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Russian submarine Kursk
K-141 Kursk was an Antey class (NATO reporting name: Oscar II) cruise missile submarine of the Northern Fleet of the Russian Navy. The Kursk sank on August 12, 2000 with all hands lost. It was named after the Russian city Kursk, where one of the biggest battles of World War II took place (Battle of Kursk).
BackgroundConstruction of the Kursk began in Severodvinsk, near Archangelsk, in 1992. It was launched for the first time in 1994 and formally commissioned in December of that year. The ship was "baptized" by an Orthodox priest in 1995. The Kursk was the last of the large Oscar-II class submarines to be designed and approved in the Soviet era. At 155 metres in length, and four storeys high, it was the largest attack submarine ever built. The class had also been described as "unsinkable" on account of its double hull. The outer hull, made of high-nickel high-chrome content steel just one-third of an inch thick, had exceptionally good resistance to corrosion and a weak magnetic signature which helped prevent detection by Magnetic Anomaly Detection systems (MAD). There was a two metre gap to the two inch thick steel inner hull. Kursk formed part of the Russian Northern Fleet. The Fleet had suffered tremendous cutbacks through lack of funding throughout the 1990s. Many submarines had been brought into docks along the Barents Sea and left to rust. All but the most essential frontline equipment was inadequately serviced, including search and rescue equipment. Sailors of the Northern Fleet had gone unpaid in the mid-1990s due to money being re-appropriated before reaching the Arctic North. However the end of the decade represented something of a renaissance for the fleet. In 1999 Kursk had carried out a successful reconnaissance mission in the Mediterranean, spying on the United States Navy's Sixth Fleet during the civil war in Yugoslavia. The ship's captain, Captain Gennady Lyachin, was made a Hero of Russia on return to Russia. The training exercise of August 2000 was to be the largest summer drill since the collapse of the Soviet Union ten years before, involving four attack submarines and the Fleet's flagship Peter the Great amongst a flotilla of smaller ships. ExplosionThe mission began in earnest on the morning of August 12, 2000. As part of the exercise Kursk was to fire two dummy torpedoes with the battleship as its target. At 11:28 local time (07:28 UTC), high-test peroxide (HTP), a form of highly concentrated hydrogen peroxide used to provide the explosive propulsion required to fire a torpedo, seeped through rust in the torpedo casing. The HTP reacted with copper and brass in the tube from which the torpedo was fired, causing an unstoppable chemical explosion. The explosion blasted with the force of 100 kg of TNT and registered 1.5 on the Richter scale. The watertight door isolating the torpedo room from the rest of the sub was left open prior to firing. This was apparently common practice, on account of excess compressed air being released into the torpedo room when a weapon was fired. The open door allowed the blast to rip back through the first two of nine compartments on the huge sub, certainly killing the seven men in the first compartment, and at least injuring or disorienting the thirty-six men in the second compartment. Although no one can be sure of the events of the next two minutes, it is known that the captain of the ship, in the third compartment, did not have time to send a distress signal. An emergency buoy, designed to release from a submarine automatically when emergency conditions such as rapidly changing pressure or fire are detected and intended to help rescuers locate the stricken vessel, also failed to deploy. In the Mediterranean mission, the previous summer, fears of the buoy accidentally deploying, thereby giving away the sub's position to the US fleet, had led to the buoy being disabled. Two minutes and fifteen seconds later a much larger explosion ripped through the sub. Seismic reports show that the explosion occurred at the same depth as the sea bed, suggesting that the collision with the sea floor, combined with rising temperatures due to the initial explosion, had caused further torpedoes to blow up. The second explosion measured 3.5 on the Richter scale. The explosion ripped a 2-metre-square hole in the hull of the craft, designed to withstand depths of 1000 m. The explosion also ripped open the third and fourth compartments. Water poured into these compartments at 90,000 litres per second — killing all those in the compartments, including five officers from 7th SSGN Division Headquarters. The fifth compartment contained the ship's nuclear reactors, encased in five further inches of steel. The bulkheads of the fifth compartment withstood the explosion, causing the nuclear control rods to stay in place and prevent nuclear disaster. Western experts have expressed strong admiration for the Soviet/Russian engineering skill to create a submarine that withstood so much. Twenty-three men, working in the sixth through to ninth compartments survived the two blasts. They gathered in the ninth compartment, which contained the secondary escape tunnel (the primary tunnel was in the destroyed second compartment). Captain-lieutenant Dmitri Kolesnikov (one of three officers of that rank surviving) appears to have taken charge, writing down the names of those who were in the ninth compartment. The pressure in the compartment at the time of the explosion was the same as that of the surface. Thus it would be possible from a physiological point of view to use the escape hatch to leave the submarine one man at a time, swimming up through 100 metres of Arctic water in a survival suit, to await help floating at the surface. It is not known if the escape hatch was workable from the inside — opinions still differ about how badly the hatch was damaged. However it is likely that the men rejected using the perilous escape hatch even if it were operable. They may have preferred instead to take their chances waiting for a rescue vessel to clamp itself onto the escape hatch. It is not known with certainty how long the remaining men survived in the compartment. As the nuclear reactors had automatically shut down, emergency power soon ran out, plunging the crew into complete blackness and falling temperatures. Kolesnikov wrote two further messages, much less tidily than before. In the last, he wrote: It's dark here to write, but I'll try by feel. It seems like there are no chances, 10-20%. Let's hope that at least someone will read this. Here's the list of personnel from the other sections, who are now in the ninth and will attempt to get out. Regards to everybody, no need to be desperate. Kolesnikov. There has been much debate over how long the sailors might have survived. Some, particularly on the Russian side, say that they would have died very quickly. Water leaks into a stationary Oscar-II craft through propeller shafts. At 100 m depth, it would have been impossible to plug these. Others point out that the many superoxide chemical cartridges, used to convert carbon dioxide back to oxygen to enable survival, were found used when the craft was recovered, suggesting that they had survived for several days. Ironically, the cartridges appear to have been the cause of death. A sailor appears to have accidentally brought a cartridge in contact with the sea water, causing a chemical reaction and a flash fire. The official investigation into disaster showed that some men appear to have survived the fire by plunging under the water (the fire marks on the walls indicate the water was at waist level in the lower area at this time). However the fire rapidly used up the remaining oxygen in the air, causing death by asphyxiation. Alternative claims about the cause of the explosion
Rescue attemptsInitially the other boats in the exercise, all of whom had detected an explosion, did not report it. Each only knew about their part in the exercise, and assumed that the explosion was that of a depth charge, and part of the exercise. It was not until the evening that commanders became concerned that they had heard nothing from Kursk. Later in the evening, and after repeated attempts to contact Kursk had failed, a search and rescue operation was launched. The rescue ship Rudnitsky carrying two submersible rescue vessels, AS-32 and Priz reached the disaster area at around 8:40 AM the following morning. The rescue vessels' batteries were in poor condition — draining quickly and difficult to re-charge. The AS-32 proved virtually useless. The Priz was somewhat successful — reaching Kursk's ninth compartment on Monday afternoon, but failed to dock with it. Bad weather prevented further attempts on Tuesday and Wednesday. A further attempt on Thursday again made contact but failed to create a vacuum seal required to dock. The United States offered the use of one of its two Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicles, as did the British government. On August 16, 2000, the Russian government asked the British and Norwegian governments for help. A rescue ship was dispatched from Norway on August 17 and reached the site on August 19. British deep-sea divers reached the ninth compartment escape hatch on Sunday August 20th. They were able to determine that the compartment was flooded, and all hope of finding survivors was lost. Most of the hull of the submarine, except the bow, was raised from the ocean floor by the Dutch salvage companies Smit International and Mammoet in the fall of 2001 and towed back to the Russian Navy's Roslyakovo Shipyard. 115 of the 118 dead were recovered and are buried in Russia. ReferencesCrew listFirst compartment
Second compartmentVisitors from 7th Submarine Division Headquarters
Crew
Third compartment
Fourth compartment
Fourth (B) compartment
Fifth compartment
Sixth compartment
Seventh compartment
Eight compartment
Ninth compartment
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