The Typhoon-class submarine no longer exists

The largest submarine of the Cold War era has officially been decommissioned. The first and last Typhoon-class submarine, the Dmitry Donskoy, has been decommissioned, Russian state news agency TASS announced.

“The submarine cruiser Dmitri Donskoy has been decommissioned from the Russian Navy. It will await use at the Severodvinsk naval base along with two other submarines of the project.” He said.

Named after a 14th-century Russian prince, the Dmitri Donskoy was laid down at the Northern Shipyard in 1976 and launched on September 29, 1980. The ship was commissioned on December 29 of the same year.

It was a momentous occasion for one of the world’s engineering marvels. Russia’s Typhoon-class submarines are colossal by submarine standards, weighing in at 48,000 tons, nearly as much as the German World War II battleship Bismarck.

The Typhoon is a distinctive ship with a large hull, measuring 574 feet (175 meters) long and 75 feet (23 meters) wide. It has remained a mystery since 1981, and many of its secrets were not revealed until the 1990s. In 1990, it inspired the thriller “The Typhoon”.The Hunt for Red October”, using fantastic technology to fill the gap between known ships and imagined ones.

The class was developed in the 1970s as a Soviet response to the U.S. Navy’s new Ohio-class nuclear ballistic missile submarines, which increased the Polaris’ weapons load from 16 to 24 tubes, carrying Trident II missiles with multiple warheads.

Project 941 Akula, codenamed Typhoon by NATO, was developed to meet the challenges of operating under ice thousands of miles from the target and releasing 200 warheads and decoys on demand.

The Typhoon has multiple pressure hulls instead of just one. There are two parallel hulls on either side of the ship. A third hull above the hull extends from under the huge sail and contains the command center, while a fourth hull at the bow is used as a torpedo tube. The area in front of the parallel hulls has 20 missile tubes. Each missile tube is designed with titanium alloy for added strength and is tightly connected together.

Dmitri Donskoy is the last of six Typhoon-class submarines, the seventh was canceled during construction. After the end of the Cold War, the Typhoon-class submarine fleet became an outdated weapon system. The submarines were too expensive to operate and refurbish, so the Russian government decided to build new, more modern submarines.