Nuclear sub moves shouldn’t be announced on social media

The first to lash out was Dimitry Medvedev, Russia’s former president who now serves as deputy chair of President Vladimir Putin’s security council. In a social media post on 28 July, he said a US ultimatum for Moscow to come to the negotiating table over Ukraine was a “threat and a step towards war.”

Later, he alluded to Russia’s “dead hand” nuclear launch system, which automatically fires a nuclear strike if the nation is attacked with such weapons.

US President Donald Trump responded to Medvedev by saying he had ordered two nuclear submarines “to be positioned in the appropriate regions.”

He also said, correctly, that “words are very important and can often lead to unintended consequences, I hope this will not be one of those instances.” Later, a Kremlin spokesman warned against “nuclear rhetoric.”

Between them, the US and Russia have more than 10,000 nuclear weapons. How dangerous is this war of words between the Kremlin and the White House? And what is the significance of Trump nuclear submarine claim?

I’m not a submariner (or a ‘bubblehead’ in US Navy parlance), but I’ve commanded them in combat as a commodore and a rear admiral, directed the launch of their conventional Tomahawk missiles at terrorist targets in Africa and Asia, and sailed in them.

I like to say these formidable warships are the apex predators of the ocean. And their locations are always kept secret.

As an anti-submarine-warfare officer for three years on a destroyer early in my career, I hunted both Soviet and Chinese subs and American ones in exercises.

We like to think of US destroyers as the greyhounds of the sea, lethal to submarines; but more often than not, we ended up the target rather than the hunter in those drills against US boats.

The US operates three types of nuclear-powered submarines, each posing a different level of threat.

It is unclear which of the three types Trump claimed to have moved around; all US nuclear subs are capable of clandestine operations across the globe.

First, and by far the deadliest, are huge ballistic-missile boats: Ohio class SSBNs, which displace 20,000 tonnes when fully submerged. The Navy has 14 of these killer whales, each capable of carrying 24 Trident II nuclear-tipped missiles with ranges exceeding 6,400km.

The missiles are in vertical tubes at the centre of the boat. While more than half the Ohio class are usually on at sea, it seems unlikely that Trump would have ordered changes to their movements given the extraordinary range of their missiles.

The second group of nuclear-powered submarines is the attack boats, or SSNs. The US currently operates three classes— Los Angeles, Seawolf and Virginia—and has just over 50 warships.

These are multi-mission platforms: they can hunt enemy submarines, launch long-range Tomahawk missiles at land targets with pinpoint accuracy, gather intelligence covertly and sink enemy military and civilian surface ships.

The three classes vary in size from 7,000 to 9,000 tonnes and their weapons and sensors vary—but all are deadly and difficult for acoustic surveillance to spot. I had two of them assigned to me once.

Finally, four Ohio-class behemoths have been converted to carry more than 150 Tomahawk land-attack missiles in the tubes that formerly held ballistic missiles. These are favoured by combatant commanders because of the big load of missiles, which constitute a strike group’s main battery.

Since the Tomahawk’s range is about 2,400km, these would probably be the boats Trump moved, presumably closer to Russia. He may have designated the commander of US European Command, my old position, as the operational commander.

These missiles could hold at risk Russian command-and-control nodes, supply routes and military targets.

That said, I have met Medvedev and he is not a serious player in Putin’s universe despite his political resume. Trump should ignore his erratic commentary and focus on putting pressure directly on the Russian economy.

For that, the best weapons are not “haze grey and underway,” as we say of the subs. They are economic tools, especially secondary sanctions applied to Russian oil customers and confiscation of Russian funds frozen in Western banks.

As tempting as it is to move nuclear submarines around, the means to bring Putin to the table are not America’s killers of the deep seas. ©Bloomberg

The author is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, a retired US Navy admiral, former supreme allied commander of Nato and vice-chairman of global affairs at the Carlyle Group.