Kursk

2000

Barents Sea, the torpedo, the tapping stopped Location: Barents Sea, off Severomorsk, Russia · Coordinates: 69.62°N 37.58°E · Casualties: 118 · Survivors: 0 · Depth: 108 m (raised) · Cause: torpedo malfunction · explosion — A hydrogen peroxide leak in a practice torpedo ignited during a training exercise at 11:28 on 12 August 2000. Two minutes later the detonation breached the forward magazine; a larger explosion destroyed the bow compartments. Twenty-three crew survived the initial blasts, sealed in the stern; they lived for hours, tapping on the hull. The Russian Navy refused foreign rescue assistance for 36 hours. · Fate: raised 2001 · scrapped · Type: submarine · Oscar II class (nuclear cruise missile) · Tonnage: 19,400 tons (submerged) · Crew: 118 · Flag: Russia · Launched: 1994 Russian Oscar II-class nuclear-powered submarine, on a naval exercise in the Barents Sea. A hydrogen peroxide leak in a practice torpedo ignited at 11:28 on 12 August 2000; two minutes later the detonation breached the forward magazine and a larger blast destroyed the bow. Twenty-three men survived in the stern and lived for hours, tapping on the hull. The Russian Navy refused foreign rescue help for 36 hours while Putin remained on his Black Sea holiday. 118 dead, the defining political failure of the early Putin government. The Vessel The Kursk (K-141) was a Project 949A Antey-class cruise-missile submarine of the Russian Northern Fleet, the second-to-last Oscar II-class boat built by the Soviet and then Russian shipbuilding industry. She was launched at Severodvinsk on 16 May 1994 and commissioned on 30 December 1994 at the very end of the boats that Soviet shipbuilding had begun laying down in the 1980s. She was 154 metres long, displaced 19,400 tons submerged, and was designed around twenty-four SS-N-19 Shipwreck (P-700 Granit) anti-ship cruise missiles carried in external launch tubes angled at 40 degrees forward of her sail. Her mission was the destruction of American aircraft carrier battle groups. The Oscar II class had been designed in the 1970s as the Soviet Navy's principal weapon against the post-Vietnam American naval order, specifically against the battle groups built around the Nimitz-class carriers; her 24 missiles, fired in a coordinated salvo, were calculated to saturate the Aegis defences of a full American carrier group. She was a fighting submarine of the Cold War, commissioned three years into the post-Cold War era. Her post-Cold War Northern Fleet service had been constrained by the general financial collapse of the Russian military establishment through the 1990s. She had spent 1995 through 1999 mostly alongside at Vidyayevo on the Kola Peninsula, conducting only short training patrols because the fleet could not afford the fuel or the maintenance for full deployments. Her August 200 The Disaster Two minutes and fifteen seconds after the initial leak began, at 11:30 and 42 seconds on 12 August 2000, the Type 65-76A torpedo detonated inside the torpedo tube. The detonation was recorded on the seismograph at Kongsberg in Norway as a 1.5-magnitude event. The blast breached the forward bulkhead between the torpedo room and the first compartment, venting flame and debris into the control room. One hundred and thirty-five seconds after the first detonation, at 11:32 and 54 seconds, a second and much larger explosion destroyed the forward third of the Kursk. This detonation was recorded as a 3.5-magnitude event and corresponded to the ignition of approximately seven of the remaining torpedoes and shells stored in the forward weapons compartment. The blast destroyed the control room, the first compartment, the second compartment, and the forward edge of the third. Captain Lyachin and the forty-odd crew members in the forward sections died instantly. The force of the second explosion drove the remainder of the hull down and into the Barents Sea floor at 108 metres. Twenty-three men survived the blast, sealed by the closed watertight doors in the aft compartments. They gathered in the ninth and tenth compartments over the following hours. Captain-Lieutenant Dmitri Kolesnikov, 27 years old and newly married, led the survival party; his body, recovered with the ship in October 2001, carried a handwritten note dated 13:15 on 12 August 2000 listing the names of the twenty-three sur