Navy

NATO's Plan to Kill Russia's Submarines: Bomb Them with Magnets?

At the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Union had so many hundreds of deadly submarines at sea that Western war planners willing to try almost any possible countermeasure, however goofy sounding.
Some seemingly crazy ideas proved actually worthwhile, such as the underwater Sound Surveillance System—a vast chain of seafloor microphones that patiently listened for Soviet subs … and remains in use today.
Other less elegant anti-submarine tools survive only as anecdotes. In his book Hunter Killers , naval writer Iain Ballantyne recalls one of the zanier ideas — air-dropped “floppy-magnets” meant to foul up Soviet undersea boats, making them noisier and easier to detect.
From the late 1940s on, captured German technology boosted Soviet postwar submarine design. Soviet shipyards delivered subs good enough — and numerous enough — to pose a huge danger to Western shipping.