K-141 Kursk

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Kursk
The sister ship Omsk (K-186)
The sister ship Omsk (K-186)
Ship data
flag RussiaRussia (naval war flag) Russia
Ship type Nuclear submarine
class Oscar class
home port Widjajewo
Shipyard Shipyard 402 in Severodvinsk
Launch May 16, 1994
Commissioning December 30, 1994
Whereabouts Sunk on August 12, 2000
Ship dimensions and crew
length
154.0 m ( Lüa )
width 18.2 m
Draft Max. 9.0 m
displacement surfaced: 14,200 t
submerged: 24,000 t
 
crew 112 men
Machine system
machine 2 pressurized water reactors
2 steam turbines
Machine
performance
98,000 PS (72,079 kW)
propeller 2, seven-winged
Mission data submarine
Diving depth, normal 600 m
Top
speed
submerged
32 kn (59 km / h)
Top
speed
surfaced
16 kn (30 km / h)
Armament
Sensors
  • cylindrical bow sonar (Skat-3 system)
  • lateral fuselage sonar
  • Towing sonar
  • High frequency sonar for surfacing under ice
  • Mine avoidance sonar

The K-141 Kursk ( Russian Курск ) was a 1990/1991 Russian nuclear submarine of the Project 949A (NATO Code Oscar II class ) equipped with cruise missiles .

Than in 2000 due to a presumably by a technical fault caused explosion in the Barents Sea sank, claiming the Russian military initially, the Kursk was hit by a US submarine. The Russian Navy did not have a special rescue submarine that had rescue locks or robotic arms compatible with the Kursk , but only immersion capsules. The hesitant Russian information policy, the initially unsuccessful rescue attempts by the poorly equipped Russian Navy to open the exit hatch with the help of Norwegian divers, as well as the skepticism of Russian naval officers as to whether opening the allegedly damaged exit hatch would be possible at all, led to a serious delay and to a great extent late acceptance of foreign offers of help.

After time-consuming unsuccessful attempts, the Norwegian divers managed to open the inner hatch three days after their arrival and over a week after the explosion, now operating from their own diving platform. They found that there could be no more survivors because all the sections were already flooded. However, Norwegian officer Erland Raanes testified that, contrary to claims made by Russian naval officers, no damage was found to the hatch. The Russian government then asked the Norwegian government to carry out the recovery of the bodies.

It later turned out that about 23 crew members had initially survived and were able to escape to the rearmost section, where the emergency exit hatches were also. A CO 2 filter that fell and came into contact with water or oil caused a chemical reaction that led to a fire. This used up the remaining oxygen in the air and the men suffocated.

history

construction

On March 22, 1990, the first sections were welded, so that K-141 was laid down. The naval war fleet took the submarine into the inventory on January 31, 1991 and assigned it to the nuclear-powered missile U-cruisers on June 3, 1992. On April 6, K-141 was officially given the name Kursk by order of the High Command of the Naval War Fleet . On May 16, 1994, the K-141 Kursk was pulled out of the building hall and was launched . The signature under the acceptance file and the hoisting of the naval war flag took place on December 30, 1994. On March 1, 1995 the handover to the Northern Fleet and the stationing in Ura Guba / Widjajewo took place .

First trips

The first commander of the Kursk , Viktor Roschkow, was able to reassemble his crew. The crew managed to get K-141 Kursk ready for action within six months. The problems in the internal management of the fleet increased, however, since Russia itself was in a crisis and the military chronically underfunded or. was paralyzed by the all-encompassing corruption prevailing at the time. In 1996 there was already speculation about what would happen if commands were no longer carried out. Food was irregular and insufficient on board. Roshkov then asked the mayor of Kursk for help. From then on, trucks with groceries drove to the base every three months. 1997 Roshkov resigned his service and left the fleet.

The new commanding officer was the First Rank Captain Gennady Lyatschin. In 1998 the weapons systems and sensors in Severodvinsk were modernized. Then began a Mediterranean voyage . In 1999 Russia wanted to show strength in this area again after the NATO air strikes on Yugoslavia . Lyachin managed to get the Kursk through the Strait of Gibraltar unnoticed . The boat was later located and tracked by sonar buoys. On October 19, 1999, the Kursk returned to Widjajewo after 78 days at sea. She then became the flagship of her flotilla .

Downfall

The 154 m long Kursk at a depth of 108 m

On August 12, 2000 the Kursk took part in a maneuver of the Russian Northern Fleet in the Barents Sea . At 11:28 a.m. Moscow time , an explosion with a magnitude of 1.5 on the Richter scale was recorded in this sea area in Norway , and another one with a magnitude of 3.5 at 11:30 a.m. According to the official investigation report, the engine of a training torpedo was probably switched on too early. Due to the lack of cooling from the surrounding sea water, the projectile overheated, causing a hydrogen peroxide line to leak (85–98 percent hydrogen peroxide , so-called HTP or high test peroxide , is used for rockets and torpedo drives). This chemical reacted strongly with brass and copper (both are located in the torpedo) and formed water vapor and gaseous oxygen under great heat.

In the process, a high gas pressure can develop, which bursts its fragments apart when the torpedo's hull bursts. A fire broke out that quickly spread to the bow torpedo room, where the explosion of the warheads tore a large hole in the outer hull of the submarine. In addition, section 2 was severely damaged by the devastating pressure wave, where the command and steering position with most of the officers and the captain was located. The water that then penetrated the Kursk sank 180 kilometers northeast of Murmansk (about 69 ° 40 ′  N , 37 ° 35 ′  E ) to a depth of 108 meters.

American studies with the help of Russian experts come to a similar conclusion, but instead of the torpedo engine starting early, they assume that the cause is leaks in the hydrogen peroxide system due to poor maintenance. The reason why the much stronger inner torpedo tube flap broke in the first smaller explosion is believed to be that at that moment the sailors tried to open or close the flap again in order to eliminate problems with the electrical contacts of the flap. The report attributes that there was no attempt to extinguish the fire or any emergency measures (surfacing) after the fire broke out because a ventilation shaft between the bow and command section did not withstand the first explosion and the crew of the command bridge was also killed.

Initially, a malfunction of a supercavitation torpedo of the " Shkwal " type was considered a possible cause, which was later rejected according to both Russian and US analyzes.

Vladimir Putin on August 23, 2000 in a TV interview about the Kursk

At least 23 crew members initially survived inside the boat, but were unable to free themselves from this depth on their own. In order to slow down the rise in the CO 2 content of the air in the submarine, the men tried to hang up special CO 2 filters. These remove the CO 2 from the air . If such a filter containing calcium oxide ("quicklime") comes into contact with water, corrosive calcium hydroxide aerosol is formed with strong heat generation (see also: diving rescuer ). It can be assumed that one of the crew members dropped one of these filters into the water in the dark.

Russian rescue teams tried, among other things, unsuccessfully to carry out a rescue with rescue submarines of the Pris class . The international aid offered by Great Britain , Norway and the USA , among others , and even preparations for this had previously been rejected by the Russian side, so that their timely arrival was delayed. The media and members of the crew were only slowly and inconsistently informed about the condition of the boat and the progress of the rescue work. When Norwegian divers dived down to the wreck on the Regalia diving platform over a week later , they could no longer find any survivors. Meanwhile, the last of the 118 crew members had also died.

During the accident, the Norwegian reconnaissance ship Marjata was 19 nautical miles from the site of the accident and registered the two explosions with its sensors.

Letter fragment from a crew member
   

08/12/2000 3:45
PM Здесь темно писать, но
наощупь попробую.
Шансов похоже нет% - 10-20
Будем надеяться,
что хоть кто-прочитает нибудь
Здесь список л / с отсеков, которые
находятся в 9-и будут м
пытаться выйти

Всем привет, отчаиваться
не надо.
Колесников.

    

August 12, 2000 3:45 PM
It's too dark to write here,
but I try by feeling.
There doesn't seem to be a chance, 10–20 percent.
Hopefully
someone will read this.
Here is a list of the staff from the sections that
are in the ninth [section]
and will try to get out.

Greetings to everyone,
don't despair.
Kolesnikov

Salvage

After the use of diving robots, divers began in July 2001 to mark the places on the wreck where holes were to be drilled for the ropes used to lift the wreck. The ship was lifted by the Dutch companies Mammoet and Smit Internationale on October 8, 2001. Previously, the bow with the torpedo section had been separated from the rest of the ship under water. The wire saw used for this was manufactured by a company in Krefeld . This wire saw consisted of sleeves coated with JG-DUR hard metal. With the help of the Giant-4 pontoon, the deep- sea ​​tug Singapore towed the Kursk into the port of Roslyakowo ( 69 ° 4 ′  N , 33 ° 12 ′  E ). There the Kursk was brought to the PD-50 floating dock and scrapped. The Kursk is the only one of the five sunken Soviet-style nuclear submarines that has been lifted. Likewise, K-8 (1970), K-219 (1986), K-278 (1989) and K-159 (2003) decreased .

Commemoration

Memorial in Murmansk
Monument in Moscow

In Murmansk, a memorial was to be erected near the cathedral to commemorate the accident and its victims. The tower of the submarine was to be incorporated into the memorial. In March 2009, however, the tower turned up in a junkyard near Murmansk, where it was discovered by members of an organization in support of the Russian fleet. The following public protest led to the fact that the memorial was finally inaugurated in summer 2009. It stands on the water near the Church of the Savior, overlooking Kola Bay .

Another memorial to the occupation has stood in Moscow since at least 2008 .

Cause of the disaster

For months, the Russian military claimed that the Kursk had been rammed by an American submarine - the Memphis (which allegedly shadowed the Kursk ) - and that this was how the accident happened. In fact , there have been collisions between US and Soviet or Russian submarines a few times since the Cold War . On February 11, 1992, the US submarine Baton Rouge collided with the Russian boat B 276 . This possibility of the sinking of the Kursk could later be ruled out, as it could be proven that the strength of the pressure wave that would have occurred in the alleged collision could in no way match the actual strength of the explosion. Other sources initially concluded that the submarine was accidentally sunk by a missile from cruiser Pyotr Veliki during a test shoot .

Russian investigation report

In February 2002 the state commission of inquiry presented the result of its investigation. A defective exercise torpedo ultimately caused the disaster. Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov named the chiefs of the Northern Fleet and the crew of the Kursk under Captain Gennady Lyachin as responsible for serious negligence. The criminal case against the naval command ended without result in July 2002 and was discontinued. The documents are officially kept secret for a period of 25 years, with the exception of the part about the conclusions of the investigation.

reception

See also

Web links

Commons : K-141 Kursk  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Footnotes

  1. Evonik Product Stories “Highly concentrated in space”. on: evonik.com , October 21, 2011.
  2. Martin Bright: What really happened to Russia's 'unsinkable' sub. Guardian, August 5, 2001, accessed on May 2, 2017. The author mentions an increase in volume by a factor of 5000, but without giving information about prints . According to the article, the torpedo expert Maurice Stradling suspects that a similar process took place on the Kursk as the explosion of a torpedo in the British submarine Sidon in 1955. - The origin of the volume factor 5000 can be speculatively reconstructed from a 400-fold increase in volume between liquid Hydrogen peroxide and 0.5 mol / mol oxygen gas under normal conditions and an initial pressure of 12 bar. Please note: The pressure of the sea water at a depth of 108 m is a little over 11 bar.
  3. ^ Salvage divers at work on Kursk. In: The Telegraph . The diving support vessel (DVS) DSND Mayo was in use . DSND is a Norwegian company that operated Mayo with Halliburton Subsea in the Subsea 7 joint venture and sold it in 2004. ( Subsea 7 sells diving support vessel DSND Mayo. )
  4. The Russian government justified this by saying that it was too dangerous to salvage this part because it still contained sharp warheads. (Martin Bright, Guardian, 2001.)
  5. ↑ In 2003 the Tricolor was sawed according to the same principle .
  6. Ingo Bauernfeind: Radioactive for all eternity - The fate of the Prinz Eugen . ES Mittler & Sohn, Hamburg / Berlin / Bonn 2011, ISBN 978-3-8132-0928-0 , p. 160 .
  7. Kursk Tower found: Scrapped memorial. ( Memento from April 4, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) on: sueddeutsche.de , April 1, 2009.
  8. Tower of the Russian "Kursk" discovered on scrap heap. on: spiegel.de , March 31, 2009.
  9. “Kursk” monument finally revealed. On: wartist.org, August 12, 2009.
  10. Disasters: A Big Bluff. In: Der Spiegel. 43/2001. October 22, 2001, last accessed May 2, 2017.
  11. Richard Kämmerlings: "Nobody survives this film" Welt from July 9, 2019
  12. ^ "Kursk" Steam, accessed December 20, 2019