THE announcement this week by Philip Hammond, the defence secretary, that he was placing a £1.1 billion ($1.7 billion) order with Rolls-Royce for nuclear reactors to power the successors to Britain's fleet of four Vanguard-class ballistic missile submarines set off a flurry of controversy.
Able would be dropped from a B-29 bomber, Baker set off on or under a barge, and Charlie detonated much deeper underwater against a group of salvaged submarines.
The Russian submarine Kursk sank in the Barents Sea nearly two years ago because the fuel inside a torpedo exploded and set off a second, catastrophic blast, the chairman of a government inquiry said.
Scientists suspect that a strong earthquake set off a submarine landslide, which in turn produced the tsunami.
Oceanographers drilling on the sea floor 240 kilometers off Vancouver Island have serendipitously set off a submarine hot spring.
It had come from their Lucy days: wouldn't it be funny if Lucy snuck on a submarine, which unknown to her, set off to sea, and she had nowhere to hide?
During the Cuban missile crisis, Arkhipov was serving on a submarine in the Caribbean when U.S. destroyers set off depth charges nearby.
Or, he said, some unknown chain of events could have set off an explosion aboard the submarine.
One of the strangest and most affecting songs here is "Walt Grace's Submarine Test, January 1967," about a basement tinkerer who set off in a homemade submersible despite the advice of everyone close to him.
