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

Defense experts said that one possible explanation for the collision was that the two submarines were involved in an exercise that involved the craft tracking each other at close quarters in the kind of war games that have played out in the Atlantic for decades between western and Soviet submarines, especially in the northern Atlantic between Scotland and Iceland.

A sense of what is involved in these games of deep-sea maneuver was given in the 1990 film, “The Hunt for Red October.” Based on a novel by Tom Clancy, the film centers on a chase involving an American hunter-killer submarine, the U.S.S. Dallas, and a Soviet missile-carrying submarine, the Red October. In its tensest moments, the film shows the two submarines, each using sophisticated technology designed to avoid sonar detection, maneuvering at close quarters in a deep-sea canyon off Iceland.

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

February 16, 2009 3:36pm in Further reading | Comment