What ever happened to Cargo Submarines?

[Music] in the summer of 1958 President Eisenhower ordered the world's first nuclear-powered submarine the Nautilus on a very special top secret mission a voyage under the northern ice cap called operation Sunshine it was to prove that submarines really could go anywhere and be a credible nuclear threat but such a Transit opened a whole new unexpected can of worms so why don't we have many cargo submarines join me below the sea as we explore the never coming age of the cargo submarine foreign [Music] Goods below the surface of the sea was not a new idea in fact it was nearly 45 years earlier in World War one that cargo submarine Concepts were floated and sunk Germany at the time needed certain raw materials to win the war and the best place to get it would be from the neutral United States but there was just one problem the pesky British blockade thus they would use two U-boats with Torpedoes removed and Cargo in place to go to America and simply buy the raw materials that they needed to win the war effort but there were two problems the first was that the trip would have to be profitable Germany would need to fill up with Congo to go to America and sell it there some things that were unlikely to interest the then neutral Americans and then of course in 1917 Germany sunk a ship hiring many Americans and thus joined England and France meaning that they were no longer open to trade with Germany but in the next War the dynamic would be completely flipped the U.S Navy was the first to strategically deploy such an idea using submarines to carry ammunition and supplies to the corridor Island in Melina Bay as the Japanese overran the Philippines early in 1942 they evacuated the wounded nurses and gold as the area was conquered and then these submarines had to have their Torpedoes and ammo removed to carry as much as possible because of the success of this strategic withdrawal president Franco D Roosevelt directed the Navy to develop cargo carrying submarines they built three of the Barracuda class that were never used they didn't quite work out as well as intended and and Boats were seen as superior but it would actually be the axes powers that would use the cargo submarines most to supply the vast Nazi U-Boat Fleet a special cargo U-boats were converted that could refuel these attacking craft called the type 14 it could carry 500 tons of fuel and other materials and be able to supply up to 12 U-boats for four to eight weeks each the plan worked successfully until it didn't the cluster of 12u boats at one location was easily decoded by the allies and all the resupply submarines were destroyed the Germans would have another crack at it designing the type 20 cargo submarine this U-Boat was to have a surface displacement of 2 700 tons and could carry 800 tons of cargo orbit 50 tons external to the Prussia Hull in special bags it would not have any Torpedoes but it would have anti-aircraft cannons for self-defense during resupply like in World War One their first job was to bring in supplies from Germany's Ally in the East but it was a bad Ended as the materials were sent to build more attack submarines the Japanese in the Pacific also use cargo submarines for their many Island bases as a way to resupply under the Allies blockade and they even used some to transport launchable aircraft and you'll be delighted to know I've done a whole video on the submarine aircraft carriers that you can watch right now here on the channel during World War II the power of submarines was absolute and terrifying the lend lease program which rescued Britain and Russia from the grips of the Nazis relied on American-made weapons and goods being transported by the merchant Fleet a fleet of ships mind you that was constantly being harried by German submarine U-boats under the icy Atlantic so why not simply flip the board on the Nazis and transport the goods by submarine instead of the ships and that's exactly what some British people thought you see it became clear that Britain's sole advantage of being an island surrounded by C was also a major flaw Goods had to either be shipped in or flown in by then seaplanes this made them prey to being surrounded and cut off from North America and Europe and the solution it seemed was cargo submarines after the war the man at the time behind the push for cargo submarines was none other than Barnes Wallace the inventor of the vicar swallow and the very famous Dam busted bomb that I just featured here on the channel he advocated nuclear-powered cargo submarines as a means of making Britain immune to Future embargoes and to make it a global trading power but like his aspirations for a strong Britain his voice fell on deaf ears as the empire was slowly dismantled from within but do you know who didn't give up on this idea why it's our favorite Union the Soviet one in the 1990s the malachite design Bureau in Saint Petersburg proposed submarines capable of transporting petroleum or Freight containers in or through the Arctic regions it was envisioned that these ships would dive under the polar ice cap to travel directly between Europe and Asia ports and possibly Northern Canada where the designers noting that given equal cargo capacity the efficiency of an underwater container ship is considerably higher for example than that of an icebreaker transport ship of the normal type an underwater container is competitive the tanker and container variants would follow the same design as the standard military nuclear submarines with the tank of variant carrying almost 30 000 tons of petroleum to be loaded and discharged from surface or underwater terminals the container carrier was to transport 912 standard Freight containers loaded within 30 hours through hatches assisted by an internal conveyance system however these plans came to nothing as the hard financial Straits following the dissolution of the Soviet Union as a side note the USA also followed up with submarine tankers General Dynamics in the 1980s approached several shipbuilders in West Germany to build two types of undersea vessels General Dynamics said that a designed two versions of the tanker submarines a 725 million nuclear-powered ship and a 700 million version powered by methane meteor at the time said wow it did not have any orders yet it had received enthusiastic responses to the plan as we don't have them you can imagine why years later similar design was proposed by the Reuben design Bureau with the submarine cargo vessel as a civilian redesign of the famous typhoon-class submarine from the Cold War a submarine Freight transport system was suggested in 1997 and is considered a sea going component of the Global Intelligent transportation system of course we know that today Russia needs everything that it can get military-wise and a plan to retrofit old submarines for co-corporations never came to fruition so the big question is why don't we have cargo submarines today why does the concept always fail now I know a bunch of you have already written the answer in the first 30 seconds of seeing this video and I bet even some of you have clicked away before watching this part so if you notice what I'm saying right now then comment Yellow Submarine down below here's the raw fact submarines don't actually make a lot of commercial sense outside of military or illicit operations the fact is transporting goods on a large surface ship is ridiculously cheap boat technology if you can even call it that is incredibly mature and has been in use for tens of thousands of years and with the advert of containerization has only reached more insane levels of globalization submarines on the other hand are expensive to build and maintain aren't as efficient because they have to displace more water per unit of cargo than a boat let me explain in order to dive and resurface large portions of a submarine's space are devoted to ballast tanks that are filled up and drained of water they filled up to sink and then ejected to rise kind of like your lungs in a swimming pool I mean with air not with water don't ingest water and drown please and so that space on board is full of water and it's not full of paying cargo so no cargo company would invest top doors in a cargo submarine that features much less room than a normal boat in addition the technology is far more expensive and Commercial operations of nuclear technology have been so far very limited outside of joint military operations so without the nuclear power that makes a military Sub make sense the submarines would be less efficient than boats carrying less cargo and be more expensive it's cheaper to load up a giant surface chip insured against storms and just take the canals and lastly that whole ice cap thing under the surface that we pitched at the start of the video well global warming is taking care of that so you don't need to worry unless of course you live next to the coast but who's to say a new Ice Age won't bring this idea back or as I can say watch this space thanks for watching

Channel: Found And Explained

Views: 1,597,491

Keywords: nuclear submarine, us navy, cold war, top submarine, largest submarine, nuclear submarine missile launch, russian navy, us navy training, nuclear submarine surfacing, nuclear submarine tour, nuclear submarine documentary, cold war ending

Id: HRvVnHXZr20

Length: 10min 25sec (625 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 23 2022