Russia's enormous Oscar-class nuclear attack submarines, known as the Project 949A, were designed during the Cold War with a specific mission in mind: to go hunting for American aircraft carriers, the pride of American naval power.
Because each U.S. flattop is protected by its own little fleet of escorting warships—many of them specialized in antisubmarine warfare—the Oscar's primary game plane isn't to creep up close for a torpedo attack.
Instead, it's designed to lob enormous anti-shipping cruise missiles (ASCMs) from hundreds of miles away.
Cruise-missile submarines, designated SSGs and SSGNs by the U.S. Navy, were not a new concept. The earliest missile subs were adapted from more conventional submarines in the 1950s, and the Soviet Echo class, commissioned in 1961, were the first ones designed to employ cruise missiles as their primary armament.
Work on a large third-generation cruise-missile submarine, designated as the Project 949 Granit, began in the mid-1970s. It featured a double-hulled design, as was standard on large Soviet submarines. The primary hull with the crew compartments and ship systems is contained inside a more aquadynamic outer hull of thin steel. On those Oscar IIs still in service, the outer hull is separated by up to six feet or as little as two inches, depending on the location. Two nuclear reactors generated seventy-three megawatts of electricity for the enormous submarine. A crew complement of around one hundred occupied nine or ten compartments that could be sealed off from one another.
The Oscar class is large, in order to carry its heavy armament. The main production model is more than one and a half football fields long (154 meters), and displaces 12,500 tons while surfaced, making it the fourth-largest submarine type ever produced. Nonetheless, Oscar-class subs can attain an excellent maximum speed of thirty-seven miles per hour while submerged, and dive up to five hundred meters. However, they are reputed to be slow to dive and lacking in maneuverability.