Soviet titanium submarine (Alpha-class) creep-fatigue failures

The Soviets built the Alpha subs using heavy-section titanium that the US could not match. Gurevich at Paton Welding Institute did the research from the 1960s, stopped publishing in 1972 when the program went black. Tom estimates $100M of research funding. Soviets didn't crack creep-fatigue interaction either, NRL eventually did.

One of the problems in the titanium business is that it's not a big enough industry to sustain its own rolling and melting facilities. They borrow time, rent time on a steel mill — they go in one day in a steel mill to roll the titanium they need for a month. They can't afford a half-a-billion-dollar rolling mill. They have to go roll in a dirty little steel mill, which creates its own problems. We never had a big titanium industry. The Soviets did. And the Soviets built the Alpha subs.

Tom traces the full arc: the 1980 *International Herald Tribune* announcement that caught the U.S. Navy flat-footed; the thirty-year prior U.S. Navy titanium program at David Taylor (welding 1–4 inch titanium since the 1950s); the Naval Research Lab's identification of creep-fatigue interaction as the Achilles heel; Tom's 1980 visit to the Paton Institute under the Carter-era U.S.–Soviet electrometallurgy exchange, where he spent two hours with Gurevich (Mr. Titanium, who had stopped publishing in 1972 when Alpha design began); the discovery that the Soviets never solved creep-fatigue and the subs cracked and became acoustically detectable within three years; and the Reagan administration's slamming of the exchange door. The case carries the lecture's deepest teaching: that the U.S. Navy's caution was vindicated, one titanium sub costs ten steel subs, and Congress later zeroed Millard Firebaugh's SSN-21 budget in pursuit of composite submarines.

When the Alpha sub first came on the scene, 1980 — what's the Alpha sub, everybody know? You haven't seen The Hunt for Red October? Tom Clancy. The Alpha sub was the all-titanium attack submarine that the Soviets dropped on the world in 1980, and it was a real eye-opener for the U.S. Navy. The Navy had been looking at titanium for submarine hulls for thirty years — since the early 1950s. The full story probably goes back to World War II. Because of the Manhattan Project, MIT mechanical engineering developed very effective vacuum systems for what they called vacuum metallurgy. You could now melt reactive metals under a full vacuum, whereas they really didn't have the technology to do this on an industrial scale before that.