The cost of US subs is largely driven by the safety of the designs. Before the Thresher accident they banged them out the same way the Russians did, but after t

The cost of US subs is largely driven by the safety of the designs. Before the Thresher accident they banged them out the same way the Russians did, but after that boat sank the US added a bunch of extra regulations that help prevent accidents. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SUBSAFE http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SUBSAFE Look at the list of submarine accidents on Wikipedia, you'll notice the modern US ones are all boats driving into things (this happens more than youd think, the sonar is set on passive 99% of the time and under sea mountains don't make any noise) while the Russians have had some nasty accidents with fire extinguishers and torpedeos leading to mass casuality incidents.