Broken Arrows

cthia wrote:

Thanks. And you are quite welcome.

BUT!

How dare you try and downplay the WOW&WOE FACTOR of your own post! This is what I was hoping for. An assemblage of any type of nuclear accidents, broken arrows or whatever, that would be interesting. I had no idea of any of Russia's broken arrows! Of course I should have known since they gave us the Chernobyly Disaster.

In fact it has led me on a journey of interesting discoveries replete with pictures and video.

I cannot find any references regarding this telling and tantalizing tidbit thrown out of yours that is radiating a high intensity of mystique...

I won't go into the stupidity of the Russian government scuttling of nuclear reactors in the waters off their Siberian coast.

and the suspenseful curiosity is killing me. LOL

One good turn deserves another thank you for your quite interesting post. Though sobering it is.[/quote]

I was in the Atlantic Fleet in USS Caron (DD 970) when the Yankee K-219 was lost with 15 (not 16 SLBMs) aboard in the Atlantic. I'm not certain if there were any nuclear tipped torpedoes aboard but it wouldn't surprise me. There's actually a good write-up about the boat and his sinking in Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_submarine_K-219

He lies on the bottom in about 3,000 fathoms (18,000 feet) of water.

K-278, the prototype "Mike" class SSN was lost in the Barents Sea in 1989 with 2 nuclear torpedoes aboard.

Again there is a Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_su ... omsomolets

Other boats have been lost as well, the Golf (K-129) that Glomar Explorer partially salvaged had 3 SLBMs aboard and perhaps 2 nuclear torpedoes.

To my knowledge what was recovered is still classified well above Top Secret (Codeword material.) I don't know if any of the missiles or torps were recovered.

Which is rather silly at this point, since the Russians know exactly what was on board, and will always have assumed that _all_ of it was recovered. When classified material is lost, that's the only safe assumption for planning purposes. [there was an interesting set of emergency supercessions after the Pueblo incident, and I was told that even that paled by comparison with the fall of Saigon.]

The deep-sea salvage capability might have been worth protecting at the time, but is long since obsolete.

robert132 wrote:To my knowledge what was recovered is still classified well above Top Secret (Codeword material.) I don't know if any of the missiles or torps were recovered.

Security organs are not likely to de classify anything if they avoid it, purely on general principles.

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Which is precisely why it's silly: you end up trying to protect secrets that aren't, anymore, or that you've forgotten you have. That not only brings the whole system into disrepute but enlarges the scope of the operation to the point where it can become ineffective.

Annachie wrote:Security organs are not likely to de classify anything if they avoid it, purely on general principles.

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Louis R wrote:Which is rather silly at this point, since the Russians know exactly what was on board, and will always have assumed that _all_ of it was recovered. When classified material is lost, that's the only safe assumption for planning purposes. [there was an interesting set of emergency supercessions after the Pueblo incident, and I was told that even that paled by comparison with the fall of Saigon.]

The deep-sea salvage capability might have been worth protecting at the time, but is long since obsolete.

robert132 wrote:To my knowledge what was recovered is still classified well above Top Secret (Codeword material.) I don't know if any of the missiles or torps were recovered.

Yeah, and the biggest set of compromises of all was from the acts over several years by John Walker and company. Much of what he turned over to the Soviets was encryption/decryption material compatible with the hardware captured in USS Pueblo.

This I remember very well, I was part of the intelligence community during my misspent youth. We and the Naval Telecommunications community HAD to assume that EVERYTHING that was ever transmitted over Navy circuits while this ******** (insert appropriate seafaring language) was dealing with the Soviets was compromised. We had to assume that nothing was safe.

If it had been left to me I would have hanged the whole bunch and then dropped them off the fantail in deep water with no ceremony like so much garbage, "rigged to sink."

The "cleanup" and recovery from the damage took years and the damage done cost us hundreds or thousands of lives in Vietnam and other "places."

And this is why I would have hanged Manning, Assange and Snowden. I hold a very dim view of actions like theirs.

hmmm... I'm not sure how much damage - as opposed to embarrassment - they actually did. I've been out of the loop for 35 years [and was never very far inside it anyway, so would know little to start with] and nothing in what they revealed was a surprise. If I'd bothered thinking about it, I would have anticipated it, with the possible exception of how much the Kiwis were involved. And if it didn't surprise me it certainly shouldn't have surprised anybody who was actually in the cross-hairs. Confirming capabilities is never a good thing, true, but any opponent who doesn't assume you have them is probably falling down on so many fronts you've got him anyway. Worse, if you're _that_ dependent on them, _you're_ falling down rather badly yourself.

robert132 wrote:< snip >
And this is why I would have hanged Manning, Assange and Snowden. I hold a very dim view of actions like theirs.

Louis R wrote:hmmm... I'm not sure how much damage - as opposed to embarrassment - they actually did. I've been out of the loop for 35 years [and was never very far inside it anyway, so would know little to start with] and nothing in what they revealed was a surprise. If I'd bothered thinking about it, I would have anticipated it, with the possible exception of how much the Kiwis were involved. And if it didn't surprise me it certainly shouldn't have surprised anybody who was actually in the cross-hairs. Confirming capabilities is never a good thing, true, but any opponent who doesn't assume you have them is probably falling down on so many fronts you've got him anyway. Worse, if you're _that_ dependent on them, _you're_ falling down rather badly yourself.

robert132 wrote:< snip >
And this is why I would have hanged Manning, Assange and Snowden. I hold a very dim view of actions like theirs.

Many of the documents Snowden and Manning handed over to Assange (and Moscow in Snowden's case) dealt with "sources and methods," not so much what our intelligence efforts dug up but HOW they did it.

Once an opponent knows you are reading XXXXX traffic due to a certain weakness that was unknown to him, that source dries up rather quickly. Or if he learns that certain people have been passing information to the US or allies those certain people vanish quickly and usually permanently.

Some of the documents published led the Taliban to try to find people who were passing information on them to the US, but no names were given. "No problem" Mr Taliban says, "we'll simply execute whole families and villages just to be certain we get the right ones." And they did, hundreds of otherwise innocent people turned up either in mass graves or in piles of dead bodies, many tortured.

A good intelligence service is going to protect its sources and methods. Thanks to these three cretins and others in their "crusade" to strip away veils of secrecy from "evil" government and politicians (the "ruling elite") they also stripped away the protection the sources who were keeping our people in Afghanistan and other areas safe depended upon.

Admittedly not always, but usually classified information is classified for good reasons.