On the menu today: The same diligence, professionalism, and commitment to safety that Chinese virologists brought to their gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses is on display by Chinese nuclear-submarine engineers and construction crews, as the Chinese fleet is now down one sub for the foreseeable future, and you’re probably not going to want to do any swimming in the Yangtze River anytime soon. To err is human, and all governments and militaries have accidents. But free societies are at least a little bit better at revealing uncomfortable truths and holding people accountable for the consequences of their actions.
China’s Nuclear-Submarine Disaster
You readers are going to think I’m obsessed with man-made disasters in one particular Chinese city. It’s not me, I swear; this is the big story in the Wall Street Journal this morning:
China’s newest nuclear-powered attack submarine sank in the spring, a major setback for one of the country’s priority weapons programs, U.S. officials said.
The episode, which Chinese authorities scrambled to cover up and hasn’t previously been disclosed, occurred at a shipyard near Wuhan in late May or early June.
I’m sorry, where again?
Wait, you mean the city that had a state-run lab with a substandard safety record doing gain-of-function research on coronaviruses found in bats right before the Covid-19 outbreak started there?
You probably remember that one, on account of the fact that it completely disrupted your life for a year or two and caused 27 million or so “excess deaths” around the world. But I’ll bet you don’t remember the Wuhan University researchers who allowed artificial intelligence to control an Earth-observation satellite, which led the satellite to start looking at Indian military bases and a Japanese port used by the U.S. Navy. Lead researcher Wang Mi boasted, “This approach breaks the existing rules in mission planning.” Yes, and we all know all the great things that happen when scientific researchers in Wuhan break the existing rules. First the Andromeda Strain, then SkyNet.
What other kinds of experiments are they doing over there in Wuhan these days? Summoning demons? Reaching out to say “hi” to some hostile alien empire in outer space? Are they just flipping through old Marvel comics, reading about the villains’ plots, and thinking, “Hey, that would make a cool experiment”? All the troubles in the world apparently lead back to Wuhan.
I can hear your skepticism now; Wuhan is not near the ocean. But it’s at the confluence of the Yangtze River and the Han River, and is home to the Wuchang Shipyard, where the Chinese military builds its submarines.
Now, I know you’re going to think this newsletter is in a rerun from 2020, but it appears the Chinese government had a catastrophic disaster, covered it up, and isn’t even bothering to check whether there’s been a radiation leak. Per the Journal:
The U.S. doesn’t know if the sub was carrying nuclear fuel at the time it sank, but experts outside the U.S. government said that was likely. . . .
China has been moving to diversify the production of nuclear-powered submarines. Production has been centered in the northeastern city of Huludao, but China is now moving to manufacture nuclear-powered attack submarines at the Wuchang Shipyard near Wuhan. . . .
The Zhou-class vessel that sank is the first of a new class of Chinese nuclear-powered subs and features a distinctive X-shaped stern, which is designed to make the vessel more maneuverable
The sub was built by China State Shipbuilding Corp., a state-owned company, and was observed alongside a pier on the Yangtze River in late May when it was undergoing its final equipping before going to sea.
After the sinking, large floating cranes arrived in early June to salvage the sub from the river bed, according to satellite photos of the site. . . .
“It’s not surprising that the PLA Navy would try to conceal the fact that their new first-in-class nuclear-powered attack submarine sank pierside,” said a senior U.S. defense official. “In addition to the obvious questions about training standards and equipment quality, the incident raises deeper questions about the PLA’s internal accountability and oversight of China’s defense industry, which has long been plagued by corruption. . . .”
While the submarine was salvaged, it will likely take many months before it can be put to sea.
“The whole boat would be full of water,” [Thomas Shugart, a former U.S. submarine officer and an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security] said. “You’d have to clean out all the electronics. The electric motors may need to be replaced. It would be a lot of work.”
American officials haven’t detected any indication that Chinese officials have sampled the water or nearby environment for radiation. It is possible Chinese personnel were killed or injured when the sub sank, but U.S. officials say they don’t know if there were casualties.
Shugart said that the risk of a nuclear leak was likely to be low as the sub hadn’t ventured out to sea and its reactors were probably not operating at a high power level.
Eh, even if the radiation-leak risk is relatively low, you’re probably not going to want to swim in the Yangtze River anywhere near that submarine base for a long while. Fishing in the Yangtze River near Wuhan is banned, but some Chinese still make attempts.
The Chinese submarine fleet’s history with accidents is a grim one, and some of those accidents are quite recent.
In 2023, the Times of London reported, “The Chinese navy has lost 55 sailors after one of its nuclear-powered submarine [sic] was caught in a trap intended for American and British vessels, leaked intelligence reports”:
The British report, based on defense intelligence seen by the newspaper, said: “Our understanding is death caused by hypoxia [lack of oxygen] due to a system fault on the submarine.
“The submarine hit a chain and anchor obstacle used by the Chinese navy to trap US and allied submarines. This resulted in systems failures that took six hours to repair and surface the vessel. The on-board oxygen system poisoned the crew after a catastrophic failure.”
In May of this year, Taiwan’s national-security director, Cai Mingyan, offered a partial confirmation, saying “that the Type 093 Shang-class nuclear submarine was not a serious shipwreck, but there were some accidents. ‘We all know the subsequent location of the submarine.’”
Back in 2003, the “official New China News Agency said in a brief dispatch that [an] accident occurred . . . in the Yellow Sea between the Shandong and Korean peninsulas. The diesel-powered craft, Navy Submarine No. 361, was involved in an exercise when the accident occurred, and ‘because of a mechanical malfunction, the 70 crew members on board died,’ the news report said.”
In 2011, there were widespread rumors and claims of a “an accidental radiation leak on a Chinese nuclear submarine moored in Dalian port in Liaoning Province, in the northeastern part of China,” but the Chinese government never confirmed the accident occurred.
The Russians lost two Soviet-era nuclear-powered submarines in a four-year span.* First, “In August 2000, the nuclear submarine Kursk left a port above Russia’s Arctic Circle for naval exercises on the Barents Sea. Not long after departure, one of the torpedoes on board the vessel exploded in its hatch, killing most of the 118 crew members and sending the wreck, along with 23 survivors, hurtling to the seafloor.” Then, “In the Fall of 2003, the aged Russian submarine K-159 sank in the Barents Sea while being towed to a scrap yard. The sinking, which resulted from a leak in the ship’s hull, killed nine Russian sailors.”
And there are other radiation-leak fears from old and poorly maintained Russian submarine-construction, -repair, and -docking sites:
However, numerous damaged fuel rods still remain at the site, stored in irradiated buildings that also need to be dismantled and disposed of. Originally, this project — on which Norway alone has spent some 30 million euros ($32.6 million) — was on track to be completed by 2028. However, since the war [in Ukraine] began, Moscow has pushed that deadline back to a vague point in the 2030s, while providing little public evidence of progress.
Autocracies are bored by safety regulations. Autocratic leaders just want what they want, often power and military force and grand demonstrations of their greatness, and they don’t care about what they have to sacrifice to get it, whether that’s the safety of the workers and sailors beneath them or the long-term environmental consequences.
This is one of the many reasons why red-green alliances make so little sense. How blind must you be, as an environmentalist, to look at the regimes in Beijing and Moscow and think, “Yes, these are the responsible stewards of the environment I want as my ally?”
What kind of idiot would — oh, wait, that’s right. U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry said in March, “If Russia wanted to show good faith, they could go out and announce what their reductions are going to be and make a greater effort to reduce emissions now. Maybe that would open up the door for people to feel better about what Russia is choosing to do at this point in time.”
What Russia is “choosing to do at this point in time” is invade and attempt to conquer Ukraine, with “common patterns of torture by Russian authorities against Ukrainian civilians and prisoners of war in occupied Ukrainian territories and in the Russian Federation” and more than 1,900 confirmed attacks on health facilities.
*I know, your mind instantly went to “Andrei, you’ve lost another submarine?”
ADDENDUM: Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump remains focused like a laser beam on doing what it takes to win the presidency in November.
The Republican presidential candidate unveiled the “Official Trump Watch Collection” on Thursday. The most expensive, listed as including 122 diamonds on its bezel and available in three 18-karat gold styles, costs $100,000. Another “Fight Fight Fight” model is listed at $499.