[maxbond]

Somewhat tangentially, I've been wondering why the Soviets weren't able to locate K-129. From what I've read, they searched in a location hundreds of miles away from where SOSUS detected an implosion - why didn't the Soviets pick it up? Surely they had a hydrophone array?

[jcrawfordor]

Well, one answer is that US hydrophone technology was probably superior at the time - but that's not necessarily a well-established fact, mostly an assumption. Still, it would stand to reason. SOSUS benefited greatly from cutting-edge research into acoustics that Bell Labs had been performing for other reasons, the Soviet Union probably didn't have the hydrophone technology or the undersea cable technology it relied on.

There's a more interesting answer if you want one, although this is decidedly a conspiracy theory with, I would say, "medium" credibility within the realm of conspiracy theories. Some believe that both K-129 and Scorpion were sunk by enemy action, K-129 having been sunk by an accidental collision with the Swordfish and Scorpion having then been torpedoed in retaliation. The story goes that the admiralty of both countries, agreeing this situation could rapidly escalate into an undesirable war, agreed to suppress information on the cause of both incidents. The Soviet search for K-129 and American search for Scorpion could both have been cover operations.

Yeah, it doesn't make total sense, and the evidence supporting this theory is a combination of circumstantial and recollections of people in their 80s. Besides, in the later sinking of the Kursk, Russian leadership immediately blamed a collision with a US submarine. But obviously the Russian political climate of 2000 was very different from 1968. It's a fun conspiracy theory.

A more interesting conspiracy theory is that K-129 was on a rogue mission to launch nuclear weapons on the US and was torpedoed by the US (once again perhaps by Swordfish, it was in the right place at the time) to prevent this after being tipped off by by the USSR. If that sounds a bit like the plot of The Hunt for Red October, well, it does. The evidence for this story is not nonexistent but it's pretty limited, and no one takes it very seriously.

Still, it gets at one of the oddities of K-129: the Soviet Union searched for it in its assigned patrol area, but the wreck was ultimately found far away from its assigned patrol area. I don't think anyone has a really good explanation for this. It was not at all typical for Soviet submarines to go off on their own, Moscow kept very tight control of them. So it seems that either Moscow didn't know where K-129 was (perhaps suggesting some kind of plot, whether of defection or rogue attack who knows), or they knew where it was and searched elsewhere to avoid showing their hand (suggesting K-129 was on some sort of very secret mission). I tend to suspect the latter is more likely, K-129 may have been ordered to leave its patrol area and approach the US as a show of force (this happened at other points in the Cold War) and when it was lost the search was conducted in the normal patrol area to avoid revealing that had happened. All indications are that SOSUS was successfully kept secret from the USSR for quite some time, although certainly not all the way until 1991.

Tom Clancy seems to have based The Hunt for Red October at least in part on rumors about K-129. Yeah, I watched too many submarine movies and read too many submarine books as a kid. What can I say, I had a middle-aged father.

[maxbond]

Gotcha. Thank you for the detailed response.

I think maybe I'm underestimating the complexity of the technology. It seems like it shouldn't be that hard, I'm kinda imagining something like a weather station or a seismometer. But one thing you've helped me realize is that, at minimum, that comparison fails to account for the complexities of operating in a marine environment.

And the undersea cables operative to passive sonar? Or are they more to prevent the stations from being identified and their signals intercepted, as would be the case of if it were over radio?

> The wreck was ultimately found far away from its assigned patrol area

Maybe I'm just naive to submarine stuff, I know very little, but this doesn't seem that weird to me. If everyone died onboard from, say, a fire, the vessel might keep steaming for a long time. Presumably, the CIA has a good idea if that's the case, for all the good that does us.

[jcrawfordor]

I think one of the big challenges at the time was how to install the hydrophones, although as I recall there was also a novel type of hydrophone being used. AT&T had invested a lot of effort into figuring out how to not only build long cables that would survive in undersea conditions, but also deliver power on those cables to active equipment (repeaters in the case of undersea telephone cables, hydrophones in the case of SOSUS). This involved putting several-kV (I think into the tens of kV on long cables) DC onto elements of the cable, and it was hard to design a cable that was reasonable to lay but could take that potential without dielectric breakdown. Remember this was in an era where paper was still a popular insulating material on communications cables, if not lead. DC had to be used instead of AC because on these extremely long cables the capacitance between the two current-carrying elements would end up eating up most of the power you put into it.

Between Bell Labs and Western Electric, AT&T had a lot of practical expertise in designing and manufacturing some really complex cable bundles with high voltage and sensitive communications pairs nearby. This pretty much all became obsolete as soon as fiber started taking over in the '80s, but it was pretty incredible how many coaxial pairs AT&T was cramming into a buried cable (along with power for all the en route equipment!) in the '70s. Hell, AT&T famously held off on fiber for years because they had a plan to bury long microwave waveguides like cables!

[etimberg]

The book Red Star Rogue by Kenneth Sewell goes in depth on the theory that K-129 sank while on some kind of mission to launch a nuclear weapon.

[jcrawfordor]

I kind of wanted to say Sewell but I wasn't sure I remembered the name right and I guess I was too lazy to look it up---but that's the one. Sewell is a big advocate of this theory but I think most people, even conspiratorial ones, think of him as kind of a crank. I haven't read the book so I won't judge too harshly, I just know that the rogue nuclear mission theory sort of hinges on a lot of political currents within the Kremlin and KGB that aren't in evidence elsewhere.

[apawloski]

Re: Scorpion, I’ve been persuaded by the argument put forth In Blind Man’s Bluff, that a faulty torpedo battery overheated and kicked off a sequence of events ultimately resulting in sinking and implosion.

[ericbarrett]

I'm about 3/4 of the way through Blind Man's Bluff. Highly recommended if you have any interest in Cold War history; it's a gripping read.