. Where did you get this idea from? Submarines can launch torpedoes at whatever depth the torpedo itself can operate at.
    - narag 10y ago
      Where did you get this idea from? Movies. On second thought, there was some submarine against submarine battle in Red October... most other submarine wartime movies were from WWII, always shooting at boats and at periscope level to aim. Oh, and speaking about wars, relevant nick :-)
  - reactor4 10y ago
    Ranger Able was 1kt.
- elorant 10y ago
  Russians tested a 4.8 Kiloton T-5 nuclear torpedo in 1957. They used three decommissioned submarines as targets. The weapon was detonated at 20 meters below surface and sank two of the three submarines at a distance of 6.5 miles. As previously mentioned nuclear torpedoes of the era relied on blast damage rather than precision. The shock wave could easily break the hull of any vessel, be it underwater or on the surface.
- graycat 10y ago
  > hard to take out since they can be anywhere undersea, mobile and ready to counterattack at a moments notice. When I was working in that stuff, the usual point about the SSBNs (the US long range missile firing submarines) was that they were darned difficult to find. Also, it was standard to assume that they moved in some variation on Brownian motion so that, even if did get some data on their location, it was not very useful for extrapolation. So, a major point about the design and operation of the SSBNs was that they be darned difficult to find -- via passive sonar, magnetic anomaly detection, active sonar, or anything else. Also, a big deployment of search resources that might be more able to find an SSBN would be regarded as provocative. Then there was the point: If the Soviets did find a US SSBN, now what? If they track it for very long, then that is provocative. If they don't track it, then they will soon lose it again. If they sink it, then there are all the other US SSBNs ready to fire back. So, the Soviets would have to find AND sink ALL the US SSBNs at the same time. Finding all of the SSBNs at the same time without being provocative was regarded as essentially impossible. So, maybe somehow there could be a nuke war but limited to sea. Then could pick off each SSBN as it was found one at a time. Then how long would the SSBNs last? Once I was asked to answer that! So, I derived some math, wrote some software, submitted my results, and the next day my wife and I went for a vacation in Shenandoah! Later my work was sold to a leading US intel group. I could tell you which one, but then I'd have to ...! Ah, the math wasn't either artificial intelligence or machine learning!
  - tr1ck5t3r 10y ago
    This was around https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOSUS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOSUS and better stuff is around today. Nothing like a big bang to scare the population into projectfear.
  - vonmoltke 10y ago
    > If they track it for very long, then that is provocative. Both sides spent the entire Cold War shadowing each other constantly. There was nothing provocative about it.
    - graycat 10y ago
nxzero 10y ago
Torpedo on the submarine was a T-5 and if the submarine was within 6-10 miles of the blast it would have ripped the submarine apart.
- privong 10y ago
  > Torpedo on the submarine was a T-5 and if the submarine was within 6-10 miles of the blast it would have ripped the submarine apart. Do you have any additional info on this? A quick wikipedia search turned up a little bit of info[0], but suggests the targets destroyed were 6.5 miles from the submarine that launched the torpedo and presumably that the launching submarine was not destroyed: On 10 October 1957, in another test at Novaya Zemlya, S-144, a Whiskey class submarine, launched a T-5. The test weapon, code named Korall, detonated with a force of 4.8 kilotonnes twenty meters under the surface of the bay sending a huge plume of highly radioactive water high into the air. Three decommissioned submarines were used as targets at a distance of 6.5 miles. Both S-20 and S-34 sank completely, and S-19 was critically damaged. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_torpedo#T-5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_torpedo#T-5
  - beloch 10y ago
    I have no solid evidence to help you, but my intuition says this is believable. Pressure waves can travel a long ways in dense media, and it's the interface between media of different densities, such as water of the ocean and the air inside a submarine, where the most devastating effects are felt. Jelly-fish swimming next to a submarine might not feel a thing even while the submariners inside the submarine are being smashed to bits.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - vonmoltke 10y ago
      Prior to WWII, that intuition led navies to greatly overestimate the lethal range of their depth charges. Once in combat, they discovered that they were way off, close to an order-of-magnitude in some cases.
mikeash 10y ago
A lot of weapons were nuclear (air to air missiles and anti-ICBM weapons are other examples) not because they necessarily needed the explosive power, but to make up for inaccuracy. Guidance in the 50s and 60s isn't what it's like today. When your weapon is likely to miss by several hundred feet, you can resign yourself to missing a lot of shots, or you can stick a nuclear warhead on it and take out the target anyway.
- hackuser 10y ago
  > A lot of weapons were nuclear ... to make up for inaccuracy In fact, I've read that that's the real reason for even the large strategic nuclear weapons: The accuracy of missiles launched from thousands of miles away is (or was) dreadful, but if you used strategic nukes, you still could take out the targets: The Kremlin, the naval base, etc. I've even read that modern 'smart' weapons (the article discussed Perry's work on them and their accuracy) could make nuclear weapons obsolete.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - mikeash 10y ago
    That was definitely a large part of it. Another part was the desire to maximize what you got out of a particular shot: if you have one bomb per missile, then you want each missile to pack maximum punch. Improving accuracy and the development of MIRVs both contributed to less powerful bombs becoming more desirable. I'm not sure about precision conventional weapons making nuclear weapons obsolete. I can see it for some cases. Destroying a missile silo can probably be done with a large normal bomb delivered with sufficient accuracy. Destroying an airfield would require a lot of bombs, impractical if you're delivering them on ICBMs. And destroying a well built underground command post probably requires nukes. Worse, sometimes cities really might be targeted deliberately, at least as a deterrent. A war limited to military targets might be seen as acceptable, while having cities destroyed could make it unacceptable, so there's incentive to threaten retaliation against cities in the event of an attack. No amount of precision lets conventional weapons substitute for nukes there. (Note that MIRV and better accuracy does still push for smaller weapons, as many smaller weapons detonated over an area is more efficient at destroying things than a single large weapon.)
graycat 10y ago
> And what of the submarine? Very good point. When I used to work in that stuff, it was assumed that once know where a sub was, it was easy to kill it -- just pop off a nuke and let the resulting pressure wave in the water crush the hull of the sub. Sounds like the Soviet nuke torpedo was a very low yield nuke -- if the sub would survive, then the explosion would not have been big enough to have been a trigger of full nuke war like, say, a 10 megaton nuke over a major city.
arethuza 10y ago
Of course, they might not have expected to survive the blast - a lot of people (e.g. bomber crews) expected their trips to be one way. Also, from what I recall from One Minute to Midnight the conditions on that sub had been absolutely awful for quite a lot time (in particular, no cooling) so they might not have been thinking particularly rationally.
vonmoltke 10y ago
Torpedoes haven't generally been "fairly close-range weapons" since WWII (air-launched torpedoes notwithstanding).

paavokoya 10y ago

Having flashbacks of 2001: Space Odyssey.. At first the apes postured with intimidation tactics, then one finally took the leap and started using the weapon. It's quite terrifying to consider just how natural and statistically probable it is for nukes to be used again.

wnoise 10y ago

Really makes you consider the anthropic principle.

sehugg 10y ago

Also a (currently unconfirmed) account of a belayed launch order given to Okinawa missileers during that time: http://thebulletin.org/okinawa-missiles-october8826 http://thebulletin.org/okinawa-missiles-october8826 Whistling past the graveyard indeed.

IanCal 10y ago

> There's only so many times humanity can roll the dice and come out clean Here's a related video on that thought from Minute Physics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRnU0bqsyq0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRnU0bqsyq0

krylon 10y ago

That is scary. Even if the submarine had fired a conventional torpedo, that probably would have escalated very quickly. In "The Fog Of War", McNamara, who was Secretary of Defense at the time tells a story of a meeting between him, Castro, and the man who was commander of the Warsaw treaty troops at the time (I forgot his name, though, sorry). The US apparently knew there were missiles on Cuba, but thought there were no warheads, yet. At this meeting (~1992-ish, I think), the Russian tells McNamara there were indeed enough warheads on Cuba at the time to destroy all major cities on the east coast of the US. So McNamara asks Castro if he knew of that and if he would have advised the Soviets to use the nuclear weapons on Cuba to retaliate against a US attack. Castro, apparently knew of the warheads and had urged the Soviets to use them in case of an attack, knowing full well that Cuba would have been destroyed completely. (At least that is how I remember McNamara telling the story, and assuming, of course, McNamara remembers the incident correctly and is telling the story accurately.)