MOSCOW, 20 Nov. British Navy nuclear submarine with nuclear rockets and a crew of 140 people almost drowned due to a malfunction of the depth gauge, the tabloid The Sun reports.
“In the Atlantic, the depth gauge on a ship of the Avangard class, built several decades ago, with a crew of 140 people and “Trident 2 doomsday missiles,” the publication said.
The submarine was preparing to go on patrol when the dials indicating its depth stopped working, causing the crew to believe that it was in a horizontal position, while she was still diving.
The submarine, according to the publication, had already entered the “danger zone” when engineers in the aft compartment noticed the readings of the second sensor and raised the alarm. “The worst disaster” in the Royal Navy since the Second World War, the newspaper writes. “Such a disaster would have forced a nightmarish rescue operation to recover the top-secret ship and its nuclear reactor before the Russians got there,” the story says. .
As former Commander-in-Chief of the Royal Navy, Admiral Alan West, previously said in an interview with the Daily Mail, the British Navy is in a “wretched” state. According to him, the fleet must perform many tasks, including protecting undersea cables, pipelines and trade routes across the Atlantic, but it is not able to function fully due to reduced funding.