The loss of the nuclear attack submarine Kursk has cost Russia a great deal. It is not simply the destruction of an expensive vessel that was the pride of the Russian submarine fleet, nor the terrible deaths of 118 officers and men, including several navy top brass, who had been on board for the exercise in which the Kursk was playing a leading part.
When the huge hull of the 345 foot submarine plunged to the bottom of the Barents Sea, so too did the morale of the Russian Navy. Of all Moscow’s armed forces, the navy has had the biggest organizational and financial problems in the cash-stricken post-Soviet era. Unlike the army and the air force, it is pinned down to three fronts, the Arctic-based in Murmansk, the Black Sea and the Pacific in Vladivostock. Given the great size of Russia, it is not possible to service and support each of the navies from a central point, as for instance has been done in Britain and France. Therefore Russia has always had effectively to run three separate navies, each with its own dockyards and own logistical support. At the best of times it has been hugely expensive. At the worst of times, which is now, it is ruinous.
In general, Russians have always been used to making do with equipment that was obsolescent, if not even obsolete by Western standards. They have some notable achievements, of which their successes in space have perhaps been the most remarkable. For many years US restrictions meant that the most advanced computers were not available for export to Russia. Yet given the lack of Random Access Memory and woefully low speed of computer chips available to them, Russian computer programmers produced some of the most concise yet remarkably efficient and elegant program code ever written.
But there were times when forcing highly trained professionals, such as the men in the Russian Navy, to work with inadequate resources, simply will not do. It is thought highly probably that the explosion, which blew off the front of the submarine, occurred in a torpedo tube. There is an outside possibility that the warhead of the torpedo itself may have detonated prematurely. What is more likely is that there was a malfunction in the torpedo motor, which on the Kursk, as throughout the Russian Navy, is powered by liquid peroxide fuel. The two explosions recorded by Western warships monitoring the exercise in which the Kursk was lost, suggest that a torpedo misfired in the tube, maybe thanks to an explosion of its fuel, which then triggered the detonation of the warhead which then crippled and sank the sub. If this proves to be the case, then the Russian Navy’s penny-pinching choice of the cheap fuel option for its new generation of torpedoes was a terrible mistake..
But it seems that the humiliation of Russia’s sailors is not yet complete. The operation to raise the monstrous bulk of the Kursk was planned for April but because of the technical challenges, it has been necessary to call in foreign companies to help. Wrangles over the cost, which could be as much as $100 million, have now meant one of the contractors has withdrawn. Though Moscow announced immediately that a replacement was in the wings, to many, this would represent an unimaginable piece of advance organization.
Thus Russia’s sailors, most especially submariners, must wait even longer to find out what killed their comrades in the icy dark of the Barents Sea.
