 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VA-111_Shkval |
Posted on 04/02/2015 1:41:43 AM PDT by Freelance Warrior
[Andrey] Sakharov [a Soviet dissident and one of the creators of the Soviet hydrogen bomb] gave a bitter description of this habitual psychological attitude in his Memoires, when he tried to find a military application for the Tsar Bomb:
After testing the "big" device I was worried that it didn't have a good carrier (bombers didn't count because they're easy to shoot down), in other words, in the military sense we were working in vain. I decided that an effective carrier could be a big torpedo fired from a submarine. I imagined that a nuclear jet engine that converted water to steam could be created for the torpedo. An enemy port, several hundred kilometers away, would be the target. A war at sea is lost when the ports are destroyed - so the navy tells us. The body of such a torpedo could have been made of very strong stuff, so that protective mines and nets would pose no threat. Of course, the destruction of ports -- either with an above-water blast from a surfacing torpedo with a 100-megaton charge or from a similar bomb - inevitably would entail very large number of casualties.
I discussed this project with Rear Admiral Fomin. He was shocked by the "atrocious" character of the project and noted in a conversation with me that military seamen were used to fighting armed adversaries in open battle and that the very idea of such mass killing [the population of the port] was repugnant to him. I felt ashamed and never discussed the project with anyone else.
(Excerpt) Read more at books.google.ru ...
When we first heard about Soviet “supercavitating” high-speed torpedoes, one objection was that, since they couldn’t maneuver, they would be useless against ships.
But with a nuke warhead against a stationary target like a port...
The nuclear torpedo project was actualy researched further in the Sovet Union, as the book I linked, describes.
The Tsar bomb had been useless only until the intercontinental missiles appeared on the stage.
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