Submergence by J. M. Ledgard

Author:J. M. Ledgard [Ledgard, J. M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781566893305
Publisher: Coffee House Press

A nuclear submarine is a killing machine, a destroyer of worlds, yet it is fragile. It implodes when it sinks out of its depth. In 1963, the United States submarine Thresher was wrecked with such violence that parts of it were scattered across an area several kilometers wide. There is no comparison between the technology of a submarine going across and the unadorned submersible diving deep. This is because our world is firstly about power and only secondly about knowledge.

Unsurprisingly, most advances in submersible technology have come from secret military projects. The United States Navy developed its own submersibles to clear up its own submarines and to locate and recover fragments of sunken Soviet submarines. A Soviet missile, if recovered, would have been worth years of spying on land. One of these submersibles was called Deep View. It had a glass nose and dived into the Sea of Okhotsk. Later there was the NR-1. It was powered by a small nuclear reactor and could stay submerged for weeks. The director of the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program handpicked its crew of two scientists and ten sailors. It was NR-1 that recovered a gold sextant from the debris of a Soviet sub, from which the navigator was able to calculate the sub’s position, according to the stars.

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