In August, the Russian Oscar 2-class (Project 949A) missile submarine Kursk sank in the Barents Sea during a naval exercise. She had just fired a missile (presumably an SS-N-19 cruise weapon). She was scheduled to fire a torpedo, although it is not clear whether she had done so because she never radioed confirmation of the firing. Two explosions, about two minutes apart, were reported, followed by flooding noises. Speculation has been that something went catastrophically wrong at that point. Either before or after firing the torpedo, the submarine dove into the sea bottom at a depth of about 100 meters (330 feet). It is possible that the submarine successfully fired a torpedo and the two reported explosions were not directly connected to her loss. If the exercises were intended to demonstrate the Russian Navy's firepower, then one would expect the torpedo to hit a target, and it would be no surprise if the target carried a bit of extra explosive to make the hit more spectacular (a technique once used successfully in a missile test by a Western manufacturer to sell an antiship missile to a Western navy). The gap between the two explosions would correspond roughly to a torpedo's running time. In this case, the main disaster may have been overcompensation and a quick run into the bottom.
It is conceivable that, after firing a torpedo, someone overcompensated or the boat suffered a stern plane casualty and began a shallow dive. For that matter, one might imagine that several Russian surface warships were present to monitor the torpedo's firing and that the Kursk crash-dived to avoid colliding with one of them; the surface ship may even have damaged the submarine's outer hull—including her sail—in passing (many surface-ship collisions have seemed, to the surface ship, to have been very minor jolts, so the collision might not even have been noticed). The Russians have reported that a periscope was up (indicating that the submarine was running shallow), but it may have been forced up by the impact with the bottom. It may well have been significant that the sea is shallow compared to the overall length of the submarine; it would not have taken very long for the submarine to hit bottom. If the submarine was running at periscope depth (which the Russians say was 20 meter keel depth), then she may have had no more than 80 meters of water beneath her. She is about 154 meters long. At only 10¼ down angle, her bow would be about 15 meters below her ordered depth, and at ten knots (and 10¼ down) she would descend about 50 meters each minute. Would she be able to pull out at all? Her enormous inertia would make her slow to pull out of a dive. Shallow water can be quite dangerous for a large submarine.
When the submarine hit, she apparently still was running ahead, since reportedly she dug a furrow in the bottom before coming to rest. Material from the furrow undoubtedly was sucked into her condenser scoops, and once they had been plugged she could no longer run her engines; the reactors had to be shut down. Without them, she had no power except for the limited amount provided by a storage battery, plus high-pressure air in tanks. Had the submarine been undamaged, she presumably could have blown her ballast tanks to reach the surface. Many of the reports had her taking up a 60° list on the bottom. That would be explicable if she had indeed tried to blow tanks, but could not get air into those on one side. An attempt to blow tanks would in turn suggest that the submarine's control room was intact after she hit bottom, unless tanks could be blown from a secondary control position further aft. An intact control room would also have had access to the submarine's underwater communications system (the Russians used such devices very widely); it is not clear whether such a device was available further aft. It also is not clear why the submarine did not release the usual distress buoys, which generally contain a telephone for direct contact to a sunken submarine. She was being prepared for deployment, and it may be Russian practice to weld down such buoys to avoid revealing the submarine's position.
Norwegian seismic stations recorded two explosions, which were assessed as equivalent to about 250 pounds of TNT and then, two minutes later, to about two tons of TNT. If the second explosion occurred on the sea bed, the sound would have been more strongly coupled to the earth, so the size of the explosion may have been overestimated. In any case, remote measurement of explosions is tricky at best. It does seem possible to distinguish an explosion, which produces a very short pulse, from a collision or the sound of a submarine driving into the sea bed, both of which would be much more protracted.
Although the submarine reportedly was equipped with rescue spheres, they were not used. If the control room under the sail was intact after the submarine struck the bottom, it presumably would have offered a route to the spheres--if they were usable. Initially, the Russians claimed that they had connected air and power lines to the submarine, and given the Kursk's internal volume, it seemed likely that the crew could have survived until submersibles or unpowered rescue devices reached them. Then it turned out that no such connections had been made, and that the Russians lacked the ability to reach the submarine. They finally agreed to allow foreign assistance, and Norwegian divers opened the after hatch to find the submarine flooded and the crew dead. It does appear that at least some of the crew survived whatever sank the submarine, because the Russians have now stated that they were in acoustic contact, using an underwater signaling system, a few hours after the sinking. They have also claimed that the submarine was located no more than four hours after she sank, which suggests that the submarine was able to beacon the searchers. Now President Vladimir Putin has vowed to recover the bodies for burial, and there is much talk in Russia of raising the submarine.
The sinking has both political and technical aspects. The irony is that the exercise probably was intended to show Putin what the Russian fleet could do, to support an effort to shift funds from the strategic rocket forces to the fleet. Officially, it was a working-up exercise for a squadron intended to operate in the Mediterranean to prove that Russia is still a great regional power. It has been clear for some years that Russia has nothing like the economic muscle to support its current order of battle, either on land or at sea. In many cases, units are maintained at full strength only by accepting that they cannot and will not train. The initial Chechen disaster was traced to a practice of using only units at full strength, which happened to be full of entirely untrained recruits. To his credit, Putin has said several times that numbers must be cut to the sort of force the country can afford to maintain. His reaction to the disaster has been to promise much more money for the military, yet it is not clear how this money is to be collected. It seems unlikely that the West cheerfully will lend Russia money to build up the sort of military which, in the past, was so threatening.
Much of the Russian defense establishment continues to assert that the disaster must have been the result of a collision with a foreign submarine shadowing the Kursk and observing the exercise in which she took part. Evidence for such a claim is lacking, of course, but one of the Russian newspapers produced a lengthy list of earlier claimed collisions, many of them supposedly because of U.S. submarine reconnaissance practices. The Russians have blamed the 1968 loss of their Golf-class ballistic missile submarine in the Pacific and even the loss of the Yankee off the US Atlantic coast on underwater collisions, but neither supposed example seems to have happened. Their press did give the interesting example of an Echo II-class cruise missile submarine, damaged underwater, whose commander thought he had sunk a US submarine by accident. He surfaced and got home. The Russians cite an entirely unofficial report that a US submarine on surveillance duty accidentally and fatally damaged an "Echo II" as proof that the collision actually occurred. It is impossible to say, without access to rather secret US records, but perhaps the most interesting point to keep in mind was that the collision sank neither submarine. Much the same can be said of other reported incidents, which generally resulted in dents rather than in fatal damage.
The collision theory has two major attractions for the Russians. First, it resonates with the anti-American feelings which are now rife; the Russians have to blame someone for the abject failure of their economy. To a limited extent they are right; it now appears that the "shock therapy" advocated by US advisors had disastrous consequences. On the other hand, it was not Harvard which produced the ex-Soviet mafia which basically stole so much of the surviving Soviet economy. The attitude of blaming foreigners rather than looking inward is horribly reminiscent of that in Germany after the 1918 disaster. Second, the collision theory advances an existing agenda. The Russians want to end Western submarine reconnaissance. They lack the antisubmarine forces to keep foreign submarines out of their waters. Now their cry is for "underwater traffic control" to preclude future tragedies. Since the Kursk almost certainly was sunk by something other than a collision with anyone else's submarine, this argument is specious.
Then there is the internal explosion theory. Some of the Russian newspapers now claim that the submarine was destroyed by a bomb carried on board by Chechens (their favorite villains) or by Daghestanis (who are on the same list). It seems unlikely that they had access to anything powerful enough; this theory apparently echoes the claims that Chechens were behind a series of bombings in Moscow. Apparently the submarine carried an experimental gas-generator torpedo-ejection system; certainly a civilian torpedo expert was on board to witness the torpedo firing. It is possible that the first reported explosion was actually the ejection, or at least the operation of the ejection system. If something went wrong in the tube, one can imagine that the torpedo caused some sort of mass detonation in the torpedo room. The shock wave probably would have burst watertight doors leading back into the submarine. The control room, probably immediately abaft the torpedo room, should have flooded very quickly. Who would then have been able to blow ballast tanks, or for that matter use an underwater telephone? Was there an alternative command center aft?
For the US Navy, the incident was embarrassing in that both of the rescue submersibles (DSRVs), built in the 1960s after the Thresher (SSN-593) disaster, are being retired without successors. The DSRVs were justified on the theory that a US submarine might hit a sea mount and ground there, her crew alive but unable to surface. It is entirely possible that the Kursk was more or less intact when she hit the sea floor. In that case her crew died because no rescue devices were available. We would hate to be placed in a similar situation. [See N. Polmar's "What If Kursk Had Been Ours?"]
Dr. Friedman is the author of The Naval Institute Guide to World Naval Weapons Systems.
World Naval Developments: What Happened to the Kursk?
By Norman Friedman