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Originally Posted by Commander Wallace
This is really interesting. I'm very skeptical as to this method being used to track U.S Submarines. The then, Soviet Union tested this system on their own submarines, and for good reason. It was known that the Soviet Union dispensed with radioactive shielding where the hull wasn't in close proximity to it's human occupants. The Soviets just didn't care if they polluted the oceans and seas with radioactivity. They cared about their submariners little more.
By contrast, U.S Admiral Hyman Rickover practiced what could best be described as Nuclear Incrementalism. Radioactive shielding throughout the submarine was of the utmost importance as well as a degree of redundancy in the control rod systems to make the chain reactions more controllable and management of the chain reaction breeder reactor, virtually fool proof. As The U.S Submariners became more knowledgeable, Sub Nuclear systems became increasingly sophisticated. As a result, with a closed loop system, It's probable the U.S left little if any material behind to track.
It's also well know the Soviet Union suffered many catastrophic reactor accidents, most notably, in the submarine forces as they struggled to keep up with the West, especially, the U.S.
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While I agree with the statement about keeping up with the west in the early stages of the cold war from 45 to 75, like the West each new submarine class was leaps and bounds over what came before culminating in the finish with the impressive project 971 SSN, Project 949A SSGN and Project 941 SSBN.
What we witness is a mass buildup in the first part of the cold war of all types of submarines, to the point they even throw in obsolete boats to keep the numbers up, when we look at numbers take a look at project 613 Whiskey they were built in the 1950's and 215 built so it is clear what the intention was right from the start.
With the first generation of submarines the USSR was just finding their feet but they were cutting a lot of corners, I admire Rickover's approach people may not have liked it but I will say that if he was around today and mixing it up with OSHA and HSE I think the tune would be very different, here is a man who understands what this stuff can do and from the ground up is trying to mitigate failings kudos to him.
The soviets were well known for thinking outside the box, its just as simple as that, if they save weight they save time & money, the overall cost is a deficient boat and that's certainly true of the first generation boats.
The second generation boats were much better and much better thought out and the third generation were an improvement on this too.
The soviet union had so many incidents because of the system and cultural beliefs, no one wanted to fail, and were talking about a nation that has so much pride they hate being embarrassed.
Its the same pride you see in the USA with some of these amendment activists and USA is the best brigade the difference is that all of the failings in the USA are visible to see and we in the west have developed a way to face up to it and learn from it, unfortunately in the soviet union they didn't have the skill set to handle failures let alone admit to them they just wanted everyone to believe that the soviet union was a perfect utopia.
Other reasons behind the failings were shoddy workmanship, lack of training, lack of equipment, crews being assigned to unfamiliar boats and contradictory & impossible orders.
In other cases they did push the envelope too far and got burnt for it, the lead bismuth reactors for example were way ahead of their time even the Americans ultimately gave up on the sodium reactor as did the British with their fast breeder reactor.
Overall in order to understand the choices the soviets and now Russians choose you have to understand the mindset of them, overall keep it simple wins the day its why some of their stuff is so good.