An update from Strategy Page on how far the Russian nuclear submarine threat has diminished from its peak during the cold war:
Three years ago two Akulas were detected (by the U.S. Navy) off the east coast of the United States, in international waters. Russia admitted two of its Akula class boats were out there. This was the first time Russian subs had been off the North American coast in over a decade. This spotlights something the Russian admirals would rather not dwell on. The Russian Navy has not only shrunk since the end of the Cold War in 1991, but it has also become much less active. In the previous three years, only ten of their nuclear subs had gone to sea, on a combat patrol, each year. Most of the boats going to sea were SSNs, the minority were SSBNs (ballistic missile boats). There were often short range training missions, which often lasted a few days, or just a few hours.
The true measure of a fleet’s combat ability is the number of “combat patrols” or “deployments” in makes in a year and how long they are. In the U.S. Navy, most of these last from 2-6 months. Currently U.S. nuclear subs have carry out ten times as many patrols as their Russian counterparts. Russia is trying to catch up, but has a long way to go.
Russia has only 14 SSNs (nuclear attack subs) in service and eight of them are 7,000 ton, Akulas. These began building in the late 1980s and are roughly comparable to the American Los Angeles class. All of the earlier Russian SSNs are trash, and most have been decommissioned. There are also eight SSGN (nuclear subs carrying cruise missiles) and 20 diesel electric boats. There is a new class of SSGNs under construction, but progress has been slow.
[. . .]
The peak year for Russian nuclear sub patrols was 1984, when there were 230. That number rapidly declined until, in 2002, there were none. Since the late 1990s, the Russian navy has been hustling to try and reverse this decline. But the navy budget, despite recent increases, is not large enough to build new ships to replace the current Cold War era fleet that is falling apart. The rapid decline of Russia’s nuclear submarine fleet needed international help to safely decommission over a hundred obsolete, worn out, defective or broken down nuclear subs. This effort has been going on for over a decade, and was driven by the Russian threat to just sink their older nuclear subs in the Arctic Ocean. That might work with conventional ships, but there was an international uproar over what would happen with all those nuclear reactors sitting on the ocean floor forever. Russia generously offered to accept donations to fund a dismantling program that included safe disposal of the nuclear reactors.
