Technology@War – serie

The Whiskey-class (Soviet Project 613) submarines were the most numerous submarine produced after 1945. The type is best Known in the West for the 1981 ‘Whiskey on the Rocks’ incident when an example became stranded in Swedish waters but had a long and successful career with the Soviet and allied navies.Whiskey-class Submarines: Soviet Project 613 Submarines in Service with Foreign Navies, 1951-1990 examines the very successful foreign use of this Soviet design, often derided within the West as being based upon obsolete Second World War German technologies and consequently of little threat or concern.As the Project 613 boats were replaced by newer types in Soviet service, a number of vessels were exported to allied or client states where they operated in several conflicts without loss. The type was able to evade contemporary British sonars and was used to successfully land special forces inside enemy territory without detection. This book describes the service history of the type with the Albanian, Bulgarian, Egyptian, Indonesian, Polish and Syrian fleets, and looks at Chinese production of the type and their service with the People’s Liberation Army Navy. In addition, the experience of the crews and captains are examined.Whiskey-class Submarines: Soviet Project 613 Submarines in Service with Foreign Navies, 1951-1990 is illustrated with many photographs, very often extremely rare, and includes specially commissioned color artworks.

When it was founded in 1949, the People's Republic of China was an agricultural state with no industrial base to speak of and no armaments industry of its own. From the very beginning, Mao Tse Dng, the founder of the state, endeavored to develop his own modern defense industry in order to gain weight on the international stage. Part of this effort was the development of a domestic aerospace industry with massive support from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (colloquially the ‘Soviet Union’).Until the two countries broke up in 1961 due to ideological differences, more than 100 aviation companies were established with Soviet help and the licensed production of numerous aircraft types from trainers to heavy bombers was started. The last of these was the MiG-21, which is reproduced in China as the J-7.It took more than 10 years before the country, weakened by the ‘Great Leap Forward’ and the Cultural Revolution, succeeded at all in producing this comparatively complex aircraft. Only the comprehensive reforms after the death of state founder Mao created the basis for a return to orderly production of a technology that was already two decades old and outdated.The rapprochement with the West in the early 1980s made it possible, in part, to overcome the technological backlog. The integration of Western avionics into the Soviet airframe did not make the J/F-7 a modern combat aircraft like the F-16 and MiG-29 developed at the same time, but it increased its combat value to such an extent that it became an export success for the Third World. However, even more important was the access to Western technologies, later also for air-to-air missiles, which were initially, simply copied and later formed the basis for in-house developments of modern equipment and weapons systems.When cooperation with the West ended abruptly after the Tiananmen massacre of 1989, Chinese engineers and scientists had accumulated enough know-how to provide their own impetus in the further development of the J/F-7 family. Due to the combination of new aerodynamics and modern avionics, true multi-role combat aircraft were finally created which today, still spearhead their air forces in numerous countries in Asia and Africa.When the production of the J/F-7 finally ended in 2016, two generations of modern fighters based on this design were coming off the production line in China, and the prototypes of the fifth generation were already flying. The experience gained by China's aerospace industry in developing the J/F-7 from a day fighter to a multi-role fighter has made this success possible.The book deals with both the technical development of the J/F-7 family and its actual or potential use in more than a dozen countries on five continents.

In the aftermath of the Second World War relations between the Soviet Union and their former allies in the West quickly soured and developed into the Cold War. The USSR was at a huge disadvantage at sea and sought to redress this balance through the equipping of many of its warships with nuclear weapons ranging from torpedoes to strategic missiles. Doomsday Torpedoes examines the history of these weapons and their live testing during the Cold War.The US Navy maintained a large fleet of aircraft carriers capable of encircling the Soviet Union and delivering airborne nuclear attack from many different directions. The Soviets were in dire need of finding ways to neutralise this threat, preferably with a single powerful blow: torpedoes with nuclear warheads as well as nuclear-tipped anti-ship missiles offered such a capability. Doomsday Torpedoes describes the development and fielding of such weapons by the Soviets and their navy in detail, along with strategic nuclear weapons launched from the sea, primarily submarine launched ballistic missiles. In addition, the Soviet development of submarines, as the primary launch platforms of naval nuclear weapons is examined.The main focus of Doomsday Torpedoes is the time period from 1952 up until the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963. This book examines the events of that era, including those of the Cuban Missile Crisis in which Soviet submarines came close to firing nuclear-armed torpedoes in a chain of events that came extraordinarily close to initiating the Third World War.