[Onkel Neal]

by Blair Shaw. Hmmm... that sounds familiar.

In the Beginning
With the cold war reaching a new level of tension following the detonation of Jo 1 the Soviet Unions first atomic bomb, it became very clear that not only was the world going to enter into a nuclear weapons race, but also a race to build a power generation system the likes the world had never before seen.

With much testing over the years in secret laboratories across the United States, France and the UK, the final goal of creating an effectively limitless power source for a military submarine eventually came to fruition in the USA, it was led by non other than Admiral Hyman G Rickover.

On the 17th January 1955 Captain Eugene Wilkinson flashed a message that ultimately changed the world of submarines forever, it simply read “Under way on nuclear power.”
In the sea trials and exercises that followed it proved that this was almost certainly the way to go for submarines, not only can they go faster for much longer, but they can cause chaos for the current anti submarine weapons of the time.

Oddly prior to this development the Soviet government had banned any study into the possibility of developing a reactor for a submarine, fearing it would slow down the production of the atomic bomb. however, With the Nautilus now proving such a threat and the realization that Nautilus was not going to just be a one-off project the sudden realization that the Soviets needed a boat to match was realized.

The Soviet side had been watching the program with a very keen interest, and as such eventually persuaded Joseph Stalin in 1952 to build their own boat, at this moment we can say the soviets now fully understood the United states had a weapons carrier that could approach from under the Polar ice and threaten the North of Russia or any coastline at will.
It also meant their anti submarine capabilities were rendered totally ineffective, and thus the order went out catch up and overtake.

The Race is on
With the Death of Joseph Stalin in 1953 the project looked like it would be cancelled while it was still being designed. However, with Nikita Kruschev coming to power and Admiral Kuznetsov in charge of the navy the realization was that this project must continue but for a different purpose.
The T15 project which was a large torpedo designed to get into and destroy the harbors of NATO forces was scrapped, and with the scrapping of this project the project 627 was altered to become a pure attack submarine using traditional torpedoes.

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