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Russian submarine K-141 Kursk
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BackgroundWork on building the Kursk began in 1992 at Severodvinsk, near Arkhangelsk. Launched in 1994, it was commissioned in December of that year. It was the last of the large Oscar-II class submarines to be designed and approved in the Soviet era. At 154m long – and four stories high – it was the largest attack submarine ever built. The outer hull, made of high-nickel, high-chrome content steel 8.5 mm 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 50.8 mm thick steel inner hull.
The Kursk was part of Russia's Northern Fleet, which had suffered funding cutbacks throughout the 1990s. Many of its submarines were tied and rusting in Andreyeva Bay, 100 km from Murmansk. Little work to maintain all but the most essential front-line equipment, including search and rescue equipment, had occurred. Northern Fleet sailors had gone unpaid in the mid-1990s. The end of the decade saw something of a renaissance for the fleet; in 1999, The Kursk carried out a successful reconnaissance mission in the Mediterranean, tracking the US Navy's Sixth Fleet during the Kosovo War. August 2000's training exercise was to have been the largest summer drill – ten years after the Soviet Union's collapse – involving four attack submarines, the fleet's flagship Pyotr Velikiy ("Peter the Great") and a flotilla of smaller ships.
ExplosionThe Kursk sailed out to sea to perform an exercise of firing dummy torpedoes at the Pyotr Velikiy, a Kirov class battlecruiser. On August 12, 2000 at 11:28 local time (07:28 UTC), the torpedoes were fired, but soon after there was an explosion on the Kursk. The only credible report to date is that this was due to the failure and explosion of one of the Kursk's new torpedoes. The chemical explosion blasted with the force of 100-250 kg of TNT and registered 2.2 on the Richter scale. The submarine sank to a depth of , about 135km (85 miles) from Severomorsk, at . 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. One of those explosions blew large pieces of debris back through the submarine.
Raising A consortium formed by the Dutch companies Mammoet and Smit International using the barge Giant 4 eventually raised the Kursk and recovered the dead, who were buried in Russia – although three of the bodies were too badly burned to be identified. The heat generated by the first blast detonated the warheads on 5 to 7 torpedoes causing a series of blasts big enough to be measured on geological seismic sensors in the area – and those secondary explosions fatally damaged the vessel.
Russian officials strenuously denied claims that the sub's Granit cruise missiles were carrying nuclear warheads, and no evidence has been provided to the contrary. When a salvage operation raised the boat in 2001, there were considerable fears that moving the wreck could trigger explosions since the bow was cut off in the process using a tungsten carbide-studded cable which had the potential to cause sparks which would ignite remaining pockets of volatile gases, such as hydrogen.
The remains of the Kursk's reactor compartment were towed to Sayda Bay on Russia's northern Kola Peninsula – where more than 50 reactor compartments were afloat at pier points – after a shipyard had defuelled the boat in early 2003.The rest of the boat was then dismantled.
According to the Raising the Kursk television show by the Science Channel:
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