T-72 Tank: Kartsev's Rogue Ural Project and the Jack-in-the-Box Effect

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

The T-72 began as an act of defiance. In the 1960s Alexander Morozov's Kharkiv bureau built the T-64, with an autoloader and a fragile 5TDF opposed-piston two-stroke diesel that took about twice as long to build as a V-shaped engine. The GABTU, the Soviet Main Agency of Armored Forces, ordered Leonid Kartsev's bureau in Nizhny Tagil to refit the T-64 with a V-12 diesel as a cheap mobilization model. Kartsev instead combined the T-64's gun, the V-12 and the suspension of his rejected Object 167 in a project code-named Ural. Field tests showed it was cheaper and more reliable, and in 1973, after Kartsev had retired due to illness, it was adopted as the T-72. About 25,000 were built, serving in over 40 countries.

The 41-ton tank carries a 125mm smoothbore fed by a floor-mounted carousel of 22 two-part rounds, with 17 more stowed around the crew compartment. A penetrating hit that ignites those spare charges can set off all 39 rounds and blow the turret off the hull, the jack-in-the-box effect. Armor evolved through the composite "Dolly Parton" turret of the 1979 T-72A, the thicker T-72B and Kontakt explosive reactive armor. Iraqi T-72s beat British Chieftains in the Iran-Iraq War, and Hafez al-Assad called it the best tank in the world after Lebanon in 1982. In 1991, downgraded Iraqi export models firing 1970s steel-core rounds were destroyed at 73 Easting by Abrams crews using thermal sights.

• Soviet rules allowed crewmen up to 5 feet 9 inches, so the short-crew legend is mostly a myth, though the interior is very cramped.
• With a snorkel the T-72 can cross rivers 5 meters deep, and a stalled engine must restart within about six seconds before it floods.
• Explosive reactive armor throws metal plates across an incoming shaped charge jet to break it up.
• Cope cages welded over turrets in Ukraine gave little protection against tandem-charge Javelin missiles and could trap crews.
• Kartsev's design became the basis for the later T-90 series.