Vic Socotra

30 July 2008

The Golden Fish

Golden Fish in black, March 1987, briefly underway

I feel bad for Senator Stevens this morning. The former Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee is under indictment on seven counts of hanky-panky. The longest-serving Republican Senator was someone we had to deal with in the Navy back in the days of the C old War, when Alaska was in the front lines against the Soviets.

I’ll tell you about the fun and games we had on the wild and desolate island named Adak in the Aleutians sometime. That is when I had a chance to play submarine games, and was the lead analyst on Soviet Attack submarines for the Pacific Fleet.

The whole thing was wildly improbable, but I liked it a lot. I had to keep a lot of facts straight on long scrolls of graph paper. I was wrong a lot, so often I would spend whole mornings erased information attributed to one anonymous black hull and connecting the dots to another. There was an awful lot to keep straight; there were dozens of classes of submarines to worry about. One of them was the World’s Fastest Submarine, though thankfully it20was in the Northern Fleet, and not my direct problem.

She popped up again this week, and taken with Senator Stevens problems, made me think of the Wild West days under the waves.

We called her the “PAPA” class submarine, since if someone knew her real name, it was a very deep secret indeed. We used the NATO naming convention for Soviet nuclear attack submarines, and when it appeared on our overhead pictures, it was assigned the name after "Oscar" and before "Quebec" Then the boys at Naval Intelligence in Suitland Maryland had to figure out what it was for.

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The Russians had many classes of submarines, most intended to do different things. By the early 1980s we were starting to run out of letters. That is how “Akula,” or “Shark” in Russian came to be, and it was a formidable attack submarine, as one would expect with the alphabet starting over again.

This was all secret at the time. What we did know was that Papa was the fastest attack submarine ever built. The submarine was known to its owners first by the project name, known first as the K-162 and later the K-222 to its Northern Fleet crews, clocked a speed of 44.7 knots during sea trials in 1969, shuddering and writhing all the way. The ship served as a technology test-bed for the subsequent high-speed, deep-diving ALFA class.

Of course, our analysts didn’t know that until we observed the derivative class. We had to take everything we saw at face value. K-222 was laid down on December 28, 1963, and commissioned on December 31, 1969, at Severodvinsk. She was assigned to the Soviet Red Banner Northern Fleet for the duration of her solitary career.

The K-222 was know to its crew as “The Golden Fish.” That was not so much a factor of the luxurious nature of her appointments, but rather the expense required to repair her super-strong titanium hill and unique reactors.

Golden Fish achieved its high speed by using a novel titanium hull and a pair of VM-5m type pressurized water reactors generating 177.4 megawatts of power, which in turn drove two steam turbines connected to two props driven at 80,000 shaft horse power.
The ship was very noisy and uncomfortable at its top speed, and since it was far faster than its crude sonar sensors, it was essentially blind down there in the water.

Imagine it as a sort of underwater lawn-dart. The men who sailed her probably did. At speed we could hear her through our sensors hundreds of miles away, just as they could only listen to the whine of her own shafts as they hurtled toward Lenin-knows-what.

In addition to pioneering the high-speed technologies that later were incorporated into the Alfa class, the K-222 also led to the Russian Charlie-class guided missile submarines, built to fire cruise missiles at U.S. Navy carrier groups. The Papa-class carried 10 SS-N-9 “Siren” missiles.

We had to invent the terminology for all the weapons, just like we did for the submarines that carried them. It was much easier for the Russians to keep it straight. The Soviet engineers who built it designated the missile as the P-120 MALAKIT (in English, that is the mineral malachite). It was intended to be a medium-range cruise missile originally entering service on the surface NANUCHKA-class and TARANTUL-class surface corvettes. The CHARLIE II guided missile submarine later carried them, as well.

Much as we love the ships, the mission is about what they carry, and what they can do when ordered to do something.

The Siren was optimized to attack aircraft carriers like the ones where I did my office job planning strikes on the Russians and their surrogates. The trick to the missile- they all have tricks- was that it flew a pop-up profile at high sub-mach speeds, and had dual terminal attack seekers: one was an active radar and the other an infrared homing to complicate our defensive countermeasures. The weapon could also accept mid-flight course corrections from super long-range TU-95 Bear Delta bomber.

I have a picture in my files taken by one of our Phantom crews in neat formation with one of tho se Condor-like four-engine dual-prop aircraft, the fliers waving back and forth quite cheerily.

When the tricks were all done, either controlled from afar or on it’s own, the SIREN’s business-end could be fitted with either a 1,100-pound conventional explosive payload, or a nuclear warhead with a variable yield in the range of hundreds of kilotons.

They were scary, but not nearly as scary as the SS-N-22 SUNBURN, which comes at you at mach speed at wave-top heights, with no pop-up on terminal. The Chinese have added a version to their inventory, by the way, big as life and brand new, purchased with the WalMart profits they made over the last decade.

Golden Fish has a history as a literary star, too, appearing in the Tom Clancy novel "Red Storm Rising." She engages in a cat and mouse chase with the frigate USS Reuben James, a wild sprint-and-drift engagement, before ultimately being sunk. Fiction is more gallant that reality.

The K-222 suffered some kind of accident with one of its nuclear reactors in 1980 while undergoing maintenance in a shipyard. The last operational picture of her was taken in 1987, just before the bad times started for the Red Banner Fleets. By 1988 the submarine was placed in reserve storage, moored at the Bolomorsk Naval Base in Severodvinsk.

The boat will be dismantled at Sevmash, the only facility capable of handling the super-strong titanium hull, and starting the process by which the world’s fastest submarine will be transformed into something useful, like long-lasting razorblades that produce a really close shave.

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