At the risk of derailing the thread: cite? When was this? It is a subject I’m interested in and I’ve not come across a reference to a lab tech becoming infected at Porton. (Google hasn’t helped this time!)
But would a nuclear missile sub on patrol be using its sonar at all? previous posts in this thread suggest not, because that would give away its location. so even if its sonar were damaged from a previous collision, it’s hard to see how that would have contributed to the collision with the British sub.
Why is that unusual? If it were a collision between a British sub and a Chinese sub in the coastal waters around Britain and France, that would certainly raise eyebrows. But both subs were operating in their home waters, which have a substantial overalap; and as Pleonast indicates, they would both be seeking the same type of water conditions that would best enable them to operate silently. Those two factors suggest that they might have ended up in similar locations.
Also, even after the collision, both subs would have been under standing orders not to break radio silence or make any noise, so neither of them would have sent out a radio signal to report the collision, unlike a surface naval ship might have done. So after the collision, the communications guys on both subs would have listened and heard no man-made sounds coming from the object they hit; no radio or sonar. So it’s no stretch for them not to have realised they’d collided with another nuclear sub.
Perhaps the collision speaks volumes for the technology of stealth in the subs. Maybe they are just too quiet.
Passive sonar does not give away your own location, and should be used as SOP.
If the passive array was inop, I presume there are other procedures for safe operation. (Surfacing and navigating by radar, or using active sonar to navigate.) But I could be wrong about their standing orders/SOP…
There are 2 kinds of sonar - active and passive. Active sonar is like acoustic radar - the sub sends out a blast of sound (a ping), and reads the echoes back to determine whats in the area. Subs rarely use this, because it gives away their position as well. Passive sonar is just listening for sounds in the ocean that other things give off. Subs use that all the time. But if the French passive sonar was damaged, it could have contributed to the accident.
That’s why I’ve doubts. Two subs hit each other, and it ends up with everybody saying “that’s because our subs are sooooo good”.
Interesting thread : I wanted to open one because I too couldn’t believe that two ICBM launcher subs, out of a handful in each country, would collide in the middle of the ocean, while submerged, by random chance. The answer so far seem to imply that it’s more believable than I thought at first, but still, the ocean is big (and those subs’ job, AFAIU, isn’t to roam around the Channel) so I’m not entirely convinced.
For instance I could envision some kind of unusual exercise between the French and British navy that went wrong. Better to say “Our subs are too perfect” than “We messed up that exercise we don’t want to talk about”.
Sean Connery: One ping only, please.
Or maybe they were breaking the law by being uninsured.
I take it some USA nuke sub folks are cruising through here.
Could anybody help me find a old fellow student I knew who was in the nuke sub program?
This refers to the intial belief that the sub had hit debris, not that previous sonar damage contributed to the accident.
Note that sonar domes are rather fragile and easily damaged, since they are typically fiberglass or similar materials, not the pressure-resistant metal that the sub’s hull is made from. The fin/conning tower is mostly a fiberglass shell as well. These are the bits that usually suffer in collisions, due to their vulnerable location.
Darn, beat me to it.
FYI, by “containers” the story is just that-- an intermodal shipping container. These fall off cargo ships quite routinely, and those that have enough buoyancy to keep from sinking to the bottom end up being dangerous on-the-water/underwater hazards.
BTW, a similar situation happened in fiction: Tom Clancy’s novel “The Sum of All Fears”-- the Ohio-class U.S.S. Maine hits submerged debris (in this case, logs chained together) that damages the boat and allows for a Soviet attack submarine to find her.
(bolding mine)
Cite, please? I assume you are talking about the sail, right? I thought they were steel, reinforced to be able to punch up through artic ice when surfacing…
Actually, no.
Most of the sail is in fact high-strength structural steel, the same steel as the rest of the outer hull. There are transducers and acoustic windows of composite materials on the sail, but they most certainly do NOT make up the majority of the structure.
Some boats have re-enforced sails, some do not. It all depands on the boat’s envisioned mission, and the prevailing military and design philosophies current when the boat was designed, plus any subsequent refitting. The ability to punch up through ice is generally less useful than one might anticipate, but the fact of a re-enforced sail does come in handy in collisions situations - A re-enforced sail takes a beating better, and thus generally requires less repair after an ‘oops.’ 
OTOH, a GRP or FRP sail would be at substantial risk from collisions, and that’s the structure that supports important structures, like periscopes, radar, snorkels, and the bridge. You kinda want those to be durable, ya know?
Edit:
Billfish678, you might try connecting though Classmates.com, or HullNumber.com.
Ok, thanks. For some reason, I assumed that since any given sub might be ordered into artic waters, the USN would require that they all have that feature.
Sloppy thinking on my part. 
Well, most US boats did have re-enforced sails, at one point. I’m not current on the most recent boats, sao can’t say there. But in general, if it’s possible and reasonable for US boats to have it, they probably do have it; We build some damn nice boats - and pay a pretty penny for them, too!
Other navies, however, have different design philosophies, and/or smaller wallets, or at least different priorities for their spending. The Russians, for instance, will have ice-breaking sails on everything. The Chinese? Rather less likely.
That’s what I meant about sloppy thinking. I let my USN bias color my assumptions. 
I say that the real fault for this is that it’s bad luck to name a submarine so it shares its name with a ship that blew up in harbor.
It’s cursed, I tell you! Cuuuuuuuursed!
A previous thread of mine:
I seem to remember the sails on the DSRV and Alvin were fiberglass.