Secretive thinking

I know lots of secrets. Military secrets. And I'm prepared to spill them all here.

Frankly I'm discouraged that nobody is offering me large sums of money for them, for I can be bought. But all the military secrets I know are 30 years old or more and have appeared in popular literature (Body of Secrets, Blind Man's Bluff. etc.)

What is left that is cool, then, about knowing old secrets?

I was in Sochi on Augst 2, 2000. That was the day that the Russian submarine Kursk sank in the Baltic Sea. The Rusian navy denied it, obscured it, and finally came to terms with it. Vladimir Putin elected not to disrupt his vacation and he came to Sochi, where I was. (But not because I was there. I was staying very low-key and he didn't realize I was there. We just bumped into one another at a nightclub. )

He tied up traffic terribly and movement around Sochi (a resort town on the Black Sea) became difficult. It was a long time before he made a public statement, and the Russian navy was always vague about the cause of the Kursk disaster.

But I knew what caused it from the very moment I heard of it. It wasn't because I knew anything in particular about the Kursk, it was all the other little bits and pieces I knew that all fit together at that moment. Let me put some pieces together for you.

On public record, Kursk was carrying "experimental topedoes." I guessed that before I learned it from the Russian press. It was a very and thoroughly modern submarine. Of course it would carry such torpedoes.

On public record was that an American ex-navy captain had been arrested in Russia several years previously, before the Kursk disaster, for expressing curiosity in something called a squall torpedo, capable of travelling at speeds in excess of 200 knots. Inaudibly. If you are its target, you will have no idea until the explosion occurs and your lungs are implosively filling with water.

Squall torpedo is the name. Details are now readily available. But forget what we can learn in restrospect. Let's see how we could work it out on our own, and then check that against what we learned.

Goal: get a torpedo to travel at 2oo-300 knots, silently.

Technology - easy to do,at least in principal, and well tested.

What you need is a sheath of bubbles so that the torpedo body itself does not touch the water boundary. That provides both speed and silence. Then you need a motor that will move the torpedo, say 2 tons or more, at such a speed. What one chemical will produce both speed and a sheath of bubbles?

Answer: Hyrdrogen peroxide, the stuff you dye your hair with, only a lot more concentrated. Give me a 90% pure hydrogen dioxide mixture, and I give you navol, hydrogen fuel for the doomed.

Navol has been used as torpedo fuel since long before I was in submarine school and it is (and has always been) a horrible accident waiting to happen. It is hugely, massively and amazingly flammable because it brings its own oxygen to the party. (Chemical formula, written without subscripts, please forgive me: H2O2) Put it in contact with anything that can oxidise and you have instant combustion. And once you have that, how the hell are you going to put it out?

It is also notoriously unstable, breaking down into H2O and O2 all on its own and that's a problem nobody needs.

So hydrogen peroxide is used to fuel the motor, and also, unless I'm much mistaken (never happened before) to create the sheathe of bubbles the torpedo flies though.

I know my torpedoes, and I know torpedo fuels. Squall is a torpedo just waiting to blow up. Apparently that is what happened in the Kursk. (The explosion was in the forward torpedo room, which is where forward torpedoes are normally stored. Coincidence, or is it more?)

A horrible way to die, trapped for days alive deep underwater in the freezing cold waters of the Baltic.

Iran has purchased these torpedoes from the Russians.

They claimed to have developed their own, yeah yeah whatever. We wish your sailors much better luck. Your secret is safe with us.