Type 091 submarine
nuclear-powered attack submarine class
The Type 091 (NATO reporting name: Han class) is a first-generation nuclear-powered attack submarine produced by China. It was the People Liberation Army Navy's (PLAN) first nuclear submarine, and the first indigenously produced nuclear attack submarine in Asia.
History
China's nuclear submarine program, "09 Project", was authorized by the Central Military Commission and Mao Zedong in July 1958. In October 1959, Mao ordered the program to proceed after the Soviets refused to assist. Work was slowed by the Great Leap Forward and the nuclear weapons program, which had priority and used similar resources. The submarine program was postponed in March 1963 and resumed in March 1965 after China's first nuclear weapons test. Research on foreign civilian nuclear marine propulsion continued during the pause. A loop-based nuclear reactor was selected over a more powerful but also more complex integrated design in July 1965; it most resembled the reactor used by the Japanese Mutsu. Reactor fuel rod research was disrupted in January 1967 by factional violence at Baotou. In general, the new submarine design represented a leap in size and complexity over the Type 033 diesel–electric submarines then available to the PLAN.
The program was expedited by designing and building the first Type 091 and the prototype reactor simultaneously.
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This entry incorporates text from “Type 091 submarine” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.