Kursk submarine disaster

On the morning of 12 August 2000, Kursk was in the Barents Sea, participating in the "Summer-X" exercise, the first large-scale naval exercise undertaken by the Russian Navy in more than a decade, and also its first since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. According to the Russian press, the exercise involved more than 50 ships and submarines, 40 support vessels, and around 80 aircraft. Although this was an exercise, Kursk loaded a full complement of conventional combat weapons. It was one of the few submarines authorised to carry a combat load at all times. The Oscar II Class submarines are equipped with 24 P-700 Granit (SS-N-19 "Shipwreck") cruise missiles. In addition, since the torpedo tubes can fire both torpedoes and anti-ship missiles, it also carried two dozen other weapons, including the RPK-6 Vodopad/RPK-7 Veter (SS-N-16 "Stallion") missiles. Kursk had an almost mythical standing. It was reputedly unsinkable and, it was claimed, could withstand a direct hit from a torpedo. The outer hull was constructed using steel plate covered by up to of rubber, which minimised other submarines' or surface vessels' ability to detect the submarine. The inner pressure hull was made of high-quality steel plate. The two hulls were separated by a gap. The inner hull was divided into nine water-tight compartments. The boat was , about as long as two jumbo jets. At 08:51 local time, Kursk requested permission to conduct a torpedo training launch and received the response "" ("Good"). The location was fixed at coordinates , north-east of Murmansk, approximately from Norway, and from the Kola Peninsula. Secondary event At 11:31:48, and was detected as far away as Alaska. The seismic data showed that the explosion occurred at the same depth as the sea bed. The seismic event, triangulated at , showed that in a little over 2 minutes the boat had moved about from the site of the initial explosion. It was enough time for the submarine to sink to a depth of and remain on the sea floor for a short period. ==Rescue response==

The crew of the submarine Karelia detected the explosion, but the captain assumed that it was part of the exercise. Aboard Pyotr Velikiy, the target of the practice launch, the crew detected a hydroacoustic signal characteristic of an underwater explosion and felt their hull shudder. They reported the phenomenon to fleet headquarters but their report was ignored. AS-28 Priz The Northern Fleet duty officer notified the head of the fleet's search and rescue forces, Captain Alexander Teslenko, to stand by for orders. Teslenko's primary rescue ship was a 20-year-old former lumber carrier, Mikhail Rudnitsky, which had been converted to support submersible rescue operations. The Russian Navy had previously operated two s, each of which carried a pair of Poseidon-class DSRVs that could reach a depth of , but due to a lack of funds, the vessels had been held since 1994 in a Saint Petersburg yard for pending repairs. At 17:00, an Ilyushin Il-38 aircraft was dispatched. The crew spent three hours searching for Kursk, without success. At 22:30, the Northern Fleet declared an emergency, and the exercise was stopped. Rumours among family members Early on Sunday morning, 13 August, at the Vidyaevo Naval Base, rumours began to circulate among family members of Kursks crew that something was wrong. A telephone operator handled an unusual volume of calls and overheard that a submarine was in trouble and the boat's name. As the base was very small, news spread quickly. Wives and family members exchanged news, but information was scarce. The deputy base commander assured the women that the headquarters office was half empty and that the officers present were just "passing the time." Minister of Defence Igor Sergeyev told the American Embassy that the rescue was well under way. The bow had ploughed about deep into the clay seabed, at a depth of . The periscope was raised, indicating that the accident occurred when the submarine was at a depth of less than . Collision initially blamed Senior officers in the Russian Navy offered a variety of explanations for the accident. The Russian government convened a commission, chaired by Vice-Premier Ilya Klebanov, on 14 August, two days after Kursk sank. On Tuesday Mikhail Rudnitsky lowered a diving bell twice, but could not connect to the sub. They also tried and failed to manoeuvre a remotely operated vehicle onto the rescue hatch. At 20:00 Tuesday, AS-34 was launched again, but was damaged when it struck a boom as it was being lowered into the sea. It was brought back aboard, repaired, and relaunched at 21:10. On Tuesday, 15 August, three days after the sinking, the crane ship PK-7500 arrived with the more manoeuvrable Project 18270 Bester-type DSRV (AC-36). The weather, though, prevented the PK-7500 from launching the DSRV. The rescue team decided to launch the submersible near the coast and tow it to the rescue site with a salvage tug. On Thursday at 12:00, Popov reported to the general staff of the Navy that no explosion had occurred on the Kursk, that the sub was intact on the seafloor, and that an "external influence" might have caused a leak between the first and second compartments. but failed. However, video evidence seems to suggest otherwise, as it shows Norwegian divers tapping on the aft rescue hatch while the rescue part of the operation was still underway. Fragments of both the outer and inner hulls were found nearby, including a piece of Kursks nose weighing , indicating a large explosion in the forward torpedo room. British and Norwegian help '' Private media and state-owned Russian newspapers criticised the Navy's refusal to accept international assistance. On 19 August at 20:00, the Norwegian ship Normand Pioneer arrived with the British rescue submersible LR5 on board, seven days after the disaster. The divers tried to use the arms of the ROV to open the hatch, but were unsuccessful until the morning of Monday, 21 August. They found the rescue trunk full of water. using a cutting machine that shoots a high-velocity water-and-cutting-grit mix at a pressure of . The Russian divers entered the wreck and opened a bulkhead hatch to compartment nine. They found that dust and ash inside compartment nine severely restricted visibility. As they gradually worked their way inside the compartment and down two levels, Warrant Officer Sergei Shmygin found the remains of Captain-lieutenant Dmitry Kolesnikov. Additional plans were made to continue to remove the bodies, but the Russian Navy could not agree on a contract with a foreign company. The families of those who died on the submarine protested that they did not want additional lives put at risk to bring up the dead. On 22 August, President Putin issued an executive order declaring 23 August a day of mourning. On 26 August, Putin awarded the title of the Hero of Russia posthumously to the submarine's commander, Gennady Lyachin, and the 117 crewmembers and specialists were posthumously awarded the Order of Courage. Russian claim of collision with NATO submarine On Monday 14 August, Fleet Admiral Vladimir Kuroyedov stated the accident had been caused by a serious collision with a NATO submarine, but provided no evidence. United States Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen responded to Russian accusations of a collision with a submarine at a press conference in Tokyo on 22 September 2000. While the official inquiry was underway, on 25 October 2000, Commander of the Northern Fleet Popov and his Chief of Staff Motsak were interviewed by the Spanish newspaper El Mundo. Geophysicists who analysed the seismic signals concluded and reported in February 2001 that the initial sound recorded was triggered by an explosion, not a collision. The seismic waveforms of the second event, known by then to be from the explosion of several torpedo warheads, also generated a high-frequency bubble signature characteristic of an underwater explosion of about 3–7 tons of TNT. When analysts compared the second event with the first, they concluded that the first event was also a torpedo explosion. Britain's Blacknest seismic monitoring station, which studies seismic signals generated by underground nuclear explosions and earthquakes, identified two distinct explosions. It determined that the two shockwaves perfectly matched and were consistent with torpedo explosions. Images of angry family members demanding information or waiting anxiously at the dock for news were shown on media worldwide. The President's response appeared callous and the government's actions looked incompetent. angry and grieving residents of the base and about 350 family members of the Kursks crew. German television channel RTL provided the Russian national daily newspaper Kommersant with an unedited transcript. Mother forcibly sedated The Russian state channel RTR was the only news station granted access. Its severely edited broadcast of the meeting showed only Putin speaking, eliminating the many emotional and contentious encounters between the family members and the President. Its single TV camera fed a signal to a satellite truck on loan to RTR from the German television company RTL, and RTL recorded the entire event. Nadezhda Tylik, mother of Kursk submariner Lt. Sergei Tylik, was extremely emotional and interrupted the meeting. She harangued Putin and Deputy Prime Minister Klebanov, accusing them of lying to the families. She told them, "You better shoot yourselves now! We won't let you live, bastards!" When she would not be quiet, a nurse in civilian apparel behind her forcibly injected her through her clothing with a sedative. Tylik quickly lost the ability to speak and was carried out. Tylik later criticised President Putin for refusing to "answer direct questions" at the meeting. "Maybe he did not know what to say, but we did not receive concrete answers to concrete questions," she said. Tylik told The St. Petersburg Times that she would go to any lengths to learn the truth about the submarine disaster: "They told us lies the whole time, and even now we are unable to get any information". Journalist Andrey Kolesnikov, who had been present at Putin's meeting with the families, described his experience in a 2015 documentary titled President. He said that when he watched Putin speak to them, "I honestly thought they would tear him apart. There was such a heavy atmosphere there, such a clot of hatred, and despair, and pain. I never felt anything like it anywhere in my entire life. All the questions were aimed at this single man." Putin blames media In response to the avalanche of criticism, Minister of Defence Sergeyev and senior commanders of the Navy and the Northern Fleet offered Putin their resignations, but he refused to accept them. Putin threatened to punish the media owners and counter their influence through alternative "honest and objective" media. He scornfully derided their ownership of property abroad. "They'd better sell their villas on the Mediterranean coast of France or Spain. Then they might have to explain why all this property is registered in false names under front law-firms. Perhaps we would ask them where they got the money." ==Official inquiry results==

On 26 July 2002, almost two years later, the government commission and Russian Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov announced that the hydrogen peroxide fuel in the dummy torpedo inside the fourth torpedo launcher caused the initial explosion which sank Kursk. Secret report Ustinov released a 133-volume top-secret report in August 2002, two years after the disaster. The government published a four-page summary in Rossiyskaya Gazeta that revealed "stunning breaches of discipline, shoddy, obsolete and poorly maintained equipment", The initial blast set off a fire that was later estimated to have burned at . The government report concluded that the initial explosion and fire in the torpedo room compartment immediately killed all seven crew members within. The fuel in the torpedoes carried by Kursk was inexpensive and very powerful. Torpedoes using HTP had been in use since the 1950s, but other navies stopped using them because of the danger inherent in their design. Investigators concluded that the leaking HTP had catalytically decomposed when it came in contact with copper commonly found in the bronze and brass used to manufacture Kursks torpedo tubes. Salvage crews located a piece of the number-four torpedo cover on the seabed behind the main wreckage. Its position, distance, and direction relative to the rest of the submarine indicated that it was deposited there as a result of the first explosion in that tube. According to an article that briefly appeared on Thursday 17 August 2000 on the website of the official newspaper of the Russian Defence Ministry, Krasnaya Zvezda, Kursk had been refitted in 1998—four years after it was commissioned—to carry torpedoes fueled using the cheap HTP. The article reported that some specialists in the Russian Navy opposed use of the HTP-fueled torpedoes because they were volatile and dangerous. The story did not appear in the print edition on Friday 18 August. Instead, the article was replaced with another that speculated the submarine had collided with an "unidentified object". The change was likely due to political pressure. Alternatively, there was also an escape trunk in the first compartment, but the explosion and fire rendered its use impossible. The rescue capsule in the third compartment was inaccessible, even if it was still usable. Rescue buoy disabled Kursk was equipped with an emergency rescue buoy on top of compartment seven designed to automatically deploy upon detecting a variety of emergency conditions, including fire or a rapid pressure change. When Ustinov closed the criminal case without filing charges, family members were angry. Retired Russian Navy Captain Vladimir Mityayev, who lost a son on Kursk, said "To me, this is a clear case of negligence." In the end, no one was blamed for the disaster and no one was held responsible. ==Alternative explanations==

While the official government commission blamed the explosion on a faulty weld in the practice torpedo, Vice Admiral Valery Ryazantsev cited inadequate training, poor maintenance, and incomplete inspections that caused the crew to mishandle the weapon. The crew had to complete specific maintenance steps on a regular basis and before firing a torpedo. This included cleaning the torpedo tube of lubricants, metal shavings, and dust that accumulate during long periods of inactivity. After the disaster, investigators recovered a partially burned copy of the safety instructions for loading HTP torpedoes, but the instructions were for a significantly different type of torpedo and failed to include essential steps for testing an air valve. The 7th Division, 1st Submarine Flotilla never inspected the Kursks crew's qualifications and readiness to fire HTP torpedoes. Mainstream publications like Der Spiegel, Berliner Zeitung, and the Sunday Times claimed to possess documentation proving the submarine was struck by a torpedo fired by Pyotr Velikiy. Another theory was that USS Memphis had fired a torpedo at Kursk. Manufacturer disagrees on cause The director of the that designed the torpedo, Stanislav Proshkin, challenged the conclusion of the government's official report. He argued the weapon could explode only after an external event, such as a fire. He said that routine tests during manufacture include dropping the torpedo from a height of , suggesting drops cannot incur damage that would cause an explosion. He also said Kursk was designed with two autonomous, independent control systems that would have detected a rise in temperature while the torpedo was stored on the racks. The sub was equipped with a special drain system that could rapidly drain HTP-fuel from a torpedo into the sea. If a temperature rise were detected in the torpedo tube, the torpedo would have automatically been ejected into the sea. In addition, any fire in the torpedo compartment would have triggered a powerful fire-extinguishing system that would have dumped "tons of water" on the fire. ==Salvage operation==

The Russian government committed to raising the wreck and recovering the crew's remains in a US$65-million salvage operation. They contracted with Dutch marine salvage companies Smit International and Mammoet to raise Kursk from the sea floor. It became the largest salvage operation of its type ever accomplished. The salvage operation was extremely dangerous because of the risk of radiation from the reactor. Only seven of the submarine's 24 torpedoes were accounted for. The divers installed two large hydraulic suction anchors into the seabed and attached a high-strength tungsten carbide abrasive cable saw that was pulled back and forth over the bow between the anchors. Ten days were needed to detach the bow. After the bow was cut free, the salvage crews raised several smaller pieces of wreckage. This included a piece of a torpedo tube weighing about a ton, which was analysed to determine if the explosion occurred inside or outside the tube. They salvaged a high-pressure compressed-air cylinder weighing about half a ton, to learn more about the nature of the explosion. They also raised a part of the cylindrical section of the hard frame and part of the left forward spherical partition, to determine the intensity and temperature of the fire in the forward compartment. Finally, they brought up a fragment of the sonar system dome. Hull raised Mammoet converted the , long, Giant 4 semisubmersible deck barge to carry the sub. The ship was designed to carry huge loads on its deck, but Kursk would ride beneath the ship. Giant 4 had to be completely modified to retrieve and carry the sub underneath. To raise the remainder of the wreck, the salvage team planned an extremely complex operation that required them to design and build custom lifting equipment and employ new technologies. They wrote custom software that would automatically compensate for the effects of wave motion in the rough Barents Sea, which could sever the cables suspending the sub beneath the barge. Divers cut a large hole in the barge's hull to allow room for the submarine's sail. Workers fitted the hull of Giant 4 with large saddles shaped to fit Kursks outer hull. They cut holes through the barge to allow 26 hoisting cables to pass through. The team manufactured 26 giant cable reels to hold the more than of cable intended to raise the boat. The giant cable reels fed 26 huge hydraulic strand jacks, each mounted on a computer-controlled, pressurised pneumatic heave compensator powered by nitrogen gas that automatically adjusted for sea waves. The dive support vessel DSND Mayo was equipped with dive chambers to accommodate the dive teams. They worked in six-hour shifts, and when they were not in the water, the divers remained in the saturation chambers for the entire 28 day operation. The divers used hydraulic abrasive water jets to cut 26 holes through the outer and inner hulls. The salvage divers mounted custom guidance rings around the holes in the sub and lowered guide cables to each through the holes in Giant 4. The team then used the four guide cables to lower a custom-made giant gripper similar to a toggle bolt, custom designed to fit each hole, before manoeuvring the cables through the guidance ring. The crew lowered 26 groups of hoisting cables, each able to lift 900 tons, to the submarine and attached them to the grippers. The strand jacks lifted the 26 hoisting cables and slowly raised Kursk until it was beneath Giant 4. On 8 October 2001, 14 months after the disaster, and only five months after the contract had been awarded to them, the salvage team raised the remainder of the vessel in a 15-hour operation. Once the sub was raised and joined to the barge, it was carried back under the barge to the Russian Navy's Roslyakovo Shipyard in Murmansk. Once there, two giant, custom-manufactured pontoons were floated under Giant 4 to lift the barge to allow it to enter a floating dry dock with Kursk attached underneath. Once in dry dock, the pontoons were pumped full of more air, lifting Giant 4 and allowing crews to remove the lifting cables and detach Kursk. Some analysts theorised the Russians may also have wanted to prevent foreign countries from accessing the debris, which had been classified as state secrets. Of that number, 23 survived the two blasts and gathered in the small ninth compartment, which had an escape hatch. Emergency lighting was normally powered by batteries located in the first compartment which had been destroyed in the explosion, but the ninth compartment contained a number of independent emergency lights which apparently worked. Kolesnikov wrote two notes, Izvestia quoted unidentified naval officers who claimed that Aryapov wrote that the explosion was caused by "faults in the torpedo compartment, namely, the explosion of a torpedo on which the Kursk had to carry out tests". Izvestia also stated that Aryapov wrote that as a result of the explosions, the submarine was tossed violently about, and many crew members were injured by equipment that tore loose as a result. Escape hatch unused Analysis of the wreck could not determine whether the escape hatch was workable from the inside. Analysts theorise that the men may have rejected risking the escape hatch even if it were operable, and would have preferred to wait for a submarine rescue ship to attach itself to the hatch. The sub was relatively close to shore and in the middle of a large naval exercise. The sailors had every reason to believe rescuers would arrive quickly. Vice Admiral Vladislav Ilyin, first deputy chief of the Russian Navy's staff and head of the Kursk Naval Incident Cell, concluded that the survivors had lived up to three days. Forensic examination While waiting for the boat to be brought to shore, a team of military doctors set up a temporary forensic laboratory at the military hospital in Severomorsk. After Giant 4 was floated out of the drydock, the drydock was drained, exposing ''Kursk's'' hull. Salvage teams cut into the compartments to drain the interior. Ordnance teams removed the missiles from outside the hull. On 23 October, two investigators and two navy commanders were the first to enter the hull. The next day, 24 October, eight teams of investigators and operational experts began analysing the debris found inside the boat and recovering and identifying remains of the crew. Salvage team members found a large number of potassium superoxide chemical cartridges, used to absorb and generate oxygen to enable survival, in the ninth compartment. Kolesnikov's abdomen was burned by acid, exposing the internal organs, and the flesh on his head and neck was removed by the explosion. Forensic examination of two of the reactor control room casualties found in compartment four showed extensive skeletal injuries, which indicated that they had sustained an explosive force over 50 g. These shocks would have immediately incapacitated or killed the operators. One sailor's body was found embedded in the ceiling of the second compartment. The bodies of three crewmen were completely destroyed by the blast and fire, and nothing of their remains could be identified or recovered. ==Aftermath==

Public relations The sinking of the ship, the pride of their submarine fleet, was a devastating blow to the Russian military. A year later, Putin commented on his response, "I probably should have returned to Moscow, but nothing would have changed. I had the same level of communication both in Sochi and in Moscow, but from a PR point of view, I could have demonstrated some special eagerness to return." Navy actions Kursk had been raised from the sea floor in October 2001 by the Dutch-led Mammoet-Smit international consortium, at a cost of $65 million, paid by the Russian Navy. Once at dock, the human remains and missiles were removed. The salvage team and the Russian Navy both assured the public that the reactors had been safely shut down and that no holes were cut in the housing of the submarine's two nuclear reactors. Finally recognising the hazard of the HTP torpedoes, the Russian Navy ordered all of them removed from service. Officers moved Putin accepted the resignation of Igor Sergeyev from his position as minister of defence on 28 March 2001 and made him his assistant on strategic stability. He replaced him with Sergei Ivanov, who had previously been secretary of the Security Council of Russia. The position of minister of defence had always been filled by a professional member of the military. Ivanov had retired from the military in 2000, so his appointment as minister of defence while a civilian shocked the Russian military. On 1 December 2001, Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov presented a preliminary report to Putin. Ustinov wrote that the entire exercise had been "poorly organized" and that the probe had revealed "serious violations by both Northern Fleet chiefs and the Kursk crew." Popov and Motsak had championed the story that the accident had been caused by a collision with a NATO submarine. When Putin dismissed them, he made a point of repudiating the collision theory. The Russian Navy also increased the number of deep-sea divers trained each year from 18–20 to 40–45. Awards to those killed President Putin signed a decree awarding the Order of Courage to the entire crew, and the title Hero of the Russian Federation to the submarine's captain, Gennady Lyachin. Memorials Outside the port city of Severodvinsk where the submarine was built, a large granite slab was erected on the sand dunes. It is engraved, "This sorrowful stone is set in memory of the crew of the nuclear submarine Kursk, who tragically died on 12 August 2000, while on military duty." Other memorials were built in Moscow, Sevastopol, Nizhny Novgorod, Severomorsk, The city of Kursk, after which the vessel was named, erected a memorial made from fragments of its hull. On 17 March 2009, journalist Tatyana Abramova from the newspaper Murmanskiy Vestnik found Kursks sail in the yard of a scrap metal dealer. It had been left there after several years of negotiations failed to raise the estimated €22,000 needed for a memorial. The discovery sparked an outcry among citizens in Murmansk and they demanded the sail be turned into a memorial to the men who died. After considerable difficulty, the memorial was finally completed and dedicated 26 July 2009, Russia's Navy Day. It was placed on the observation deck of the Church of the Saviour on Water in Murmansk, the submarine's home port and location of the Vidyayevo naval base. It is among a memorial to sailors who perished during peacetime and lists the names of the crew. ==In popular culture==

• A Time to Die (2002, ), an investigative book on the events, was written by journalist Robert Moore. • ''Kursk: Putin's First Crisis and the Russian Navy's Darkest Hour'' (2018, ), retitled reprint of Robert Moore's A Time to Die. • Cry From the Deep: The Sinking of the Kursk, the Submarine Disaster That Riveted the World and Put the New Russia to the Ultimate Test (2004, ), an investigative book on the events, written by journalist Ramsey Flynn. • The incident served as partial inspiration for the song "Six Days at the Bottom of the Ocean" by Explosions in the Sky, on their 2003 album, The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place. • The track "The Kursk" found on the album Drinking Songs by singer-songwriter Matt Elliott is based upon the incident. • The folk song "Barren the Sea", by Sequoya on their 2007 album "Sleep and Dream of Fire" was inspired by the incident. • The song "Captain Kolesnikov" on the album Прекрасная любовь by Yuri Shevchuk and DDT is about the disaster and the letter recovered from Kolesnikov. • Kursk: A Submarine in Troubled Waters, in French: Koursk, un sous-marin en eaux troubles is a 2005 French documentary film directed by Jean-Michel Carré and produced by France 2. • The incident was the subject of an episode of the documentary series Seconds From Disaster. • Kursk, a 2009 play by the British playwright Bryony Lavery, was inspired by the disaster. • Kursk, a 2018 film directed by Thomas Vinterberg and starring Colin Firth and Matthias Schoenaerts, was based on Robert Moore's book A Time to Die. It included the meeting where Tylik was sedated and removed. (The film was re-released in 2019 as The Command). • An Ordinary Execution (2007, ), a book by French writer Marc Dugain revolves partly around the Kursk events. ==See also==