This has been bugging me for a long time. The US Great Lakes are huge, and no enemy attack submarine could reasonably expect to penetrate the locks and gain entry, much less sail up the seaway. US boomers could operate with impunity several hundred feet under the lakes and have a high expectation of surviving a first strike.
As a practical matter, the draft of the current Ohio class is such that they couldn’t get through the St. Lawrence Seaway and the locks because they aren’t deep enough, but that is no reason that the boats couldn’t be purpose built on the lakes. Wouldn’t it make deterrence sense to have a portion of the fleet where enemy wessels simply could not hunt them down?
There are no “US Great Lakes”. All of the lakes are shared with Canada, for one thing, and what exactly are you protecting yourself from with this? An attack from Canada?
Michigan is a US Great Lake, albeit that hydrologically Michigan, Huron, The North Channel, and Georgian Bay can be considered a single water body. Superior, Huron, Erie and Ontario are not shared, but rather are divided into separate distinctly bounded American and Canadian territories.
Lake Michigan is entirely within the US, no? And the idea was for a nuclear deterrent against the USSR that was close to home and still very difficult for the USSR to target. Keeping a boomer in Lake Michigan would be presumably easier than keeping one in the Atlantic with the same benefits.
I don’t think they’d even need to be built with the intention of survivng a nuclear strike because wouldn’t they have already launched as soon as any incoming threat was detected? I’d imagine (as I think you do) that their main benefit is as an additional deterrent since they could operate with mobility without being located anywhere across a vast area, and since they’ll not be required to go as deep or withstand an attack they presumably can be built for much cheaper than a conventional sub. It’s a good question.
No saltwater corrosion: +1
Collision with Edmund Fitzgerald: -1
During the nuclear arms race, land based nukes’ range couldn’t cover the entire world, so range was extended with subs and planes.
Putting a sub in the same territory as land based nukes would not have extend range of the American nuclear arsenal, and would have drawn on resources that otherwise could have been put to better use, e.g. salt-water SSBNs that could greatly extend the arsenal’s range and response time.
A Trident II missile probably couldn’t reach a lot of places in China if it were launched from the Great Lakes. As far as missiles go, the Trident is relatively compact, meaning there’s only so much propellant you can stuff in it, meaning its range is more limited than other ground-based missiles.
ETA: Plus, any of our adversaries would know where any second strike would be coming from, and be able to at least build radars to carefully monitor what’s going on in the Great Lakes region. It’s harder to build early warning sensors that cover all of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
I doubt if the Great Lakes would be the best place to operate subs, for it would cause a traffic problem. Aside from Superior, the Great Lakes are not that big (you can see both shores from the deck of a freighter), and aside from Superior (which is deep but has rocks and shoals) and Michigan, the Great Lakes are often not that deep (especially Lake Erie., which averages about 62’). If you discount running a sub in Canada, in shallows, shoals, and the very busy shipping channels, that greatly limits the options to parts of upper Lake Michigan and parts of the southern bays of Lake Superior.
