Forget Tom Cruise and Top Gun 3. After President Donald Trump’s astonishing comments about repositioning Ohio-class nuclear submarines, perhaps Hollywood should remake The Hunt for Red October. The classic 1990 submarine thriller starred former 007 actor Sean Connery as a Russian navy captain trying to prevent nuclear war by defecting to the United States with the Soviet Union’s killer nuclear-armed submarine, the Red October.
The SSBN Ohio-class Trident ballistic missile submarines or “boomers” carry 20 intercontinental missiles with multiple nuclear warheads apiece. They patrol underwater for weeks at a time without resurfacing. U.S. presidents basically never talk about their tactical locations. Yet last Friday, Trump broke that rule for a good reason: reminding Russia that the deadly Trident submarine fleet assures Russia will never win a nuclear war. “I have ordered two nuclear submarines to be positioned in the appropriate regions, just in case these foolish and inflammatory statements are more than just that,” Trump wrote Aug. 1.
Trump’s move to put the submarines in position is nuclear signaling that goes well beyond Ukraine. The range of the Trident missiles is about 4,000 miles. For maximum deterrence, the submarines patrol in an area where they are in the optimal range to hold Russian targets at risk. On Sunday, just to make sure, Trump announced that the nuclear submarines were “in the region.”
TRUMP LIFTS VEIL ON US SUBMARINES IN WARNING SHOT TO KREMLIN IN ‘CLEVER’ REPOSITIONING MOVE
Here’s why Trump’s Armageddon chess move with the Ohio-class submarines should send chills down your spine.
Undetectable. Trump was provoked by ex-Russian president Dmitry Medvedev’s remarks on the so-called “dead hand” or Perimeter system, where Russian nuclear weapons allegedly launch automatically even if leadership is knocked out. Trident submarines are a guarantee of deterrence because they cannot be targeted. Russian nuclear warheads on intercontinental ballistic missiles could reach the U.S. in approximately 30 minutes. However, the Trident system is the most secure leg of America’s strategic triad because they are “virtually undetectable in the opaque oceans of the world,” says Submarine Force Pacific, which operates eight Tridents. That means the nuclear weapons on submarines would survive any Russian (or Chinese) strike. For that reason, the submarines are considered the heart of nuclear deterrence.
Multiple warheads. These submarines are enormous. At over 550 feet long, they are nearly two times the length of a football field. Their 18,000-lb. displacement is twice as heavy as a U.S. Navy destroyer and more in line with a World War II aircraft carrier. The Ohio-class has to be big, for they carry 20 Trident II D5 missiles which are themselves 44 feet long. Each missile holds multiple, independently-targeted re-entry vehicles or MIRV for short. Warhead options include 100 kilotons, 400 kilotons and the new low-yield 5 kiloton warhead, deployed in 2020 in case “potential adversaries, like Russia, believe that employment of low-yield nuclear weapons will give them an advantage over the United States and its allies and partners,” the Pentagon said at the time.
They are survivable. No GPS? No problem. The submarines also navigate by ocean-floor bathymetric maps and the missiles fly with old-school inertial guidance systems. Because the boomers are mobile and well-nigh undetectable at sea, they cannot be targeted. Their mission is to lurk at sea to ensure that no Russian pre-emptive strike can take out all of America’s nuclear arsenal. The ultra-quiet Ohio-class takes advantage of the longer Trident II D5 missile ranges to operate in literally tens of millions of square miles of ocean.
China’s building up their nukes. This week, China’s taken a “nothing to see here” attitude, but you know they are monitoring Trump’s every word. A Chinese navy “Great Wall” submarine for the first time joined Russian naval wargames in the Sea of Japan this week. China’s nuclear arsenal surpassed 600 nuclear warhead last year on the way to an arsenal of 1500 by 2035, the Pentagon reported.
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Eighty years have passed since B-29 bombers of the United States Army Air Forces dropped atomic weapons on Hiroshima on Aug. 6 and Nagasaki on Aug. 9. This generation of Americans is not familiar with nuclear posturing. From Kennedy to Reagan, American presidents relied on nuclear-armed submarines at sea to keep the peace. The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 relaxed the nuclear posture considerably. Then came Putin and his delusions of Russian grandeur at a cost of close to one million casualties in Ukraine.
Fortunately, America’s nuclear Triad is built so that Putin knows the submarines will always have the last word. The replacement Columbia-class is already under construction, and a high priority for Secretary of the Navy John Phelan.
These boomers truly can go anywhere without a trace. It’s the ultimate deterrent, as the Russians perfectly well know.
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