All of these were braced tightly together and incorporated titanium into the design for extra strength. In the forward section between the parallel hulls were 20 missile tubes. On top of these and jutting under the huge sail was a third hull that contained the command center and in the bow was a fourth, which was the torpedo room.
Instead of a single pressure hull, the Typhoon had several. Its broad, flat outer casing hid an innovative design. These requirements meant a very large submarine indeed, with a lot of strength in its construction. This meant carrying another record breaker, the R-39 SLBM (submarine-launched ballistic missile), which weighed 84 tonnes and carried 10 warheads with an explosive yield of up to 200 kt. The problem was this required a boat that could operate under the ice thousands of miles from its targets and let loose 200 warheads and decoys on command. Its purpose was not to strike the first blow in a nuclear war between East and West, but to act as a massive nuclear strategic reserve that the Soviets could use in a second strike.
Largest submarine code#
To meet these challenges, the Project 941 Akula submarine, the NATO code name Typhoon, was conceived. In addition, the Soviet Navy's missile submarines were being boxed in by NATO's increasingly efficient submarine hunting forces, leaving them hiding in the Arctic Ocean under the ice cap. The real Typhoon was born in the 1970s as the Soviet Union reacted to the US Navy's new Ohio-class nuclear ballistic missile submarines, which upped the weapon load of the old Polaris submarines from 16 to 24 tubes that now carried the new Trident II missiles with multiple warheads. In the meantime, it inspired the thriller The Hunt For Red October, which was made into a film in 1990 and filled the gap about what was known by filling the fictional boat with fanciful technology. It was also an enigma since it entered service in 1981, with many of the boat's secrets not being revealed until the end of the Cold War in the 1990s. With its wide, bulky lines, a length of 574 ft (175 m), and a beam of 75 ft (23 m), the Typhoon was unmistakable. With a displacement of 48,000 tons, Russia's Typhoon-class submarines were so big that they were not only monsters by submarine standards, but their tonnage approached that of the WWII German battleship Bismarck. There are engineering feats that are record breakers and those that break records by a ridiculous margin. According to the Russian state news agency TASS, the Dmitry Donskoy, the first of the gigantic Typhoon submarines and the last still in service, has been officially decommissioned. A Cold War story has come to an end as the largest ever submarine is put out to pasture.
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