“Set course for the island of Dr. No!”
With the old-school appearance of the submarine designed in the 1950s, the blue-green tones of the exterior photos, and the Great Successor’s poses and angles at which he’s photographed, Kim Jong-Un looks like a villain from the Sean Connery-era James Bond movies in these undated photos released by North Korea.
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“Look upon this sub made from Chinese knock-off parts I got on the military equivalent of eBay, and despair!” the photos seem to say. The Soviets called this design “Project 633”, while NATO’s classification for this sub is Romeo. Designed from lessons learned from captured German XXI U-Boats, Romeo-class subs are powered by diesel-electric engines and were first built in the late 1950s. The Union formerly known as Soviet phased them out shortly after 1961 when they switched to nuclear-powered submarines, and they’ve been decommissioned by military powers such as Syria and Algeria. China still has a baker’s dozen of these sub for training purposes, Egypt operates 3 upgraded variants, and Bulgaria still has one in operation.
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Naughty Korea (as opposed to Nice Korea) is the leading operator of Romeo-class subs, with 22 in its navy. Four of these — presumably the better-built ones — were bought from China, while the remainder were assembled locally with parts bought from China. They carry Chinese-made Yu-4 torpedoes, which date from the 1960s and have a range of between 6.5 kilometres (4 miles) for the original version and 15 kilometres (9.3 miles) for the upgraded version. In contrast, the U.S. Navy’s Harpoon missiles can hit a target 240 kilometres (150 miles) away — that’s nearly 40 times the range of the Chinese torpedo.
“Notify Dr. No that I will be arriving,
and want to see the progress on his jamming device.”
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These photos were released Monday by the North Korean government’s press agency, who reported that Kim, whose polymath powers make Buckaroo Banzai s green as Kim’s sub with envy, taught the submarine’s captain “a good method of navigation”. True to his title, the Great Successor has taken mansplaining to a whole new level.
“Annyeonghi gaseyo, Mr. Bond.”
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I’ll end this with the closing lines from David Blair’s report for The Telegraph:
Mr. Kim’s decision to pay a high profile visit seems at odds with the official doctrine of the so-called People’s Navy, which stresses the importance of camouflage and concealment.
So seriously were these tasks taken that 2004 was officially declared the “Year of Camouflage.”
On the 10th anniversary of that occasion, however, Mr. Kim allowed photographs of the unlikely pride of his fleet to be released to the world.
Cdre Stephen Saunders, the editor of IHS Jane’s Fighting Ships, summed up: “The fact that the Dear Successor is spending time on what, in any other navy, would be an obsolete submarine tells its own story.”
“Minions! Now set course for the island of Dennis Rodman!”
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