"Israel's Doomsday Submarines Nearly Ready" Topic

"The Israeli navy is a bit of an odd duck. It's designed largely for coastal and eastern Mediterranean warfare. But among all of Israel's small corvettes and missile boats are some some seriously mighty submarines.

Israel is also investing heavily in growing its submarine fleet. It's a reflection of Tel Aviv's increasing reliance on the underwater boats for a range of operations — including nuclear deterrence.

Right now, three Dolphin II-class submarines are under construction at Germany's ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems shipyards in Kiel. Once the submarines complete their trials and head towards the Mediterranean, they will become the most powerful Israeli submarines ever…"

Full article here
link

Amicalement
Armand

Being that the Popeye missile only carries a 750lb war head and has a range of 48 miles, that doesn't sound like much of doomsday weapon. More a don't screw with us Egypt, Lebanon and Syria or we will give you an unpleasant day weapon. However, it doesn't seem any of them are in any shape to cause trouble worthy of this expense to begin with.

The Israelis have learned the lesson of the UK and Japan: Unrestricted Submarine Warfare will strangle a nation highly dependent on imports.

Read the wiki entry on the Popeye Turbo ( link ): 650mm diameter, 1500km range.

Assuming that the Israelis have good engineers (and they have done a great job on everything else they design in-house), they could have a half-megaton nuke in less than 500lbs total warhead weight. 200kt like the wiki article speculates is even lighter yet.

the hell if Im letting them shoot ME out of some torpedo tube
no matter how big it is!

what is this, a monty python sketch?!

FIRE MRS. NESBITT!

That's a very nice looking sub.

Apparently, they've had subs with nuke-tipped weapons for quite some time.