Los Angeles-Class Submarines: Rickover's Fish Don't Vote and 62 Boats

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The Los Angeles class, known as the 688 class after lead boat SSN-688, grew from late-1960s alarm over fast Soviet submarines armed with anti-ship cruise missiles. The existing Sturgeon class could not keep pace with a carrier battle group at full speed, so the new design was about 50 percent larger to hold the S6G pressurized water reactor, with machinery on shock-absorbing rafts to keep noise out of the water. The boats broke with the tradition of naming submarines after sea creatures and took the names of American cities; asked why, Admiral Hyman Rickover answered that fish don't vote. Building them was contentious: in 1976 General Dynamics Electric Boat filed a $544 million claim over Navy design changes, which the Navy settled for $843 million under special public law authority.

In 1979 and 1980 inspectors found non-conforming steel and thousands of defective or missing welds, and the shipyard filed a $100 million insurance claim to cover reinspection. The Navy built 62 boats over more than 20 years in three flights, and officially lists the speed only as over 25 knots and the operating depth as 650 feet, while Tom Clancy estimated 37 knots and Jane's Fighting Ships a 1,475-foot test depth. The ARCI program later swapped custom sonar computers for commercial processors. Some boats, such as USS Bremerton and USS San Francisco, served over 40 years, while others retired after 15 or 20 to avoid the cost of midlife refueling.

• A single boat eventually cost around $900 million, and Electric Boat's first batch was 18 boats.
• Flight II added 12 vertical launch tubes for Tomahawk cruise missiles behind the sail.
• The 688I moved its retractable diving planes from the sail to the bow so the sail could punch through Arctic ice.
• An electrolytic oxygen generator splits seawater for breathable air and produces explosive hydrogen that must be pumped overboard.
• USS Dallas in The Hunt for Red October, USS Chicago in Red Storm Rising and the game 688 Attack Sub made the class a pop culture fixture.