That Sinking Feeling

At the Quonset Point, R.I., shipyard last week, riggers and welders were busy bending steel into the first pieces of a new class of nuclear attack submarines. When launched in 2004, the U.S.S. Virginia will be the first of a fearsome nuclear family, 30 vessels bristling with 38 weapons apiece. Designed to prowl the world's shallow coastal waters, where the Navy believes future conflicts could erupt, Virginia-class subs will whisper above the ocean floor, making only 10% of the noise of today's already library-quiet submarines.

Each 377-ft. sub will feature highly sophisticated wake suppressors and pollution controls to mask its presence. A videocam system will replace the traditional optical periscope, making for more acute reconnaissance at night and in bad weather. Each vessel will have its own on-board computer network, packing more cyber-power into its 7,700 tons than the 65 attack subs that came before it put together. Eventually, the Navy plans to outfit the subs with "antitorpedo" torpedoes, which the Navy has fantasized about for decades.

The new class of warship is more than a maritime mirage: this week President Clinton will unveil a defense budget for next year that includes a cool $1 billion for the vessels, as well as a recommendation to speed up their production. The fleet is ultimately expected to cost $63.7 billion and serve as the leading edge of a 50-attack-sub armada that the Navy wants for the 21st century. (A separate class of 18 strategic submarines, which serve as platforms for intercontinental ballistic missiles, will be downsized to 14.) But there is a growing sense that these new subs, designed to hunt other ships and launch land and sea attacks, may be preparing for a war that will never come.

While supertech subs were once an integral part of a cold war blueprint that included deadly superpower showdowns on the high seas, few planners can describe a credible scenario in which that kind of naval engagement would now take place. For all their gritty romantic lore, the days of battleships and cruisers slugging it out as submarines stealthily lurked below the surface have gone the way of Admiral Chester Nimitz. But many in the American submarine community continue to believe--or at least to argue--that a massive undersea force is still an essential part of American security.

The Navy cites the prowess and power of the Russian submarine fleet as its key challenge. Moscow, despite its economic woes, is building three new classes of submarines that will challenge the U.S.'s best, say Navy intelligence reports. Other accounts from Russia, though, paint a far bleaker picture. Senator Richard Lugar recently visited Sevmash, Russia's premier submarine yard, and found workers destroying--not building--submarines. "There isn't the money to modernize," says the Indiana Republican, an expert on the Russian military. "There isn't the money for an armed force."

Indeed, Russian submariners have been gratefully taking delivery of tons of potatoes, cabbages, carrots and beets from Russian towns that have "adopted" submarines. The local utility has periodically shut off electric power because the Sevmash yard hasn't paid its bills. Its restless, unpaid workers have been threatening to strike. As dozens of Russian submarines rust in port, production of new ones has ground to a halt.

Perhaps that is why the U.S. Navy is increasingly shifting its warnings to the threat posed by some two dozen other nations--from China to Iran--operating more than 100 diesel-electric subs. Vessels of this type are quiet underwater, but their need to recharge their batteries forces them to surface every day or so, when they become sitting ducks. Nonetheless, Navy planners repeatedly cite the possibility that Iran's three Russian-made Kilo subs could bottle up the mouth of the Persian Gulf in a time of crisis, picking off thin-skinned oil tankers like marksmen at a state fair. But few believe that even this scary scenario would be much more than a 48-hour headache for the Pentagon.

Boosters insist that much of the U.S. sub fleet's new post-cold war mission isn't about blowing things up. It is about protecting American power around the world without firing a shot, by visiting foreign ports along with other warships, implicitly flexing martial muscle. "The United States," says the Navy's official sub statement, "maintains a capabilities-based, multimission submarine force that is sized to satisfy peacetime requirements and is not sized to counter any country's threat."

Privately, some Navy officials acknowledge that the military rationale for 50 attack submarines is dubious. After all, the Navy now assigns two attack subs to each deployed aircraft carrier, something it usually didn't do even during the most tension-fraught days of the cold war. "It's a dirty little secret," a Navy commander daringly argued in Proceedings, an independent Navy journal. "U.S. nuclear-powered attack submarines no more support the carrier battle group commander than wet roads support traffic safety."