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Navy celebrates 1,000th Trident sub patrol

KINGS BAY NAVAL SUBMARINE BASE, Ga. — Some of the military’s top officers marked a milestone in the era of nuclear warfare Thursday as they celebrated the 1,000th patrol of the Navy’s nuclear-armed, Ohio-class submarines.

The 150-man crew of the submarine Wyoming, which completed the milestone patrol Feb. 11, stood in a vast hangar as admirals, generals and Navy Secretary Donald Winter praised them and other submariners for manning “America’s most potent weapon.”

“Although our nation has never fired a submarine-launched ballistic missile in anger, the ability of our Trident fleet to do so 24 hours a day ... has promoted the interests of peace and freedom around the world,” Winter said from a podium perched on the hull of one of the 560-foot subs.

Armed with Trident missiles capable of hitting targets 4,600 miles away, these submarines have been the U.S. military’s chief deterrent against nuclear war since the first of their class, the Ohio, launched in 1981.

The Navy’s 14 Trident subs — based at Kings Bay on the Georgia coast and Naval Submarine Base Bangor in Bremerton, Wash. — carry more than 50 percent of the nation’s strategic nuclear warheads. Their crews deploy for 11 weeks at a time, lurking undetected beneath the ocean.

“We take our best and brightest, and what we do is lock them up in a hull of steel, we put them underwater and tell them to stay quiet while they’re down there,” said Air Force Gen. Kevin Chilton, commander of U.S. Strategic Command, which maintains the nation’s nuclear war plans.

Despite their hulking size, the submarines are designed for stealth. Hiding most of the nation’s nuclear weapons under the sea, the military argues, makes enemies more reluctant to order a first strike.

The U.S. has been deploying nuclear-armed submarines for more than four decades. The first, the USS George Washington, was launched in 1960. Washington-class submarines continued in service until the Ohio class took over in the 1980s.

The Wyoming’s latest deployment marks the 3,839th overall patrol of U.S. nuclear-armed submarines, said Rear Adm. Tim Giardina, commander of the Navy’s Trident submarine fleet.

Marine Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the military will soon begin looking at options for a technologically superior replacement for the Ohio-class submarines.

One consideration will be the wider range of threats the U.S. faces now compared to the Cold War. Cartwright said one option might be to have submarines carry Trident missiles armed with conventional warheads as well as nuclear weapons.

“The nuclear answer is not the answer for every problem,” Cartwright said. “It is not going to be single deterrent that deters all things.”