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Golf Class Submarine

 
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Project 629, also known by the NATO reporting name
NATO reporting name

NATO reporting names are unclassified code names for military equipment of the Eastern Bloc . They provide unambiguous and easily understood English language words in a uniform manner in place of the original designations ? which may have been unknown at the time or easily confused codes....
 of 'Golf class', were diesel electric ballistic missile submarine
Ballistic missile submarine

A ballistic missile submarine is a submarine equipped to launch ballistic missiles . Ballistic missile submarines are larger than any other type of submarine, in order to accommodate SLBMs such as the Russian R-29 or the American Trident missile....
s of the Soviet Navy
Soviet Navy

The Soviet Navy was the naval part of the Soviet Armed Forces. Often referred to as the Red Fleet, the Soviet Navy would have been instrumental in any perceived Warsaw Pact role in an all-out war with NATO when it would have to stop the naval convoys bringing reinforcements over the Atlantic to the Western European theatre....
. They were designed after six Zulu class submarine
Zulu class submarine

The Soviet Navy's Project 611, also known by their NATO reporting name of Zulu-class, were designed as attack submarines, but six were converted in 1956 to become the world's first ballistic missile submarines, one armed with a single F-11FM Scud missile and five others with two Scuds each....
s were successfully modified to carry and launch Scud missiles. All Golf boats had left Soviet service by 1990.

Design was started in the mid-1950s at the OKB-16 design bureau along with the D-2 missile system which it was to carry, and was based on the Foxtrot
Foxtrot class submarine

The Foxtrot class was the NATO reporting name of a class of diesel-electric patrol submarines that were built in the Soviet Union. The Soviet designation of this class was Project 641....
.






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Project 629, also known by the NATO reporting name
NATO reporting name

NATO reporting names are unclassified code names for military equipment of the Eastern Bloc . They provide unambiguous and easily understood English language words in a uniform manner in place of the original designations ? which may have been unknown at the time or easily confused codes....
 of 'Golf class', were diesel electric ballistic missile submarine
Ballistic missile submarine

A ballistic missile submarine is a submarine equipped to launch ballistic missiles . Ballistic missile submarines are larger than any other type of submarine, in order to accommodate SLBMs such as the Russian R-29 or the American Trident missile....
s of the Soviet Navy
Soviet Navy

The Soviet Navy was the naval part of the Soviet Armed Forces. Often referred to as the Red Fleet, the Soviet Navy would have been instrumental in any perceived Warsaw Pact role in an all-out war with NATO when it would have to stop the naval convoys bringing reinforcements over the Atlantic to the Western European theatre....
. They were designed after six Zulu class submarine
Zulu class submarine

The Soviet Navy's Project 611, also known by their NATO reporting name of Zulu-class, were designed as attack submarines, but six were converted in 1956 to become the world's first ballistic missile submarines, one armed with a single F-11FM Scud missile and five others with two Scuds each....
s were successfully modified to carry and launch Scud missiles. All Golf boats had left Soviet service by 1990.

Design was started in the mid-1950s at the OKB-16 design bureau along with the D-2 missile system which it was to carry, and was based on the Foxtrot
Foxtrot class submarine

The Foxtrot class was the NATO reporting name of a class of diesel-electric patrol submarines that were built in the Soviet Union. The Soviet designation of this class was Project 641....
. The submarine was originally designed to carry three R-11
Scud

Scud is a series of tactical ballistic missiles developed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War and exported widely to other countries. The term comes from the NATO reporting name SS-1 Scud which was attached to the missile by Western intelligence agencies....
 FM ballistic missiles with a range of around 150 km. These were carried in three silos fitted in the rear of the large sail behind the bridge. They could only be fired on the surface but the submarine could be underway at the time. Only the first three boats were equipped with these—the remaining ones were equipped with the longer range R-13 missiles.

The first boats were commissioned in 1958 and the last in 1962.

The boats were built at two shipyards—16 in Severodvinsk
Severodvinsk

Severodvinsk is a types of inhabited localities in Russia in Arkhangelsk Oblast, Russia, located in the River delta of the Northern Dvina, west of Arkhangelsk....
 and 7 in Komsomol na Amur. Fourteen were extensively modified in 1966–1972 and became known as 629A's by the Soviet Navy
Soviet Navy

The Soviet Navy was the naval part of the Soviet Armed Forces. Often referred to as the Red Fleet, the Soviet Navy would have been instrumental in any perceived Warsaw Pact role in an all-out war with NATO when it would have to stop the naval convoys bringing reinforcements over the Atlantic to the Western European theatre....
 and Golf IIs by NATO
NATO

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization , also called the Atlantic Alliance, is a military alliance established by the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty on 4 April 1949....
 (the original version now being designated Golf I). The major change was the upgrade of the missile system to carry R-21 missiles and increased speed. A few others had different conversions, for example one boat was converted to a minelayer (629E).

All boats had left Soviet service by 1990. In 1993, ten were sold to North Korea
North Korea

North Korea, officially the Democratic People's Republic of Korea , is a state in East Asia, occupying the northern half of the Korean Peninsula....
 for scrapping. These boats have never been used operationally by North Korea, although their ballistic missile
Ballistic missile

A ballistic missile is a missile that follows a sub-orbital ballistics flightpath with the objective of delivering a warhead to a predetermined target....
 launch systems may have been studied by the North Korean military in order to improve other missile technology.

The plans were also sold to China which built a single modified example in 1966 which is apparently still in service.

Project Jennifer


On August 3, 1968 1390 km northwest of Oahu
Oahu

'Oahu' or 'Oahu' , known as Gathering_place#Island_of_O.7B.7Bokina.7D.7Dahu_as_The_Gathering_Place, is the third largest of the Hawaiian Islands and most populous of the islands in the State of Hawaii....
 in the Pacific Ocean
Pacific Ocean

The Pacific Ocean is the largest of the Earth's oceanic divisions. Its name is derived from the Latin name Mare Pacificum, "peaceful sea", bestowed upon it by the Portugal explorer Ferdinand Magellan....
 the Golf II class submarine K-129
Soviet submarine K-129

Two submarines of the Soviet Navy have been designated K-129.* Soviet submarine K-129 was a diesel-electric ballistic missile submarine lost at sea and partially salvaged using the Glomar Explorer....
 exceeded its crush depth for unknown reasons and imploded, the accident being registered by the SOSUS
SOSUS

SOSUS, an acronym for SOund SUrveillance System, was a chain of underwater listening posts located across the northern Atlantic Ocean near Greenland, Iceland and the United Kingdom—the so-called GIUK gap....
 network. The entire crew of 98 was lost and the vessel sank with three ballistic nuclear missiles as well as two nuclear torpedoes. The United States
United States

The United States of America is a Federal government constitutional republic comprising U.S. state and a federal district. The country is situated mostly in central North America, where its Contiguous United States and Washington, D.C., the Capital districts and territories, lie between the Pacific Ocean and Atlantic Oceans, Borders of the U...
 recovered parts of the submarine in July 1974 from a depth of around 5 km, in an operation named Project Jennifer
Project Jennifer

"Jennifer" was the code name for the United States Central Intelligence Agency project to recover the sunken Soviet submarine K-129 , one of the Soviet Union's GOLF II Class strategic ballistic missile submarines, from the Pacific Ocean floor in the summer of 1974, using the purpose-built ship Glomar Explorer....
.

Two nuclear submarines that had been facing retirement, USS Halibut and USS Seawolf, were rebuilt and pressed into service as deep sea search vehicles. After Halibut discovered a sunken Soviet submarine containing at least one intact ballistic missile complete with nuclear warhead, Melvin Laird, Secretary of Defense under President Nixon, approved Jennifer. Six years later, north of the Hawaiian Leeward Islands, a mighty mechanical claw descended to the bottom of the Pacific and, guided by computers on board the Glomar Explorer, clamped onto 5,000 tons of twisted, rusting steel and began slowly raising it to the surface. It is unknown for sure how successful the effort was, but the United States has admitted to recovering at least a portion of K-129, which purportedly included the bodies of numerous Russian sailors. Some sources say there were only six bodies, while others say the whole crew was recovered.

In 2005 the controversial book Red Star Rogue, by Kenneth Sewell, claimed that K-129 sank 500 km northwest of Oahu on March 7, 1968 while launching one of her three ballistic missiles. In Red Star Rogue Kenneth Sewell claims that the submarine had surfaced and was in the process of launching a one megaton SERB nuclear missile from the #1 missile tube that would have vaporized Honolulu and rendered Oahu uninhabitable when a miscalculation triggered a fail-safe device that destroyed the missile and sank the submarine. He also claims Project Jennifer recovered virtually all of K-129 from the ocean floor.

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