Saturday, 12 August 2000. The Russian Northern Fleet was in the Barents Sea for its first large exercise in more than a decade. Among the ships was K-141 Kursk, an Oscar II class cruise missile submarine commissioned on 30 December 1994. She was 154 meters long, displaced more than 13,000 tonnes submerged, and carried 24 anti-ship missiles built to kill American carriers.
There were 118 men aboard. Her commander was Captain First Rank Gennady Lyachin.
That morning Kursk was due to fire two practice torpedoes at the battlecruiser Pyotr Velikiy. She never fired either.
A leak in torpedo tube four
The practice weapon was a Type 65-76A, a big 650 mm torpedo that ran on high-test peroxide, or HTP. HTP is very concentrated hydrogen peroxide. It is a cheap, powerful oxidizer, and it is also the reason most navies quietly stopped using it after the Royal Navy lost HMS Sidon to an HTP torpedo in 1955.
The Russian investigation concluded that HTP seeped through a faulty weld in the torpedo casing. When it touched the catalyst it decomposed, expanding roughly 5,000 times in volume, and burst the kerosene tank. Norwegian seismographs logged the first explosion at 11:28 Moscow time. It was the equivalent of 100 to 250 kilograms of TNT.
That was the small one.
The fire in the torpedo room cooked the warheads of the weapons around it. At 11:30:42, 135 seconds after the first blast, several torpedoes detonated together. Seismographs recorded it at magnitude 4.2. Estimates put it at several tonnes of TNT. By then Kursk was already on the bottom, 108 meters down, and the front of the boat was gone.
Twenty-three men in compartment nine
The reactors shut down as designed. Behind the reactor compartment, men in compartments six, seven and eight were still alive. They went aft to the ninth compartment, the turbine space at the stern, which had an escape trunk.
The senior officer there was Captain-Lieutenant Dmitry Kolesnikov, 27, commander of the turbine group. He wrote a note. Russian prosecutors later released part of it:
“All personnel from sections six, seven and eight went over to section nine. There are 23 people here. We made this decision as a result of the accident. None of us can get to the surface.”
He timed the first entry at 13:15. A second entry at 15:15 was written by feel, in the dark, and is far harder to read.
The 23 did not live long. Investigators found evidence of a flash fire in the compartment, most likely from a potassium superoxide oxygen-regeneration cartridge that came into contact with seawater. How many hours they lasted is still argued about, and the official position, that they died within hours, has never satisfied the families.
Five days of “everything is under control”
The Russian Navy did not announce the loss until Monday, 14 August. Early official statements spoke of contact with the crew and of air being supplied to the boat. Neither turned out to be true.
Russian rescue submersibles made repeated attempts to dock on the stern hatch over the next days. The navy blamed currents, poor visibility and a damaged sealing surface. None of the attempts held.
Britain and Norway offered help on the first day. The Royal Navy had its LR5 rescue submersible, and the Norwegians had commercial saturation divers used to North Sea oil work. Moscow said it had what it needed.
President Vladimir Putin stayed on holiday at the Black Sea. Russia accepted foreign assistance five days after the sinking. Norwegian divers reached the site on the 19th, flying out to the dive support ship Normand Pioneer and the Seaway Eagle.
The hatch the Russians could not open
The Norwegians were working at 108 meters, a depth that was routine in their trade. They went straight to the escape hatch on the stern.
On the morning of Monday, 21 August, they opened the outer hatch of the escape trunk at the stern. The trunk was full of water. With the inner hatch open, so was the ninth compartment. The Norwegian team said what everyone had suspected for days: all 118 men were dead.
It had taken the commercial divers about a day of work. The Russian navy had had nine.
On 8 September Putin sat down in New York with CNN’s Larry King. King asked what had happened to the submarine. Putin smiled slightly and said, “It sank.” Of all the things a head of state could have said on live television, that is the one Russians remember.
Raising a 24,000-tonne coffin
The Russian government signed a contract with the Dutch firms Mammoet and Smit International to raise the boat before the Barents Sea winter shut down work. Mammoet put Kursk’s weight at about 24,000 tonnes, with the bow sunk two meters into the clay.
The plan was to leave the wrecked bow behind. Divers and a robotic saw cut it off with an abrasive wire. Saturation divers, many of them from Scotland, then cut 26 holes into the hull for grippers. Each grip connected to a strand jack on the barge Giant 4, capable of 900 tonnes.
The lift began at 03:45 on 8 October 2001. Breaking the suction of the seabed took about 9,000 tonnes of pull. A little more than 11 hours later, Kursk was clamped under Giant 4 and on her way to the dry dock at Roslyakovo, near Murmansk. Radiation monitors found nothing above background.
In the dry dock, recovery teams found 115 of the 118 bodies. On Kolesnikov’s body they found the note. The bow section, with the torpedo room and the answer to what really started it, was blown apart on the seabed in 2002.
The prosecutor general’s report blamed the torpedo weld. Nobody senior was charged. The families were offered roughly 35,000 dollars each.
The same water had seen a convoy fight on New Year’s Eve 1942 that ended with Hitler trying to scrap his fleet. And Kursk was not the first submarine killed by her own design choices: the Royal Navy’s steam-driven K-class boats lost men the same way, to engineering that worked on paper.
Today Kursk’s sail stands in Murmansk, above the Kola Bay, as a memorial to the 118 and to other sailors lost in peacetime. In April 2022 the cruiser Moskva, flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, sank too, and Moscow admitted only one death.
