Australian "Perhaps what is most reassuring about the happy ending to the 75-hour drama involving the Russian submarine, apart from the rescue of the seven submariners, is the contrast it makes with the tragedy that cost the lives of all 118 crew members on the nuclear-powered Russian submarine the Kursk [in 2000].
See articleTwo submariners from HMS Tireless, a British navy nuclear-powered submarine, died when an air filter exploded on board.
A US naval chief insisted the US had won the cold war by making the Soviet Union bankrupt itself in building up its nuclear submarine force: a Soviet commander was equally insistent his submariners remained undefeated; that the cold war had merely mutated into a more lukewarm war.
And in 1981, former submariners say, one American sailor had to be sedated when a spy submarine that he was aboard became temporarily stuck in sand in the seabed in Soviet water.
Rashid Aryapov of the submarine Kursk is a tribute to his country, his service and to submariners everywhere.
But we also learn that American submarine attacks accounted for 90 percent of Japanese merchant and naval losses, but that submariners also had the highest military casualty rate: 22 percent were killed.
The rig that drilled the successful shaft was supplied by a contractor at Collahuasi, a mine controlled by two multinationals, Anglo American and Xstrata.The government also brought in Chile's navy, whose submariners have experience working at great depths in confined spaces.
Its co-operation with Vietnam has also included training submariners, repairing military aircraft and selling patrol boats.
If the correct lessons are eventually learned, the submariners will not have died for nothing.
A fatal form of barotrauma can occur in submariners and divers.
But even the lay reader cannot fail to be absorbed by its dramatic tales of cat-and-mouse skirmishes with Soviet hunter-killer submarines, embarrassing spy scandals and lucid accounts of the Falklands War – all enlivened with first-hand testimony from the submariners themselves.
