French & British Nucular Subs Collide Underwater

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D-Fence

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BRITISH and French nuclear submarines which collided deep under the Atlantic could have sunk or released deadly radioactivity, it emerged last night.

The Royal Navy?s HMS Vanguard and the French Navy?s Le Triomphant are both nuclear powered and were carrying nuke missiles.

Between them they had around 250 sailors on board.

A senior Navy source said: ?The potential consequences are unthinkable. It?s very unlikely there would have been a nuclear explosion.

?But a radioactive leak was a possibility. Worse, we could have lost the crew and warheads. That would have been a national disaster.?

The collision is believed to have taken place on February 3 or 4, in mid-Atlantic. Both subs were submerged and on separate missions.

As inquiries began, naval sources said it was a millions-to-one unlucky chance both subs were in the same patch of sea. Warships have sonar gear which locates submarines by sound waves.

But modern anti-sonar technology is so good it is possible neither boat ?saw? the other.

A senior military source said: ?The lines between London and Paris have been hot.?

The MoD insisted last night there had been no nuclear security breach. But this is the biggest embarrassment to the Navy since Iran captured 15 sailors in 2007. The naval source said: ?Crashing a nuclear submarine is as serious as it gets.?

Vanguard is one of Britain?s four V-Class subs forming our Trident nuclear deterrent. Each is armed with 16 ballistic missiles.

She was last night towed into Faslane in Scotland, with dents and scrapes visible on her hull. Triomphant limped to Brest with extensive damage to her sonar dome.

Triomphant has a crew of 101. Vanguard weighs 16,000 tons, is 150 metres long and has a crew of 140.

The MoD said it did not comment on submarine operations
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Good times! Satellites crashing into each other, Nuclear subs crashing into each other.......They are preparing for waaaaaaaaaaar!

/me goes into his nucular shelter.
 
jensked said:
Quite extraordinary two small objects with millions of dollars worth of equipment to prevent such a thing can collide in a HUGE ocean.
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<insert cliche about the british and bad driving here>

<insert cliche about the french and bad driving here>

<insert cliche about germans being the only people who know what they are doing with driving here>

done.

On a sidenote: If I were secretary of defense in Britan or France, I?d call in sick on a day that begins with news like this and stay in bed while sucking my thumb in the fetal position. Your day can?t get good anymore ...
 
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All evacuate the fail (u)boat.
 
On the upside, the Royal Navy and the Marine Nationale would have to be pretty pleased that their subs are so quite that each couldn't be heard by the other. :lol:
 
France has nuclear subs?

What are they going to do when the germans rise again?

^yes, that was a bad attempt at a WWII joke. I'm studying it right now and just read about the scuttling of the French fleet
 
stiggie said:
On the upside, the Royal Navy and the Marine Nationale would have to be pretty pleased that their subs are so quite that each couldn't be heard by the other. :lol:
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Yeah, and the Astute class is a significant improvement over the Vanguards!

There comes a point where you spot the sub by the lack of noise coming from a particular direction.
 
guess it was only a matter of time until things kicked off between us brits and the french again.
and nouseforaname90, if i was going to do a ww2 themed joke it would've gone "the french submarines are there to stop the germans from rising as a threat again, get their ass kicked and gone to the british and americans for help and then completely forget about them coming to their rescue years later."
not wanting to start a flame i'll immediately say some apologies to any french people i've irritated, i'm sure us brits or yanks have done as equally stupid things over the years.
 
Well it was slightly different - the French were fed up because we would not take their Army off the beach at Dunkirk at first, then we did they arrived in Britain got dry and went back to France and promptly surrendered, no shame in that as the German Army of the time was the best fighting machine by a huge margin, point being that those places were lost to British soldiers who would have been useful latrer.

So the French think that we ran away, which indeed we did - damn right we were equipped in arms, doctrine and training to fight WWI - not the new mechanised version that was to be WWII.

Now my point, we did not 'surrender' despite generous terms for an armistice from Hitler, who after all really wanted to expand East, and when we came back we brought some friends - e.g. USA/Canada.
 
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According to the paper this morning, despite anti-collision systems on both subs they may have crashed because "their anti-detection equipment is too good".

*facepalm*
 
I find this odd. This only happened in the past when the US and USSR were spying on each other (intentionally getting close). There must be something more to this, but I can't fathom a reason why any of these two would want to spy on one another in this way.
 
argatoga said:
I find this odd. This only happened in the past when the US and USSR were spying on each other (intentionally getting close). There must be something more to this, but I can't fathom a reason why any of these two would want to spy on one another in this way.
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Yes, they were spying on each other.. obviously.

The fact is that the sorts of areas that it's good for a sub to loiter (deep, quiet, reasonable distance from port) are relatively limited. So when you have two sub fleets with ports in the same part of the world they tend to hang out at the same places. Some parts of the ocean are popular with the UK, US, France and the Russians so anyone could hit anyone else!
 
emil_t said:
wasn't there a treaty that banned nuclear weapons ?
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probably, but the Navy and the Army probably never really subscribed to that magazine.
 
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