“Why, because they’re like huge trees?”
“Exactly. Each of these silos is about seven and a half feet in diameter and about forty feet high. The Louisiana carries twenty-four Trident D-5 fleet ballistic missiles, each with five independently targetable nuclear warheads. The D-5 is a threestage, solid propellant, inertially guided missile with a range of more than four thousand nautical miles.”
“So how do you get through there if you’re going aft?” asked Leona.
“Well, at the level of the main deck, there’s an elevated walkway. You know, like an open metal grate like you see in factories?”
“Yeah, and so you can get in between the silos?”
“Sure, there’s several feet of clearance between the silos. There’s a central walkway separating the port and starboard silos, and there are lateral walkways between each pair of silos leading to a couple of outboard walkways that run down the port and starboard sides of the boat.”
Leona pointed to the next section of the drawing. “Ooh, then you have the reactor compartment. I think I would stay away from there.”
“Most people do. Don’t worry, Leona, if you don’t have business in the reactor compartment or the engine room, you won’t be going back there. As a yeoman, you’ll spend all your time in the forward compartment. Generally, the only crewmembers who venture back to the engineering spaces are A-gangers — those are the machinery guys — and officers and enlisted members of M-Division, the guys controlling the nuclear reactor. The Ops and Admin types spend all their time forward. Still, everyone onboard has to wear a radiation-monitoring badge.”
“Oh great. Just to constantly remind you that no matter where you are on the submarine, you’re not that far from the nuclear reactor?”
Yeah, you’re never more than about seventy-five yards from deadly thermonuclear radiation!”
“Thanks a lot. You really know how to put someone’s mind at ease!”
“Just kidding. Our boats are extremely safe. We’ve never had a nuclear incident, although we continuously run drills so everyone knows how to handle it if we do.”
“Yeah, well I saw the movie about the Russian submarine that had the reactor accident… K-something?”
“K-19: The Widowmaker. That was a true story about a Soviet Hotel-class submarine, which had a catastrophic failure of its reactor coolant system. A team of eight engineering officers and crew jury-rigged a new coolant system, but they had to work for several hours in high-radiation areas. All eight of them died of radiation exposure within a week, and the rest of the crew got a healthy dose as well. As fellow submariners, we used to joke, “A primary coolant leak can ruin your entire day”!”
“Well you guys are a real hoot,” said Leona with a hint of irritation in her voice.
George turned back to the drawing.
“Okay, okay. Anyway, the engine room is the last compartment. The awesome power of the reactor and the ship’s engines is shown by the speed at which they can propel this submergible ‘building’ through the water. Although the Louisiana’s official maximum speed is published as being over twenty knots, and her maximum depth is stated to be over eight hundred feet, these figures are really conservative. In fact, her top speed is over forty-five knots, and she can operate at depths up to twelve hundred feet.”
“Really? That’s a big difference from the published numbers.”
“I know, but most of the time it really doesn’t matter. On a normal boomer patrol, these figures are somewhat meaningless. The boomer’s mission is to remain in her patrol area, within operational range of all of her missile’s targets, and to be as silent as possible. That means the Louisiana will rarely go below five hundred feet and rarely exceed five to ten knots.”
“Why not? It seems like if you go deep you can hide better.”
“That’s true, but we have to be at periscope depth to fire the missiles, so if we spend all our time real deep, we’re not really ready to fire. We also have to be near the surface to pick up the radio commands, which would tell us to fire. And besides that, changing depth and traveling at high speed generates noise, and noise generates attention. The one thing a boomer crew longs for is a boring patrol.”
“I thought submarine duty would be exciting.”
“Well, it used to be a little more exciting than it is now. During the Cold War years, the Soviet Union also had boomers on patrol with missiles targeted for cities and other strategic sites in the United States, and we had to keep track of where they all were so that if the balloon went up, we could take them out before they had a chance to launch their missiles.”
“Hmm, that doesn’t make sense to me.”
“Why not?”
“Well, if we were out there tracking their boomers, ready to sink them, what makes you think they weren’t out there tracking you, ready to sink you?”
“We had technology on our side. Soviet submarines were considered noisy by submarine standards, and because of that, U.S. forces generally had a pretty good idea at any one time of where all of the Soviet boomers were located. Our boats, on the other hand, enjoyed the advantage of technology, which enabled them to operate submerged for extended periods of time without generating noise that would lead to their detection by enemy attack submarines.”
“We were that much quieter than them?”
“Yeah, we were. We had computer-aided screw designs, which lessened the noise the large propellers made as they propelled our boats through the water. We also had super-quiet engines and super-quiet primary and secondary coolant pumps.”
“What are those?”
“Oh, they’re part of the cooling system for the nuclear reactor and the steam-generating plant that it powers. We had ours mounted on sound-absorbing mounts, which isolated any remaining noise from the hull. For the longest time, though, it seemed the Soviets must have just bolted theirs directly to the hull.”
“How do you know that?”
“I don’t really. It’s just their submarines were so noisy that if you took one of them out of the water, put it in a dry dock, and hooked up hoses to everything that needs water so you could operate the submarine as if it was submerged, it would deafen you to stand on the dock next to it without ear protection.”
“That’s amazing!” Leona continued to study the drawing. “So how many people serve on one of these?”
“The normal complement is fifteen officers and one hundred forty enlisted members.”
“Gee, and most of them crammed up here in the forward compartment… doesn’t that get a little crowded?”
“Yeah, it’s important to take a shower every day!”
“No, I’m serious. Doesn’t that cause a lot of stress with so many people being in such tight quarters?”
“Yes, it does, but we learn to tolerate each other while we’re on patrol for the sake of the mission. Some people tend to have problems, though, because of all the tension they have bottled up inside from the patrol. They get home, and they really let loose! The navy realizes the stress of this mission is enormous. So, patrols are limited to sixty days, and once off patrol, the crew is rotated to shore for R and R before starting a two-month training cycle leading up to their next deployment. In the meantime, an alternative crew takes the submarine on another sixty-day patrol.”
“There are two complete crews for every boomer?”
“Yes, the Blue Crew and the Gold Crew. The machine, it seems, is able to handle the hardships of patrols much better than the human crew.”
“But why is it so stressful, if all you’re doing out there is playing a long game of hide-and-seek?”