The Russian authorities recently acknowledged for the First time that the sinking of the nuclear submarine Kursk was not caused by a collision with a foreign submarine. Following the explosions that sent the boat to the bottom of the Barents Sea on 12 August 2000, Russian officials stressed that the torpedo detonations were caused by a collision, most likely with one of two U.S. nuclear-propelled attack submarines in the area at the time.
Russian Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov stated that investigators have discovered no evidence of an external impact on the hull. The Interfax-Military News Agency reported that the Russian government will be ready to make an announcement on the official cause of the sinking by mid-2002.
"By that time," Klebanov was quoted as saying, "we want to lift the fragments of the first compartment that interest us, or the entire first compartment." The shattered bow section was severed from the main portion of the hull before the lift to avoid the danger of unexploded torpedoes that remained in the wreckage.
Also, Russian submarine specialists have determined that the 23 men who survived the initial blasts that destroyed the Kursk could not have survived for more than eight hours. Those men, aft of the reactor compartments, which reduced the direct effects of the explosions, succumbed to suffocation or drowning.
The information came as specialists examined the hulk of the submarine, now resting in a floating dry dock at Rosslyakovo, near Murmansk. Russian Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov, who is leading the investigation into the cause of the sinking, described the conditions for the handful of sailors not killed in the initial explosion as "a hell which you can only try to imagine."
The second compartment was found to contain some 330 pounds of explosives, parts of weapons that were in the first compartment.
Sixteen of the Granit (NATO SS-N-19 Shipwreck) cruise missiles have been unloaded from the Kursk in dry dock. Six other missiles were damaged. Their deformed launch tubes were "stabilized" and are to be cut out when the submarine is towed to the nearby Nerpa shipyard in Snezhnogorsk. (The submarine can carry 24 of the large, antiship missiles.)
After the human remains and special equipment are removed from the Kursk, all holes in the hull are to be plugged and the submarine floated and towed to the Nerpa shipyard. There she will be scrapped; her two reactors will be placed on barges and towed to nearby Sayda Bay for storage.
Meanwhile, plans are going forward to raise the Kursk's bow section in May-June 2002. The shattered first compartment, with some torpedoes remaining intact, will be raised in pieces. The plan, according to academician Igor D. Spassky, head of the Rubin design bureau, which designed the submarine, still is to undertake that effort without foreign participation.