The Typhoon Class Submarine: Russia's Largest Submarine Ever Built by Size

The Typhoon class submarine remains the largest submarine ever built, a record it has held since the lead boat entered Soviet service in December 1981. Displacing up to 48,000 tonnes submerged, the Russian Typhoon submarine, called Project 941 Akula by the Soviet Navy and Typhoon by NATO, was built around a single requirement: carry twenty R-39 Rif ballistic missiles far enough under the Arctic ice that no American first strike could reach them. Six of these Russian Typhoon submarines were completed between 1981 and 1989; a seventh hull was cancelled before launch.

Everything about the Typhoon class submarine is oversized. It displaces close to twice as much submerged as the American Ohio class it was built to counter, and at 175 metres it runs close to the length of two American football fields laid end to end. Crews called it the "floating Hilton" for a level of comfort (sauna, small pool, gym) that no other submarine class has matched before or since. This page covers where the design came from, how it compares in size with the world's other missile submarines, what happened to each of the six hulls, and why the Soviet Navy built the biggest submarine in the world in the first place.

Origins: The Soviet Typhoon Class Submarine and Project 941 Akula

The Soviet Union built the Typhoon class submarine as a direct answer to the US Navy's ballistic missile submarine of the era, the Ohio class, which began entering service in 1981 carrying 24 Trident missile tubes (reduced to 20 in 2017 under New START). Soviet naval architects at the Rubin design bureau needed a boat that could carry the new R-39 Rif missile, NATO's SS-N-20 Sturgeon and bilateral designation RSM-52, a three-stage, solid-fuel weapon that weighed roughly 84 tonnes fully fuelled and measured 16.1 metres long, far larger than the American Trident I it was meant to match. A missile that size could not fit inside a submarine built on Delta-class or Yankee-class proportions, so the bureau built the submarine around the missile rather than the other way round.

The resulting design, Project 941 Akula in Soviet service, became known outside Russia as the Typhoon class after Leonid Brezhnev referred to a "typhoon" ballistic missile submarine in a 1974 speech. Each Soviet Typhoon class submarine carried twenty R-39 missiles, and each missile could seat up to ten independently targetable warheads of 100 to 200 kilotons; at full deployment the six-boat class represented roughly 120 missiles and well over a thousand warheads, before arms-control treaties began cutting that number down through the 1990s.

Multi-Hull Design: Building the Largest Submarine in the World

A Typhoon class submarine is not one pressure hull but five. Two main cylindrical hulls, each about the diameter of a Delta-class boat, run side by side down most of its length; a smaller hull above and between them holds the control room and periscopes, and separate hulls fore and aft house the torpedo room and steering gear. The twenty missile tubes sit in the gap between the two main hulls, inside the outer light hull rather than inside either pressure hull. That layout is why the boat is so much wider than any other submarine ever built (23 metres of beam against roughly 13 metres for an Ohio or a Borei), and why the design is unusually survivable: flooding in one main hull does not touch the crew sealed inside the other.

The same multi-hull arrangement, paired with an anechoic rubber coating and two independent OK-650 reactors, made this the biggest submarine in the world by a wide margin and gave it enough reserve buoyancy to punch up through several metres of Arctic pack ice to fire. No attack submarine of the period matched its size, because none needed to; an attack boat is built to hunt, a Typhoon was built to hide and to survive being found.

Typhoon Class Submarine Size and Specifications

The raw numbers explain why this design earned its reputation as the world's largest submarine outright, not just the largest missile submarine.

How the Typhoon Compares: Ohio, Borei, Delta IV, Vanguard and a WW2 U-Boat

Even against the next-largest missile submarines ever built, the Typhoon class submarine sits in a class of its own. It is not merely bigger than its rivals; it is close to twice the submerged displacement of an Ohio or a Borei, and more than fifty times the submerged displacement of the WW2-era Type VIIC U-boat that patrolled the Atlantic four decades earlier armed with nothing heavier than torpedoes and a deck gun.

Only the Borei class, still in production for the Russian Navy, comes close on displacement, and it still falls 24,000 tonnes short. That gap is the reason the Typhoon remains the reference point whenever a report or a documentary reaches for the phrase biggest submarine in the world — the class is retired, but the record it set has not been challenged by any of the modern submarine classes built since.

Six Russian Typhoon Submarines: Names, Commissioning and Fate

The Soviet Navy laid down seven hulls under Project 941 and completed six of them; the seventh, TK-210, was cancelled while still under construction at the Sevmash yard in Severodvinsk. All six commissioned boats served with the Northern Fleet, and by the mid-2020s none remained in active service.

Arctic Bastion Patrols: The Reason for the Size

A Typhoon class submarine was built for one patrol pattern: sit under the Arctic ice inside a protected "bastion" close to Soviet territory, screened by surface ships, aircraft and attack submarines, and stay there long enough to guarantee a retaliatory strike even after a first strike on the Soviet Union itself. Its size, its reserve buoyancy and its reinforced sail were built specifically to let it surface through pack ice to fire; TK-20 Severstal test-launched a missile from beneath the North Pole in November 1996, one of the more visible demonstrations of what the design was for. Patrolling this way, a single Russian Typhoon submarine under Arctic ice was considerably harder for NATO attack submarines to track than a Delta-class boat working open ocean, because Soviet air and naval assets, including surface escorts such as the Kirov-class battlecruiser, never needed to leave it unescorted for long.

Life Aboard: Sauna, Pool and 120-Day Patrols

A crew of roughly 160 could stay submerged for up to 120 days at a time, close to four times the length of a typical Cold War patrol on a smaller boat, and the interior was built with that in mind. One of the two main hulls held a wood-panelled sauna, a small swimming pool around four metres by two, a gym and a lounge with a solarium and card tables; it is where the "floating Hilton" nickname came from. None of that comfort changed the underlying job. A hundred and sixty men still spent four months at a stretch inside a pair of pressurised steel cylinders under the ice, breathing recycled air, with no daylight and no contact with the outside world beyond what their orders allowed.

Decommissioning and the Fate of Dmitriy Donskoy

The R-39 Rif missile was retired from Russian service by 2004, and without its main weapon the rest of the class had little role left beyond weapons testing. TK-202, TK-12 and TK-13 were withdrawn in 1996 and scrapped between 2005 and 2009, much of it funded through the US Cooperative Threat Reduction programme. TK-17 Arkhangelsk and TK-20 Severstal were laid up at Severodvinsk in the 2000s and remain there, decommissioned but not yet dismantled, their missile-tube covers permanently removed so that satellites can verify neither carries weapons.

TK-208, renamed Dmitry Donskoy after a 1990–2002 refit to Project 941U standard, worked the longest of the six. It fired the first Bulava missile test in September 2005 and served as the Bulava programme's dedicated test platform through 2010, then supported sea trials for newer Russian submarines for roughly another decade. The Russian Navy decommissioned Dmitry Donskoy on 6 February 2023, ending 41 years of service and closing out the Typhoon class's active career. In March 2025, Russian officials announced plans to preserve the boat as a museum ship at the Central Naval Museum in Saint Petersburg once its reactors and nuclear fuel are removed, a slower and more complicated process than scrapping a conventional hull.

The Typhoon Class Submarine in Fiction and Games

The class's size made it a natural subject once its existence became public in the early 1980s. Tom Clancy's 1984 novel The Hunt for Red October features a fictional, modified Typhoon-class boat named Red October (no real Typhoon has ever carried that name) and the 1990 film adaptation relied mainly on models and composite shots to represent it, since no actual Typhoon was ever available for filming. A Soviet Typhoon class submarine also appears as a playable naval unit in the Command & Conquer: Red Alert strategy game series, credited there simply as "Typhoon."

Battle Fleet also publishes turn-based naval and Cold War strategy games, including a WW2 naval campaign built around the same broad categories of submarine, carrier and surface-fleet units described on this page, along with a Cold War-era espionage title covering the same period the Typhoon patrolled.

One naming note worth clearing up: the Typhoon submarine has nothing to do with the Eurofighter Typhoon combat aircraft. NATO simply reused the same reporting-name convention decades apart, and the two Typhoons, one a Soviet nuclear-powered SSBN and the other a European multirole fighter jet, share nothing but the name.

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