Apparently, the next Borey class SSBN will be dubbed St. Nicholas, after one of the more important saints in the Russian Orthodox Church. I leave it to the wisdom of the crowds to develop jokes about lists of naughty and nice, nuclear warheads in the stockings, and so forth.
Like many others, I find the comparative practice of warship naming to be endlessly fascinating. The St. Nicholas reminds me most of the Royal Navy's N3 battleships (contemporaries of the first American South Dakota class and the Japanese Tosas) which according to some sources would have been named St. David, St. Patrick, St. George, and St. Andrew, after the patron saints of Wales, Ireland, England, and Scotland. The Washington Naval Treaty, unfortunately, deprived us of HMS St. Patrick, which would have been more or less a large Nelson with 18" guns instead of 16".
No comments:
Post a Comment