Russia’s First Doomsday Weapon: The Terrifying Legacy of the November-Class Subs

Russia’s November-Class Submarines, Defined: The Venture 627 “Package,” the Russian phrase for “whale,” grew to become the first-ever sequence of nuclear-powered submarines within the Soviet Navy (VMF). Fourteen 14 boats had been commissioned and operated by the Soviet Navy (VMF) between 1958 and 1990.

The November-Class: A Historical past 



The totally different fashions throughout the November-class recorded formally in Soviet naval information are: Okay-3 Leninskiy Komsomol), Venture 627A (Okay-5, Okay-8, Okay-11, Okay-14, Okay-21, Okay-42 Rostovskiy Komsomolets, Okay-50, Okay-52, Okay-115, Okay-133, Okay-159, Okay-181) and Venture 645 (Okay-27). The Okay designation is Russian for Kreyserskaya podvodnaya lodka (which means “submarine cruiser”).

Solely one of many ships stays intact in the present day, the Okay-3 hull, which is preserved as a naval museum within the pre-Soviet period capital of St. Petersburg. However regardless that not one of the subs nonetheless exist, their mission remains to be alive and effectively in in the present day’s more and more belligerent Russian army.

These subs had been created within the speedy post-WWII interval. They had been inbuilt response to a 1952 requirement for an assault submarine to fireside nuclear-tipped torpedoes at coastal American cities whereas submerged off-shore. Their operate was to make American cities uninhabitable by irradiating them quite than leveling them.

As irrational because it might sound—this has remained a part of Russian strategic army doctrine for many years and continues to at the present time.

If there’s a bloodline that the November-class subs may lay declare to, it’s the designation of being the primary weapon system particularly designed for this end-of-the-world mission. It was the primary “Doomsday Machine” ever to be produced within the USSR.

Nuclear Obsession

The Kremlin in the present day retains an much more pronounced and seemingly psychotic fixation with destroying American cities by showering them with radiation. It’s an obsession that continues to be on the Russian management’s record of priorities even to at the present time.

Since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, both Russian President Vladimir Putin (or certainly one of his surrogates) has surfaced at common intervals to warn the West of how he plans to make use of nuclear weapons towards the West if he someway feels appropriately “threatened.”

Previously few years, these threats have escalated as the event of platforms that might perform this doomsday mission – as soon as the protect of the November subs – have been steadily feeding Putin’s diatribes about annihilating the West.

These are superior designs meant to take the place of a few of the manned nuclear-powered subs that had been designed a long time in the past to destroy the cities of North America. These virtually science-fiction ideas of methods to make battle within the US have advanced from “comedian book-type briefings current to the Fuhrer to real-world methods that don’t have any function in a traditional army that’s run in response to rational standards to precise weapons methods with a one-way nuclear mission,” mentioned a Russian colleague with lengthy expertise in Moscow’s protection industrial complicated.

The Household Line

Initially briefed to Putin virtually a decade in the past, the latest of those weapons platforms is an underwater, long-range drone known as the Poseidon.

The Poseidon is a nuclear-powered uncrewed underwater automobile developed by the identical Rubin Design Bureau that designed the November-Class subs. This design bureau, primarily based in St. Petersburg, has constructed over two-thirds of the Russian nuclear submarine fleet.

These aware of the latest historical past of these kind of new-generation nuclear drones know that they’re a continuation of the “nuclear blackmail” technique. A “useless hand” that can wipe out the US and its allies lengthy after the Russian command bunkers and different nuclear supply methods have been worn out.

The November-class subs started this Alpha-Omega “chain” of platforms designed to destroy America. They had been a precedence in a method {that a} common submarine was not once they had been developed.

Nonetheless, the variety of design facilities and different protection enterprises answerable for the November subs program confirmed that it was not simply one other undersea boat. It was a nationwide “race to the moon” program. The one motive that they had been constructed was to be sure that the USSR may “win” a nuclear battle lengthy after it was misplaced.

Their current-day legacy of those late-Fifties subs is that Moscow remains to be keen to spend billions of {dollars} constructing 4 of those Poseidon-carriers. At the moment, they symbolize over a tenth of the long run Russian undersea fleet.

This can be a testimony to the significance Putin’s regime locations on the doomsday torpedo. The identical significance that his predecessors had invested within the November-Class subs.

In regards to the Writer: Reuben F. Johnson 

Reuben F. Johnson is a survivor of the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and is now an Knowledgeable on International Navy Affairs with the Fundacja im. Kazimierza Pułaskiego in Warsaw. He has been a marketing consultant to the Pentagon, a number of NATO governments and the Australian authorities within the fields of protection know-how and weapon methods design.  Over the previous 30 years he has resided in and reported from Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Brazil, the Individuals’s Republic of China and Australia.