One of the Smallest Nuclear Submarines Ever Built Beat a U.S. Navy Aircraft Carrier’s Defenses — and ‘Sank’ the Roosevelt

One of the Smallest Nuclear Submarines Ever Built Beat a U.S. Navy Aircraft Carrier’s Defenses — and ‘Sank’ the Roosevelt

Summary and Key Points: On paper, it shouldn’t have stood a chance. France’s Rubis-class is among the smallest nuclear attack submarines ever built — barely 240 feet long, 70 sailors, dwarfed by the American and Soviet boats of its day. Yet in a 2015 exercise off Florida, one of them slipped through the defenses of an entire U.S. carrier strike group and scored a simulated kill on the supercarrier USS Theodore Roosevelt. How a sub that small got…

In 2015 a small, decades-old French submarine slipped undetected through the destroyers and helicopters screening the USS Theodore Roosevelt and “sank” the supercarrier in a war game — and a Swedish boat had already done the same thing to another US carrier

Summary and Key Points: In the waters off Florida in early 2015, a French nuclear attack submarine named Saphir — a 1970s-era Rubis-class boat, the smallest nuclear attack sub in service anywhere — threaded through the cruisers, destroyers, and helicopters screening the USS Theodore Roosevelt and fired simulated torpedoes into the aircraft carrier. A boat a fraction of the carrier’s size and cost beats all of it. A decade earlier, a cheap Swedis…