U.S. Navy titanium creep-fatigue research (1982 Soviet discovery)

NRL had studied creep-fatigue interaction in titanium and identified it as a barrier to U.S. titanium submarine construction. The Soviets didn't know about it and built the Alpha class anyway, learning the hard way. Tom received NRL questioning at David Taylor / Carderock conferences in the early 1980s.

It turns out that if you compress titanium and hold it under compression, fatigue cracks grow really fast. Well, guess what a submarine hull is — it's held under compression when you're down deep. So there were several problems with the titanium subs of the Soviets. Certain things weren't a problem: they could go faster underwater than our destroyers could go on top of the water. They could dive deeper than the collapse depth of the depth charges. Some of these things concerned people, although one person who did a lot of work for the Rocky-class said, well, if you use the right type of depth charge you only have to get within a few miles. I thought, yeah, and as soon as you start doing that we have bigger problems. But in any case, we could have gotten rid of them.