August 16, 2000

A Sad Record of Submarine Disasters

By CHRISTOPHER DREW

he Soviet Navy sent a powerful submarine to sea in the late 1980's, determined to strike some fear into the American Navy.

But barely before the sub, the Komsomolets, could accomplish anything, a fire burst out underwater. Some crew members escaped after the sub fought its way to the surface of the Norwegian Sea.

But five men stayed inside and decided to trust their lives to a rescue capsule built onto the top of the sub.

That turned out to be a deadly mistake.

The crew had not been taught how to release the capsule. And once inside, they desperately tried to read the directions by holding a battle lamp over the instruction plaque. The chamber jammed and did not release until the sub fell back to the bottom of the sea. Only one of the five men survived.

This disaster illustrates the long series of problems that have plagued the Russian Navy, the latest casualty being the the Kursk, whose crew is lying at the bottom of the Barents Sea.

Weaknesses in technology, haphazard workmanship and a lot of bad luck kept the Russian Navy from being as powerful as it often seemed to be, even during its glory days in the cold war. And though the Russians have proven to need rescue devices more than any other nation's submarine force, even their best equipment has rarely worked.

The result has been an attitude toward crew safety that often seemed callous to Westerners. The Izvestia newspaper recently reported that 507 crew members have died during the 40 years that the Russians have had nuclear-powered subs.

While Russian officials insist they have done all they could for their men, the true scope of the failures has become public only in recent years, as the Russian news media has dug more aggressively into areas that long were matters of state secrets.

The dangers have proven to be occasions for great heroism. But critics say that with severe budget cuts in recent years, the problems have only grown worse.

Referring to the Kursk accident, Peter Huchthausen, a former United States naval intelligence official, said: "I'm surprised it hadn't happened earlier. This whole navy is an accident waiting to happen."

Throughout the cold war, many of the hazards developed out of the intense pressure from political leaders to catch up with the United States Navy.

After the United States launched the first nuclear-powered submarine, the Nautilus, in the mid-1950's, the Soviets hurried to follow.

Vladimir N. Chernavin, a former commander in chief of the Soviet Navy, once said that as a young commander in 1959, he refused to take one of the first Soviet nuclear subs out for sea trials because of its poor condition.

Russian sailors say that another nuclear-powered submarine, K-19, had already gone to sea, despite a bad omen. At its christening, the bottle of champagne failed to break.

In 1961, the K-19 was in the Norwegian Sea when its radiation detection equipment came to life. A reactor shut down. But the fuel rods continued to heat, and shot past 1,000 degrees.

According to an account in Soviet Soldier magazine in 1991, nine brave men volunteered to step into the highly radioactive reactor compartment, climbing inside what they called "the Boa's Mouth."

They remained there for two hours, each receiving 100 times the lethal dose of radiation.

Then one last man, Ivan Kulakov, a 22-year-old chief petty officer, rushed in after them, completing a jury-rig of the cooling system to bring the temperature down and save the sub.

The nine men died within weeks of radiation poisoning. But Mr. Kulakov, who recounted the story to the magazine, survived, crippled by terrible burns. The tragedy was so gruesome that Soviet sailors gave the K-19 a gruesome nickname: "Hiroshima."

In the United States, such a disaster would have marked the end of the K-19's life. But the Soviets cleaned it up and eventually sent it back to sea.

Its luck, however, never changed. In 1969, it collided with a United States submarine that was on a reconnaissance mission off the coast of the Soviet Union. And in 1972, a fire broke out on the sub and killed 26 crew members.

Before the Kursk, a total of four Russian subs sank, and many others have been damaged in reactor accidents, fires and explosions among the weapons they carried.

Another accident occurred in 1986, when a Soviet Yankee-class missile submarine, the K-219, suffered an explosion in one of its missile silos while on patrol in the Atlantic Ocean, about 1,200 miles from New York.

Two men died from the blast, including the missile officer.

As recounted in the 1997 book, "Hostile Waters," written by Mr. Huchthausen and two other men, including a former Soviet submarine officer, the sub clawed its way to the surface.

It had lost use of the remote controls for the reactors, and when the reactors began to overheat, two men had to go inside the shielded compartment to crank down the rods by hand. One man collapsed within 20 minutes and was evacuated.

But Sergei Preminin, a 20-year-old sailor, stayed amid the radiation to shut down the last reactor and prevent a meltdown.

And even though the Russians have kept their subs close to home since the cold war ended, problems persist, often because of poor maintenance and training.

"Alarmingly, their submarine safety record has not improved much in spite of years of operational experience," said Joshua Handler, a former researcher for the environmental group Greenpeace who is now writing a dissertation at Princeton University on Russian nuclear hazards.

American officials say the Russians have failed to maintain some of their most sophisticated rescue equipment, leaving the fate of the Kursk sailors in the hands of one of the oldest methods around.

In "The Terrible Hours," a book published last year, Peter Maas recounted how an American Navy officer, Charles Momsen, pioneered the use of a diving bell and helped rescue more than 30 men from a downed submarine in 1939.

Under this design, a bell-shaped vessel is lowered from a surface ship and hooks into the hatch on a sunken submarine. The men then climb into the bell, and it serves as a rescue elevator as the mother ship slowly lifts it back to the surface.

Now, in their latest crisis, the Russians essentially are trying to duplicate what Mr. Momsen did 61 years ago. But they also are trying to do it in waters that are twice as deep and far more treacherous, and with time running short.

Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company