20,000 leagues and all that

Perhaps I should have kept up to speed with the feeds on my Netvibes page. Had I done so, I would have read Alex Barker yesterday afternoon, and his post Hunt for Red October and the sub-nuclear crash. He posted that

The New York Times raises the intriguing prospect that the submarine crash in the mid-Atlantic was actually the result of a war game.

But then finished with

Sadly, officials tell me this wonderful theory is completely untrue. Improbable as it may seem, the submarines really did just bump into each other.

I am still not sure I believe that.

Submarine grandmother’s footsteps

Much has been made of the fact that the British and French nuclear submarines that collided in the Atlantic sometime last month were somehow unaware of each other’s presence. The FT this morning reported that

One defence insider suggested the French were genuinely unaware that Le Triomphant hit a British submarine until a routine information exchange with the Royal Navy.

Isn’t it more likely that one was stalking the other? If Sandy Woodward in The Independent is right that the chances of a collision such as this happening are the same as winning the lottery four times in a week, then it wasn’t chance. Equally, however, actually touching each other probably wasn’t by design either.

I rather doubt that we will ever find out, despite political calls for an explanation.