Media, blogs and technology - today: Nuclear submarines

Well, sometimes journalists and bloggers should think a little bit before writing. There is some hassle in media and blogs about a collision of two nuclear missle submarines. Well … there is something important about ballistic missle submarines. They are quiet, they are really quiet. They have to designed this way, as normally attack submarines are assigned to them. Their role: Sink the missle submarine before it launches it rockets. It´s quite easy to sink a submarine in comparision to intercept ballistic missiles. Okay, the problem is: In the case you have to hide from unfriendly submarines, you can´t unhide for friendly submarines. Furthermore: Such a crash could only happen at slow speeds. Laws of physics mandate that a submarine is louder at higher speed. Furthermore missle submarines have excellent passive sonar systems. They have to be this way. You don´t use active sonar, as this is like a sign “shoot me”. It´s the same with radar. You can detect the existence of a radar emiter on a greater range than it´s usable range for detecting things. So you know the position of submarine over a greater distance than the effective range of the sonar by detecting the sonar waves. Missle submarines are designed to be almost silent at slow speed and there are some jokes that you can´t detect some submarines by it´s sound emisions. You can just detect it by sounds that aren´t there like ambient noise emission that are covered by the submarine. At a higher speed the noise would be detected at greater certain distance and the submarines could aviod each other. It´s safe to assume that they operate at slow speed, as they don´t have to travel great distances … they just have to disappear in the water. Submarines are really stable construction. Nevertheless they can sink at certain impact speeds. But at such speeds they would be able to detect each others. And by the way: Sinking nuclear submarines are not sooo uncommon. I think both submarines weren´t aware of the other submarines. When both submarines operate in the same area, this is really bad luck. And by the way, it´s much more probable to collide with a container at sea than with another submarines. Someone told me that´s quite a regular occurance that a container freighter looses a container. And a loaded 40 foot container is quite a large obstacle in the way. So bad jokes about the military or catastropic scenarios are widely overblown. And by the way, i would like to read articles in blogs or media that really think about the stuff they write about. When you want to be really afraid of nuclear submarines … just think about the old and rotting russian submarines near Murmansk in the Barents Sea. That´s really a problem