Fitness App Leads to Massive Security Breach on French Nuclear Submarines

The top-secret base is reportedly home to four French nuclear submarines, each carrying 16 nuclear missiles, with an explosive intensity roughly a thousand times as powerful as the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Officers and crew aboard a French nuclear submarine have accidentally blown their cover as well as their location and schedule by recording their runs and jogs on a fitness app. The nuclear submarine scheduled for Russian patrol has risked leaking crucial data such as location, position, and patrol schedule to Moscow.

The mobile and smartwatch app in question is the Strava app, which allows its users to share their fitness activities and achievements online and monitor their progress worldwide. The app has a feature which includes publishing the data on a map with the accurate location where the user completed his/her/their exercise or achieved their fitness goal.

The location where the faux pas happened was the Ile Longue submarine base in Brest Harbour in France’s Finisterre. The base is reportedly home to four French nuclear submarines, each carrying 16 nuclear missiles, with an explosive intensity roughly a thousand times as powerful as the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Out of the four nuclear submarines, nicknamed ‘black boats’, at least one of them has always been on patrol on a rotational basis since 1972. According to the doctrine they follow, called ‘permanence at sea’, their role is to disappear in the oceans such that they are in a position to launch a nuclear attack anywhere in the world within seconds of an order from the French President.