Nuclear Submarines Research Articles

India's Nuclear-Armed Submarines: Deterrence or Danger?

In April 2016, India took a momentous step forward in its quest to complete the nuclear triad.1 INS Arihant—India's first indigenously-built, nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine (SSBN)—laun...

Power-with leadership practices: An unfinished business

This paper takes Mary Parker Follett's ideas of power-with and explores them within a contemporary context. Three illustrative case studies from a technology company, innovative manufacturer, and nuclear submarine are offered as ways of exploring the phenomenon. We find that in spite of being hailed for their revolutionary management styles, power-with is still challenging to operationalize especially given the tendency and culturally prevalent expectations to revert to hierarchical, leader-centric forms of guiding organizations. We propose a way forward based on power-with practices which organizations may adopt.

Sea changes: The future of nuclear deterrence

ABSTRACTIn order to deter adversaries, a nuclear-armed power must deploy an invulnerable second-strike force; its leadership must display the willingness to use that force under certain well-defined circumstances; and it must make believers out of the prospective foes it hopes to deter, convincing them that its capability is real, and it has the resolve to use it. But new technology is empowering navies to peer underneath the sea, finding deep-running submarines more effectively than ever before. This calls into question the invulnerability of nuclear-powered ballistic-missile submarines, the most invulnerable retaliatory asset there is. This article explores the dynamics shaping undersea nuclear deterrence in the second nuclear age and ventures some speculation about how submarine combat may unfold in the coming decades.

I. The Significance of the North Atlantic and the Norwegian Contribution

This chapter outlines the Cold War roots and features of Russian policy and strategy. It examines the positions and responses of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Norway both today and during the Cold War, focusing on their efforts to secure the maritime domain. The central thesis is that NATO needs to address the revitalised Russian bastion defence concept and counter the emerging anti-access strategy in the North Atlantic. The Soviet Union launched an ambitious strategic nuclear submarine building programme. In 1951–52, NATO set up two strategic commands: a European command led by Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR); and an Atlantic command led by Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic (SACLANT), based in Norfolk, Virginia. The military participates in international operations, especially in the Baltic and in the Middle East. Norwegian capabilities are a significant contribution to NATO's endeavour to counter Russian anti-access efforts and secure the maritime domain.

Barrels and bullets: The geostrategic significance of Russia’s oil and gas exports

ABSTRACTIn 1953, US President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about the hidden costs of what he was to later describe as the “military-industrial complex.” Ike said: “We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.” The leaders of today’s Russia face a twenty-first-century version of this dilemma, weighing the trade-off between spending on guns or butter. Russia’s own defense-industrial complex (known as the oboronnyi-promyshlennyi kompleks, or OPK) has been the recipient of billions of dollars in the past few years, as the state ordered new weapons such as the T-50 PAK-FA fifth-generation fighter aircraft, the Armata main battle tank, new nuclear-powered submarines, and strategic missiles. Should they continue the costly effort to remake their military into one of the most numerous and sophisticated forces in the world? Or should Russia’s leaders instead focus their efforts on investing in health, education, infrastructure, and other areas to help build a more dynamic and competitive economy? The answer to this question will be partially shaped by how much money Russia’s leaders will have to spend; with the crash in the value of oil exports – the unstable pillar of this Eurasian petro-state – what funds can they expect to draw upon? Decision-makers in the Kremlin will also be influenced by their perception of whether Russia faces a hostile geopolitical environment. If the current view prevails, it is possible that Russia’s leaders may choose to maintain military spending even as the economy sinks into stagnation.

Evaluation of Radionuclide Emission into the Environment in the Case of the Accident on the Sunken Nuclear Submarine B-159

Evaluation of Radionuclide Emission into the Environment in the Case of the Accident on the Sunken Nuclear Submarine B-159

Emerging from obscurity: small navies and sea-launched land-attack cruise missiles

ABSTRACTSea-launched land-attack cruise missile (SLCM) strikes, one of the most common expeditionary force projection tasks, is traditionally performed by major navies using long-range offensive platforms such as major surface warships and nuclear submarines prized for their range, endurance and capacity. By contrast, small navies are deemed unsuited for such a role, since they typically comprise small warships and conventional submarines, which thereby suit them for peacetime constabulary and wartime sea denial and defensive sea control missions. However, the Russian Navy's use of such assets in late 2015 to launch SLCM strikes against Islamic State (Daesh) targets in Syria demonstrates that expeditionary force projection is not an exclusive province of major navies. Attendant challenges such as the lack of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities may limit such roles by small navies but will still potentially spark greater interest amongst them in acquiring SLCMs to bolster their deterrent capabilities.

Technological Perspectives for Propulsion on Nuclear Attack Submarines

This work aimed at proposing a new combination of technologies to improve military performances and reduce costs of nuclear attack submarines, without overlooking safety constraints. The last generation of nuclear attack submarines increased size to meet safety and operational requirements, imposing huge burden on costs side, reducing fleet size. The limitations of current Technologies employed were qualitatively discussed, explaining their limitations. There are new technologies (plate and shell heat exchangers) and architectural choices, like passive safety, and segregation of safety and normal systems, which may lead to reduction of costs and size of submarines. A qualitative analysis was provided on this combination of technologies, stressing their commercial nature and maturity, which reduced risks. The qualitative analysis showed the strong and weak points of this proposal, which adopted the concept of strength in numbers. Concluding, new Technologies enabled the existence of 3800 t nuclear attack submarines with powerful propulsion systems and good acoustic discretion.

The three-dimensional shape of sea ice revealed by multibeam sonar

The life history of sea ice is written in its basal morphology. Sea ice progresses through several stages during its lifecycle, including frazil, nilas and pancake ice, until it bonds into a near-continuous sheet known as first-year (FY) ice. If this ice survives the summer melt-season, it becomes multiyear (MY) ice (Weeks & Ackley 1986). Both FY and MY sea ice have significant morphological variability, ranging from undeformed, level ice to heavily deformed or ridged ice. These variations lead to a complex, highly heterogeneous ice topography. Profiling the underside of Arctic sea ice was first performed by nuclear submarines (e.g. Wadhams 1988, 2000); however, since the end of the Cold War, military submarine transits of the Arctic have become less frequent and are insufficient to understand climate-induced trends. Therefore, deployment of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) equipped with upward-looking multibeam sonar represents an important innovation. Sea ice is not a homogeneous medium. It occurs in a wide variety of forms due to the various thermodynamic and dynamic forces it undergoes during its lifecycle of growth, decay and deformation. The greatest variability is associated with deformed ice in the form of ridges: long, quasi-linear features composed of blocks of ice, piled both above and below the relatively level ice surface. Ridge sails may be up to several metres in height above the sea surface and keels may reach depths of >40 m. These morphological variations lead to a complex, highly heterogeneous sea-ice topography that varies on scales from <1 metre to 100s …

Safety of Future NPPs Must Not Be in Conflict with Economics

The conflict between safety and economics requirements is peculiar to the present nuclear power (NP). The main point of the conflict is that for traditional type reactors the increase of requirements to safety of nuclear power plants (NPP) worsens their economical characteristics. This is caused by large potential energy accumulated in reactor coolant. In the presented paper the opportunity and expediency of changeover to reactors with heavy liquid-metal coolants (HLMC) in future NP is grounded. First of all, this refers to lead-bismuth coolant (LBC) mastered in the process of operating nuclear submarines (NS) reactors. The reactor facilities (RFs) of that type cannot cause destruction of defense barriers and make possible deterministic elimination of severe accidents with catastrophic radioactivity release. So it will make possible to eliminate the highlighted conflict and reasons for existence of population’s radiophobia. Lead-bismuth fast reactor SVBR-100 with electric power of 100 MWe is the reactor facility of that type. The effect of accumulated in coolant potential energy on safety and economics is considered. Main specific features of SVBR-100 technology providing a high level of inherent self-protection and passive safety are presented.

Thermal-hydraulic analysis under partial loss of flow accident hypothesis of a plate-type fuel surrounded by two water channels using RELAP5 code

Thermal-hydraulic analysis of plate-type fuel has great importance to the establishment of safety criteria, also to the licensing of the future nuclear reactor with the objective of propelling the Brazilian nuclear submarine. In this work, an analysis of a single plate-type fuel surrounding by two water channels was performed using the RELAP5 thermal-hydraulic code. To realize the simulations, a plate-type fuel with the meat of uranium dioxide sandwiched between two Zircaloy-4 plates was proposed. A partial loss of flow accident was simulated to show the behavior of the model under this type of accident. The results show that the critical heat flux was detected in the central region along the axial direction of the plate when the right water channel was blocked.

Sea-ice ploughmarks in the eastern Laptev Sea, East Siberian Arctic shelf

One of the major observations during marine interdisciplinary expeditions in 2011 and 2012 on the RV Akademik M.A. Lavrentyev and RV Viktor Buinitskii was the occurrence of a large number of ice scours in the East Siberian Arctic shelf (Lobkovsky et al. 2013). The scours vary in size, depth, spatial arrangement and age of generation. Maximum water depth for sea-ice ploughing of the shallow continental shelf depends on sea-ice ridge keel depth (Ogorodov 2011). Linear and curvilinear scours on the floor of the eastern Laptev Sea shelf at water depths ≤40 m are interpreted here as ploughmarks generated by sea-ice pressure ridges (Fig. 1). Ice ploughmarks in the Laptev Sea were first discovered in 1970 during the East Siberian Arctic shelf transect by US Navy nuclear submarine USS Queenfish (McLaren 2008). Fig. 1. Sea-ice ploughmarks on the eastern Laptev Sea continental shelf. ( a ) General bathymetric map of the study area from digitized navigation charts (Nikiforov et al. 2004). ( b ) Location of study area (red box; map from IBCAO v. 3.0). ( c , e , f , i ) Side-scan sonar sonographs of sea-ice …

Prediction and Evaluation of the Radioecological Consequences of a Hypothetical Accident on the Sunken Nuclear Submarine B-159 in the Barents Sea

Cross-border propagation of 137Cs in the Barents Sea as result of a hypothetical accident associated with a self-maintained chain reaction in the reactors on the sunken nuclear submarine B-159 is predicted. The possible radioecological consequences of the radioactive contamination of the marine environments are evaluated. The results obtained are compared with approaches used abroad.

Some features of the technogenic pollution of the Kara Sea, with the example of the sunken nuclear submarine K-27

This article discusses the results of offshore operations undertaken during a cruise of the R/V Professor Shtokman (2013) during an expedition in the fjord Stepovoi of the Novaya Zemlya Archipelago k]where the nuclear submarine (NPS) K-27 was scuttled in 1981 k]An echo sounding of her hull showed signs of water destratification k]which may be caused by turbulence from gas or heat flows outgoing from the hull k]According to the hypothesis of the author k]the presence of the reactors and radioactive nuclear fuel remnants may lead to the continued heating of the inner cavities of the submarine and k]as a consequence k]to constant heat flow from its surface k]which is an obvious danger k]including risks associated with plans to refloat and transport the submarine for the further dismantlement.

Неразрушающий контроль на «Северном машиностроительном предприятии»

“Sevmash” is one of the biggest Russian shipbuilding enterprises. Its capacity enables high-tech and knowledge-intensive projects to be fulfilled, such as manufacturing of spent nuclear fuel containers, building of modern nuclear-powered submarines (NPS) and marine engineering structures. The enterprise has mastered manufacturing of offshore platforms for oil and gas field development in the Arctic. Now “Sevmash” continues construction of nuclear strategic and multi-purpose submarines of the fourth generation “Borey” and “Yasen”.&#x0D; The article deals with the formation and development of non-destructive testing services from its beginning to the present day. Since 1950s, the radiography of hull structures welded seams and pipelines joints was the main testing method. In 1970s construction of new generation nuclear submarines began; it was necessary to create gamma flaw detectors of new design and they were created within 15 years. Besides in 1970s the active period began for development of ultrasonic testing instruments. In 1970s–1990s, concurrently with radiographic and ultrasonic techniques, testing of welds during the welding process with an acoustic emission method was carried out.&#x0D; In 1990s magnetic particle inspection of welded joints, radiation monitoring, leakage testing with the use of helium leak detectors and vacuum chambers had been extensively developed. The bubble vacuum method of welded connections testing was widely used in the process of repair and re-equipment of surface crafts. &#x0D; Today “Sevmash” actively re-equips its production facilities. It gives “Sevmash” the opportunity to built ships that meet the highest demands.

QUIT THE MASQUERADE AND HAVE MEETINGS THAT MATTER

Marquet explains how “groupthink,” fear, and stress in the workplace can conspire to keep people from saying things that need to be said, in meetings and otherwise. Drawing on research and on his previous career as the commander of the nuclear-powered fast attack submarine USS Santa Fe, he demonstrates that people must be free of artificial constraints, especially if leadership is to become a distributed attribute. It's better to have a well-prepared culture of empowerment. He writes, “We found that even in emergencies it was better not to have to tell people what to do. Telling people what to do means they can't figure out what to do on their own.”

Инженерно-экологическая оценка утилизации надводных кораблей с ядерной энергетической установкой

The article considers basic approaches to dismantling of nuclear-powered guided missile heavy cruisers on the example&#x0D; of the nuclear-powered guided missile heavy cruiser &amp;#34;Admiral Ushakov&amp;#34;, as well as conceptual questions of safety during&#x0D; planned dismantling. The major factors that have impact on choosing the strategy of dismantling and on ensuring nuclear,&#x0D; radiation and ecological safety of the personnel, population and environment during dismantling are considered. The&#x0D; conclusion is that maintaining and servicing decommissioned nuclear powered ships and their reactor installations, along&#x0D; with operations in the course of subsequent dismantling of nuclear powered ships have no fundamental differences from&#x0D; the corresponding conditions and operations for nuclear submarines. “Shiprepairing Center “Zvezdochka” JSC has longterm&#x0D; experience of maintaining and dismantling nuclear submarines, including fuel discharge of dozens of marine reactor&#x0D; plants. This experience convincingly confirms high reliability of procedures (including on nuclear and radiation safety and&#x0D; on inadmissible impacts on environment) embedded into domestic projects of marine reactor plants, and acceptability of&#x0D; regulations and technologies applied by “Shiprepairing Center “Zvezdochka” JSC during corresponding operations including&#x0D; such potentially dangerous ones as discharging nuclear reactors and further treatment of the spent nuclear fuel.

Russia's Place in a Polycentric Naval Setup

With its extremely long coastline, four strong fleets and abundant maritime resources, Russia cannot be viewed as just a continental power. A combination of rich naval traditions, enormous economic potential, technological expertise and independent foreign policy puts Russia in a category of global sea powers. That is exactly how it looked for most of the 20th century. Suffice to say that by the end of the Cold War era, Soviet warships and nuclear submarines posed a serious challenge to the US Navy. In the 1990s came a drastic decline in the naval capabilities of the country, but it did not last long – at any rate, not in historical terms. The early 21st century has been marked by an effort to rebuild the Russian Navy and increase its activities. Whilst trying to modernise its naval potential, Russia does not aim to change the status quo and expand its sphere of influence at the expense of others. Its primary purpose is to discourage other powers from dragging it into conflicts which, in the case of Russia's involvement and given its size and military might, could aggravate the international geopolitical order. This course is generally conducive to a greater polycentrism in global naval affairs, and a more stable world.

A Review of China's Technological Developments in the 20th Century

This paper presents a review of China’s technological development in the 20th century. The purpose of the review is to study the major technological inventions achieved by China in the 20th century that has brought significant impact to China’s technological development. In the 20th century, China has made great achievements in the field of space technology and also atomic energy. In space technology, China launched its very first satellite, Dong Fang1 (DFH1) (translated as Red East 1) and continued to improvise it in terms of performance in the field of spaceflight technology. In the same century, China also explored the area of atomic energy by building its very first nuclear-powered submarine, Chang Zheng 1 (translated as Long March 1). These technological developments achieved in the 20th century allowed China to be a step ahead of many other countries towards the advancement of technology. It is hoped that this review on China's influential role in the technological developments of the 20th century can be used as a useful references for other countries that wish to embark upon rapid and progressive technological developments.

Cold War Command: The Dramatic Story of a Nuclear Submariner

<i>Cold War Command: The Dramatic Story of a Nuclear Submariner</i>