Finally, the rush to conspiracy is a warning that, had this incident occurred during a genuine crisis, such an accident could cause a dangerous escalation that could lead to war. The tragedy only reinforces how dangerous life aboard a submarine really is, and how important safety is in the underwater realm. In the end, the sinking of the Kursk appears to have been caused by a simple, freak accident of chemistry. Why attack the Kursk? Why was only the Kursk sunk, and not the Kuznetsov and Pyotr Velikiy? Why would the Russian government cover up the attack?
While technically possible (in absence of the evidence of an internal torpedo explosion) there is no remotely plausible motive for such an attack during a period of good U.S.-Russian relations. Many allege that nearby American attack submarines sank the Kursk with Mark 48 torpedoes. A similar accident is thought to have sank HMS Sidon, a Royal Navy submarine, in 1955.Ĭonspiracy theories regarding the sinking of the Kursk are rife on the Russian Internet. Unfortunately, hydrogen peroxide becomes explosive when it comes into contact with a catalyst, such as organic compounds or fire. Like many torpedoes, the Type 65 used hydrogen peroxide as an underwater fuel. A faulty weld in a torpedo or damage to a torpedo during movement had caused it to leak hydrogen peroxide. Rescue efforts by Russian-and later British and Norwegian-teams failed to rescue the survivors.Ī Russian inquiry into the accident concluded that one of the Kursk’s Type 65-76A torpedoes had exploded. The note was dated exactly two hours after the initial explosion. Still, at least twenty-three of the 118 crew had survived the sinking, as a note penned by one of the ship’s senior officers, Lt. An explosion had ripped through the front of the hull, tearing a terrible gash along the upper bow. Kursk had suffered two massive explosions and sank in 354 feet of water at a twenty-degree vertical angle. One Russian account claims that the twenty-eight-thousand-ton battlecruiser Pyotr Velikiy shook from the first explosion, and a Norwegian seismic station recorded both explosions. At 11:28 a.m., an underwater explosion was detected followed two minutes later by a second, larger explosion. Kursk, which was fully loaded with Granit missiles and torpedoes, was scheduled to make a simulated attack on an aircraft carrier. On August 15, 2000, the Kursk was on exercise with major elements of the Russian Northern Fleet, including the aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov and battlecruiser Pyotr Velikiy. The missiles would be fed targeting data from the Legenda space surveillance system, which would hunt fast-moving carrier battle groups from orbit. The missile packed either a 1,653-pound conventional high explosive warhead, enough to damage an aircraft carrier, or a five-hundred-kiloton nuclear warhead, enough to vaporize a carrier. Each weighed 15,400 pounds each, most of which was fuel for the ramjet-powered engine which propelled the missile at speeds of Mach 1.6 to a range of 388 miles. The P-700 was thirty-three feet long and nearly three feet wide. The P-700 was a large missile designed to kill large ships. They were large for a reason: each Oscar carried two dozen huge P-700 Granit missiles. At 19,400 tons submerged, they were larger than the American Ohio-class ballistic-missile submarines. Some of the largest submarines ever constructed, they displaced measure 506 feet long with a beam of nearly sixty feet-nearly twice that of the Soviet Union’s Alfa-class attack submarines. The Soviets’ solution was the construction of the Oscar-class submarines. They also carried nuclear weapons, making them exceptionally dangerous to the Soviet coastline. With their versatile air wings, American carriers could frustrate the Warsaw Pact’s plans wartime plans, doing everything from escorting convoys across the Atlantic to bombing Soviet Northern Fleet bases above the Arctic Circle. The Soviet Union’s greatest adversaries at sea were the aircraft carriers of the U.S. The Kursk accident was the worst naval disaster suffered by post–Cold War Russia. The cruise-missile submarine Kursk suffered a massive explosion and sank after an onboard torpedo accidentally detonated. In 2000, a Russian submarine designed to sink aircraft carriers became a victim of its own arsenal.
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