A large nuclear submarine of the Chinese Navy surfaced earlier last week and crossed the Taiwan Strait to the north. A foreign expert pointed out that it is rare for a nuclear submarine to float up and might have to return to the base for maintenance. The PLA official did not say anything about the incident, the Chinese media claimed that as the Taiwan Strait is too shallow, the nuclear submarine had to float.
Photos taken by the European Space Agency satellite Sentinel 2 on Nov. 29 show a Chinese nuclear-powered submarine floating in the water crossing the Taiwan Strait from south to north, with a surface ship escorting it.
U.S. Naval Institute (USNI) columnist H.I. Sutton said the picture is suspected to be a Chinese Navy Type 094 nuclear submarine, estimated to be sailing north from Yalong Bay submarine base on Hainan Island, probably to return to Bohai shipyard for maintenance.
Carl Schuster, former director of the Joint Intelligence Center at U.S. Army Headquarters in the Pacific and a former Navy captain, believes that a nuclear submarine equipped with ballistic missiles sailing afloat is “something I’ve never heard of,” implying that something is wrong with its hull or engineering and that it needs to go to a large shipyard for inspection and repair.
The PLA official did not comment on the matter, but the GlobalTimes site quoted an article by WeChat’s “科大烽火” that the photo was of a Type 094 nuclear submarine, adding that the floating passage through the Taiwan Strait “does not have much mystery and deep meaning”, only that the Taiwan Strait is too shallow, the underwater terrain is complicated, and the displacement of the Type 094 nuclear submarine is nearly 10,000 tons, so it must float through the Taiwan Strait.
The article also mentions that the Type 094 nuclear submarine can also choose to go through the deep waters of eastern Taiwan, but fears that the whole process would be monitored by the U.S. military, so it chose to float through the Taiwan Strait, a “safer” route “under the Chinese surveillance”.
In addition, Chinese media widely believe that the Type 094 nuclear submarine surfaced to express confidence and show off force to the U.S. military.