USS Toledo (SSN-769), is a United States Navy, nuclear-powered attack submarine and the third U.S. Naval vessel to be named for the city of Toledo, Ohio. The contract to build her was awarded to Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company in Newport News, Virginia, on 10 June 1988, and her keel was laid down on 6 May 1991. She was launched on 28 August 1993, sponsored by Mrs. Sabra Smith, and commissioned on 24 February 1995. History Her first deployment was to the Mediterranean with the Carrier Strike Group in 1997–1998, followed by a six-month tour of the North Atlantic. Kursk incident Toledo and were observing Russian naval exercises in August 2000. There, the Russian cruise missile submarine Kursk suffered a catastrophic incident and sank. Russian Navy officials initially made numerous claims that the sinking of Kursk was caused by a collision with one of the US submarines, though evidence clearly disproved such a theory; the underwater seismic signals recorded matched those of an explosion and not a collision with another vessel, and the US submarines were fully operational after the incident (there is a claim Toledo would have been severely damaged or sunk by a hypothetical collision, being less than half of Kursk's displacement). The loss of Kursk was officially attributed to a faulty dummy torpedo leaking highly volatile high-test peroxide, setting off a chain reaction that detonated five to seven combat-ready torpedo warheads. Nonetheless, French filmmaker Jean-Michel Carré, in an historical-fiction movie named Kursk: A Submarine in Troubled Waters, which aired on 7 January 2005 on French TV channel France 2, alleged that Kursk sank because of a sequence of events triggered by a collision with Toledo. According to Carré, Kursk was performing tests with VA-111 Shkval torpedoes and the tests were being observed by two US submarines on duty in the region, Toledo and . 2001-2006 deployments Toledo deployed to the Mediterranean again in late 2001-early 2002 in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. Toledo returned to the Naval Submarine Base New London in mid-April 2003 after having taken part in the Iraq War. On 7 December 2004, Toledo returned to Groton, Connecticut, after a six-month deployment in the Persian Gulf with the Carrier Strike Group that included port calls in Crete, Dubai, and Bahrain. Her route home from Bahrain was unusual, rounding the Cape of Good Hope rather than using the Suez Canal. Once back in