Soviet commanders wanted Ural to head to Kwajelein, where since the 1960s the U.S. “She was forced to anchor out in the bay and begin her invisible battle with corrosion and failing machinery, which had to remain running while at anchor to support the systems that supported the huge crew,” Independent Military Review recalled.
The recon ship finally arrived at Vladivostok only for her crew to discover that the vessel’s special pier wasn’t complete. Rats “only reappeared when the ship moored at the pier.”
She also became what Russian Navy Blog described as “one of those rare ships free of rats.” When her electronics were all switched on, something-radiation, perhaps-swiftly killed all the rodents aboard. Russian Navy Blog helpfully listed that and other screw-ups a 2008 post. Ural’s bad luck began early on, during her long voyage from the shipyard in the Baltic Sea to her Pacific home port-a two-month trip that took the giant spy ship and her 1,000 sailors all the way around Europe, presumably through the Suez Canal and onward across Southeast Asia to Vladivostok, near Russia’s borders with China and North Korea.ĭuring a stopover in Cam Ran Bay in Vietnam, guards aboard Ural threw grenades at what they thought was an enemy infiltrator swimming toward the secret ship.
Soviet-and later Russian-authorities were never willing to risk sending Ural on an actual deployment. She was a sailing disaster magnet from the moment she entered service in December 1988. In any event, Ural never got to actually use all that high-tech gear. “Even today, 25 years after being laid down, it is very difficult to find reliable information about her construction,” the Russian publication noted. “She is equipped to quickly evaluate an enormous amount of reconnaissance data and transmit it to the national command authority.”īut exactly which radars and sensors Ural carried have never been disclosed. “The Ural could loiter for an unlimited amount of time in neutral waters without refueling in the American littoral and analyze the electromagnetic spectrum around American ICBM and strategic aviation bases,” the Russian Independent Military Review wrote in 2006. All that juice was meant to both propel the ship to a speed of 22 knots and power one of the densest, most complex arrays of radars, radios and electronic listening devices ever put to sea. Her twin nuclear reactors could, in theory, generate 171 megawatts-as much as a small civilian power plant.
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