page_title: Yankee-class submarine
section_title: Operational history
hierarchical_section_title: Yankee-class submarine / Operational history
caption_attribution_description: A starboard bow view of the Soviet Yankee class nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine that was damaged by an internal liquid missile propellant explosion. Three days later the ship sank in 18,000 feet of water.
context_page_description: The Yankee class, Soviet designations Project 667A Navaga and Project 667AU Nalim, was a series of nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines built in the Soviet Union for the Soviet Navy. In total, 34 units were produced out of 24 built in Severodvinsk for the Northern Fleet and the remaining 10 in Komsomolsk-on-Amur for the Pacific Fleet. Two Northern Fleet units were later transferred to the Pacific. The lead boat K-137 Leninets received its honorific name on 11 April 1970, two and one half years after being commissioned.
context_section_description: The Yankee-class SSBNs served in the Soviet Navy in three oceans: the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, and the Arctic Ocean beginning in the 1960s. During the 1970s about three Yankee-class were continually on patrol in a so-called "patrol box" in the Atlantic Ocean just east of Bermuda and off the US Pacific coast. This forward deployment of the SSBNs was seen to balance the presence of American, British, and French nuclear weapons kept in Western Europe and on warships (including nuclear submarines) in  the surrounding Atlantic Ocean, including the Mediterranean Sea and the Eastern Atlantic.
  One Yankee-class submarine, K-219, was lost on 6 October 1986 after an explosion and fire on board. This boat had been at sea near Bermuda, and she sank from loss of buoyancy because of flooding. Four of her sailors died before rescue ships arrived. At least one other boat in this class was involved in a collision with a U.S. Navy nuclear submarine.
  Because of their increasing age, and as negotiated in the SALT I, START I and START II treaties that reduce nuclear armaments of the United States and the Soviet Union, all boats of Yankee class were disarmed, decommissioned and sent to the nuclear ship scrapyards.
caption: K-219 damaged
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