The biggest submarine ever is retired, bringing a conclusion to a Cold War saga. The first and last remaining giant Typhoon submarine, the Dmitry Donskoy, has been formally retired, according to the Russian state news agency TASS.

There are technical achievements that shatter records and those that do so by improbable margins. The Russian Typhoon-class submarines were so large—with a size of 48,000 tons—that they were not just monsters by submarine standards but also nearly as massive as the German battleship Bismarck during World War Two.

The Typhoon was easily identifiable thanks to its broad, chunky lines, 574 feet (175 meters) in length, and a beam of 75 feet (23 meters). Since it went into service in 1981, the boat has been a mystery, with many of its secrets not being divulged until the end of the Cold War in the 1990s. In the meanwhile, it served as the basis for the 1990 thriller The Hunt For Red October, which filled in the knowledge gap by outfitting the made-up boat with fantastical technology.

The US Navy's new Ohio-class nuclear ballistic missile submarines, which increased the armament load of the earlier Polaris submarines from 16 to 24 tubes and now carried the new Trident II missiles with multiple warheads, sparked a Soviet Union response that gave rise to the genuine Typhoon in the 1970s.

Moreover, NATO's submarine-hunting troops were encircling the Soviet Navy's missile submarines, forcing them to hide under the ice sheet in the Arctic Ocean.

The Project 941 Akula submarine, also known by its NATO code name Typhoon, was created to address these difficulties. Its goal was to serve as a sizable nuclear strategic reserve that the Soviets might deploy in a second attack, not to deliver the initial blow in an East-West nuclear conflict.

The issue was that to do this, you needed a boat that could operate under the ice at a distance from its targets of thousands of miles and launch 200 warheads and decoys at will. The R-39 SLBM (submarine-launched ballistic missile), which weighed 84 tonnes and carried 10 warheads with an explosive yield of up to 200 kt, had to be transported in order to accomplish this feat.

These specifications called for a very big submarine with strong construction. The Typhoon was the end outcome. Its wide, flat exterior covered a cutting-edge design. The Typhoon featured several pressure hulls as opposed to just one. On the sides, there were two parallel hulls.A fourth hull in the bow functioned as the torpedo chamber, while a third hull on top of these protruded beneath the gigantic sail and housed the command center. The region in front of the parallel hulls included 20 missile tubes. They were all solidly held together and each of them had titanium incorporated into the design for increased strength.

The Typhoon, which had two OK-650 pressurized-water nuclear reactors in the aft portion and could accommodate 160 people, could cruise at sea for more than 120 days before returning to port for resupply and staff rotation.

The Typhoon was surprisingly pleasant considering the number of people on board, with wide couches, wood laminates, and even a swimming pool. Yet, there is practically any place for the bridge outside due to the sail's crowded configuration of retractable masts and equipment.

The Typhoon's ability to carry fewer missiles than Ohio-class submarines was one perplexing aspect. The reason for this is that when the boats were being built, the Soviet leadership anticipated constraints imposed by weapons control treaties and had no inclination to cope with alterations at the last minute.

While spectacular to look at, it's debatable how useful the Typhoon would have been in a combat situation. Although relatively thin ice may have been broken through thanks to the reserve buoyancy it received when surfacing, Arctic thin ice is still exceedingly thick. As the ship surfaced, there were reports that the deck was covered in enormous ice slabs, making it impossible to open the missile hatches.

It could be for the best that the Typhoon has an escape pod built into the keel.

The Dmitry Donskoy is the final of the six Typhoons that were completed; a seventh was abandoned while it was still being built. The Typhoon fleet was a weapon system without a purpose after the Cold War ended, somewhat of a relic. The Russian government came to the conclusion that it would be less expensive to just build new, more advanced boats after learning how expensive it was to maintain and upgrade the submarines.

With the assistance of the US, three Typhoon-class submarines have already been dismantled, and two more, along with the Dmitry Donskoy, are awaiting disposal.

The Dmitry Donskoy submarine cruiser has been retired from the Russian Navy, according to Vladimir Maltsev, head of the Russian Association for Naval Support. Together with the other two units of this project, it will be waiting for use at a naval facility in Severodvinsk.

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