The Hunt for Red October vessel. It is equipped with a cutting-edge silent propulsion system, known as the caterpillar drive, that makes audio detection by passive sonar extremely difficult and enables the submarine to sneak its way into American offshore waters and launch nuclear missiles with little or no warning. As the ship leaves the shipyard at Polyarny, Ramius kills Ivan Putin, his political officer, to ensure that he will not interfere with the defection. Initially, Ramius was instructed to conduct military exercises with Soviet attack submarine "V. K. Konovalov", commanded by his former student Viktor Tupolev, for the purpose of testing the effectiveness of
The Hunt for Red October (film) to rewrite the whole film but was only required to do the Russian sequences. Rather than choosing between the realism of Russian dialog with subtitles, or the audience-friendly use of English (with or without Russian accents), the filmmakers compromised with a deliberate conceit. The film begins with the actors speaking Russian with English subtitles. But in an early scene, actor Peter Firth casually switches in mid-sentence to speaking in English on the word "Armageddon", which is the same spoken word in both languages. After that point, all the Soviets' dialogue is communicated in English. Connery continued using the Russian accent