And what they have discovered is deeply embarrassing for the Russian navy's high command. More credible was the theory being pushed until recently by senior officers in the Russian navy that the Kursk had collided with a British or American submarine spying on the manoeuvres in the Barents Sea.īut now British torpedo experts and seismologists working on the case believe they have solved the mystery of the Kursk by drawing on secret government documents about a near-forgotten submarine accident off the coast of Portland on the southern coast of England. It seemed inconceivable that the double hull and nine water-tight compartments of the submarine could have been punctured by anything but the most violent explosion.Įntire websites have been devoted to the theory that something went wrong with tests on a top-secret new ultra high-speed torpedo, Shkval (Squall), said to be unstoppable by Nato technology.īut there is no evidence that there were any Shkval torpedos on board, and some experts doubt their very existence. At first it was suggested that the submarine may have hit by an old World War II mine or been struck by friendly fire from the naval exercises.īut these explanations seemed to contradict Russian claims about the Kursk's impregnability. The sinking of the Kursk was a conspiracy theorist's dream, with some of the wilder explanations emerging from the highest levels of the Russian naval command.
Looking back, those scenes now seem all the more cruel as it must have been clear to the navy from the start there was never any hope of rescuing the crew. The blast then set off a chain reaction which caused the other torpedo warheads on board to explode minutes later.All 118 crewmen lost their lives in the disaster: a devastating blow to Russian military pride and the reputation of the recently elected President Vladimir Putin, who refused to cut short his holiday to deal with the crisis.įew will forget the scenes of desperate relatives, waiting at the quayside for news of the sailors, growing ever more furious at the official smokescreen of disinformation. The film accurately portrays what is now accepted to have really happened: a hydrogen peroxide leak in one of the sub’s HTP (high test peroxide) torpedoes. What sank the Kursk was, in the immediate aftermath, the subject of various conspiracy theories – some propagated by the Russians themselves – which claimed everything from a collision with US spy vessel to unexploded Second World War mines and mystery missiles aboard the sub had caused the tragedy. The film could even have played even more on the critical downsizing of the Russian Navy, because psychologically that was important for everyone involved.” The whole thing was breaking down by the mid-to-late Nineties. “People were short of pay, there were poorly trained conscripts, and some of them were giving up their jobs. “They ran out of money,” says Philip D Grove, a naval historian and lecturer at Britannia Royal Navy College. “Twenty years ago for this exercise we had three times this number of ships,” says Admiral Grudzinsky (Peter Simonischek) as he looks on the fleet. The film has unfortunate poignancy following another Russian naval tragedy last week, when a nuclear-powered submersible caught on fire, once again in the Barents Sea, killing at least 14 men.īut, as depicted in the film, the once-powerful Russian Navy was vastly depleted and under crippling financial strain by 2000. What followed was a media storm, with accusations of a cover up and a major political misfire by the newly elected President Vladmir Putin, who had refused to cut short his holiday while his submariners were dying.Ī film depicting the disaster, Kursk: The Last Mission, is out in cinemas today, directed by Thomas Vinterberg and starring Colin Firth as Commodore David Russell, the British officer who offered to help rescue the doomed submariners, and Matthias Schoenaerts as a fictionalised survivor. Initially there were survivors – a reported 23 men trapped in the husk of the submarine – but after days of botched rescue attempts and stubbornness from the Russian Navy, the disaster had claimed the lives of all 118 crew members.
The second explosion was so big that it hit 4.2 on the Richter scale and was detected as far away as Alaska. On August 12, 2000, two underwater explosions sank the Kursk, Russia’s most technologically advanced submarine, plunging it 100m to the bottom of the Barents Sea.
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