Sigh. And then I say magical worlds: "operation readiness".
The USSR have a lot of subs, yes. Problem was, we never were actually able to field them all at once. We simply don't have enough supporting infrastructure and trained crews, and, frankly, reliability of USSR nuclear subs were much lower than USN's.
This was true of the missile boats, sure. The attack submarines, not so much. The Soviet Union spent more on its submarine force than on any other single part of its military, and the operational readiness of its attack fleet was not really in question, much as NATO wanted to think (and, weirdly, still wants to think) that it was.
The Soviet Union was a paper tiger in a lot of ways and was seriously defficient in a lot of capabilities. But its submarine force was NOT one of them; they spared no expense and went to every possible length to make sure those attack boats could fill the sea with torpedoes and missiles. Whatever else the Soviets did wrong, that was the one thing they absolutely got right. Of course, the enormous expense of the building and maintaining World's Greatest Submarine Fleet is a major part of what eventually bankrupted them, so there's some irony right there...
Simply speaking, the North Fleet could not sortie the 120 submarines.
And? NATO couldn't deploy more than a third of its boats in the same period, and of the five American carriers on that list only two of them could really be operated at once. Sauce for the goose.
In other words - our submarine navy was bigger, but poorly supported. And there were noise issues and reliability issues. The soviet reactors never have USN reliability level; they were moch more prone to malfunction.
To be sure, Soviet Reactors were never as reliable as U.S. Navy reactors CLAIMED to be in propag... I mean,
publicity media. Alot of the refits and maintenance overhauls of the Ohio and Los Angeles class fleets were actually cover for repair efforts made due to major reactor failures or incidents.
The double-hull composition, while provided additional survivability, made subs more noisy (and our owerpowered reactors required much more coolant). In general, our subs were faster, more durable and better armed than USN's - but were noisier, less reliable, and have a lot of acoustic problems.
Sure. The Americans were building (relatively) slow, stealthy ships with glass jaws while the Soviets were building what were essentially submersible battle-cruisers. There's a great story from the 1980s about an American SSN captain who had a conversation with a congressman who told him American subs were so much quieter that they could sink their enemies before they even knew they were there. The American officer replied, "But he
will know, as soon as our torpedo hits him. And then he'll turn around and kill us."