A True Disaster Befell the K-278 Soviet Submarine

Here's What You Need to Remember:The death of forty-two of the sixty-nine crew aboard, most of them after they had successfully abandoned ship, caused an uproar in Russia.From a Western perspective, Soviet engineers seemed to approach their Cold War submarine as if they were high-performance jet fighters meant to out-slug, out-run and out-dive their adversaries in a swirling dogfight. Soviet submarines were usually significantly faster than their American counterparts, could take more punishment thanks to their double-hulled designs, and could nearly always dive twice as deep at five hundred meters.But the Soviet subs also had major weaknesses: they sufferedhorrifically high accident ratesdue to deficient radiation shielding and weak safety culture, and were much noisier. This allowed American subs to routinely detect and trail Soviet submarines without being detected in return. That acoustic stealth advantage is generally regarded as more useful in submarine warfare than the ability t...