Russian submarine K-141 Kursk

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Salvaged Kursk, minus the bow which was cut away during recovery, delivered to Roslyakovo dry dock to be scrapped.
Career
Ordered:
Laid down:	1992
Launched:	1994
Commissioned:	December 1994
Fate:	Lost at sea August 12, 2000
Homeport:	Vidyaevo, Russia
Stricken:
General Characteristics
Displacement:	13.400 t, 16.400 t
Length:	154.0 m
Beam:	18.2 m
Draft:	9.0 m
Propulsion:	2 nuclear reactors OK-650b, 2 steam turbines, 2/7-bladed props
Diving depth:	300 to 600 meters [by various estimates]
Speed:	32 knots (59 km/h) submerged, 16 knots (30 km/h) surfaced
Range:
Complement:	44 officers, 68 enlisted
Armament:	24 x SS-N-19/P-700 Granit, 4 x 533 mm and 2 x 650 mm bow torpedo tubes

K-141 Kursk was a Russian nuclear cruise missile submarine which was lost with no survivors when it sank in the Barents Sea on August 12, 2000. Kursk, full name Атомная подводная лодка "Курск" [АПЛ "Курск"] in Russian, was a Project 949A Антей (Antey, Antaeus but was also known by its NATO reporting name of Oscar II). It was named after the Russian city Kursk, around which the largest tank battle in military history, the Battle of Kursk, took place in 1943. One of the first vessels built after the fall of the Soviet Union it was commissioned into the Russian Navy's Northern Fleet.

[edit] Background

Construction of Kursk began in Severodvinsk, near Arkhangelsk, in 1992. She was launched in 1994 and formally commissioned in December of that year. The ship was "baptized" by an Orthodox priest in 1995. Kursk was the last of the large Oscar-II class submarines to be designed and approved in the Soviet era. At 155 metres in length, and four stories high, it was the largest attack submarine ever built. The class had also been described as "unsinkable" on account of its double hull^{[citation needed]}. The outer hull, made of high-nickel high-chrome content steel just 8.5mm thick, had exceptionally good resistance to corrosion and a weak magnetic signature which helped prevent detection by Magnetic Anomaly Detection (MAD) systems. There was a two-metre gap to the two-inch-thick steel inner hull.

Kursk formed part of the Russian Northern Fleet. The fleet had suffered tremendous cutbacks through lack of funding throughout the 1990s. Many submarines had been brought into docks along the Barents Sea and left to rust. All but the most essential frontline equipment, including search and rescue equipment, was inadequately serviced. Sailors of the Northern Fleet had gone unpaid in the mid-1990s owing to money being appropriated before reaching the Arctic North. However, the end of the decade represented something of a renaissance for the fleet. In 1999 Kursk had carried out a successful reconnaissance mission in the Mediterranean, spying on the United States Navy's Sixth Fleet during the Kosovo War. The training exercise of August 2000 was to be the largest summer drill since the collapse of the Soviet Union ten years before, involving four attack submarines and the fleet's flagship Pyotr Velikiy ("Peter the Great") amongst a flotilla of smaller ships.

[edit] Explosion

The Kursk sailed out to sea to perform an exercise of firing dummy torpedoes at Pyotr Velikiy, a Kirov class battlecruiser. On August 12, 2000 at 11:28 local time (07:28 UTC), the missiles were fired, but an explosion occurred soon after on Kursk. The only credible report to-date is that this was due to the failure and explosion of one of Kursk's new/developmental torpedoes. The chemical explosion blasted with the force of 100-250 kg of TNT and registered 2.2 on the Richter scale [1]. The submarine sank to a depth of 108 metres, approximately 135km (85 miles) off Severomorsk, at 69°40′N 37°35′E. A second explosion 135 seconds after the initial event measured between 3.5 and 4.4 on the Richter scale, equivalent to 3-7 tons of TNT [2]. Either this explosion or the earlier one propelled large pieces of debris far back through the submarine.

[edit] Rescue Attempts

Though a rescue attempt was made by British and Norwegian teams, all sailors and officers aboard the Kursk perished. The first investigations suggested that most of the crew had died within minutes of the explosion. However journal entries show that many survived in the rear of the ship for hours after the blasts. Kursk was eventually raised from her grave by a Dutch team using the barge Giant 4, and 115 of the 118 dead were recovered and laid to rest in Russia. Russian officials have strenuously denied claims that the sub was carrying nuclear warheads. When the boat was raised by a salvage operation in 2001 there were considerable fears moving the wreck could trigger explosions.

According to the Raising the Kursk television show by the Science Channel:

[edit] See also

• Major submarine incidents since 2000
• Submarines destroyed by hot-running torpedoes: HMS Sidon – USS Scorpion – Kursk
• Igor Spassky - The designer of the Oscar II class

[edit] External links

• (Russian) Some pictures of Kursk
• Kursk Lifting Operation: official information channel (English)
• Kursk Lifting Operation: official information channel (Russian)
• History Channel Modern Marvels: Inviting Disaster DVD set (includes The Sinking of Kursk)
• Project 949 Granit / Oscar I Project 949A Antey / Oscar II
• BBC: Kursk mistakes haunt Russia
• Kursk memorial website
• "A Submarine in Troubled Waters" documentary
• Risks and hazards during the recovery of the Kursk
• Theories of how the Kursk sank

Oscar-class submarine

Project 949 Granit (Oscar-I) All Northern Fleet K-525 Minskiy Komsomolets | K-206 Murmansk

Project 949A Antey (Oscar-II) Northern Fleet K-148 Krasnodar | K-119 Voronezh | K-410 Smolensk | K-266 Orel (ex-Severodvinsk) | K-186 Omsk | K-141 Kursk Russian Pacific Fleet K-132 Belgorod | K-173 Chelyabinsk | K-150 Tomsk | K-456 Kasatka

List of Soviet and Russian submarine classes