The Kursk Submarine Disaster of 2000 | Episode 106

I believe the most frightening vehicle to travel from point A to point B in would be a submarine. And I am including cable cars and rocket sleds and tight ropes and wingsuits and early diving bells and high altitude balloon gondolas and loose sleds and the kind of fixed wing plane where you have to walk on the wing, and human cannonballing and teleportation and ziplining over a volcano. In that analysis, let's see if today's story changes my mind. Yella, and welcome to Doomsday Histories Most Dangerous Podcast. Together we are going to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre, and on firing, but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and around the world. On today's episode, you will learn why the history of victory in human warfare favors how much you resemble your own anus. You will understand how your brain actually corabs itself worse than your bowels when confronted with something enormous approaching unseen from underwater. And if you ever had a particularly bad day at work and felt really underserved by your employer's desire or ability to do anything about it. This episode is doing that thing where it points back and forth between you and itself, and it's nodding strongly. And if you were listening on Patreon, you would learn why the first recorded military submarine mission sounded like that porno. You would see why life in a confined space can get you full body duct taped to a chair with a gag in your mouth, and you would hear cautionary and sober observations about the aromatic and claustrophobic life of a fellow listener who spent years in the silent service. This is not the show you play around kids, or will eating, or even in mixed company. But as long as you find yourself a little more historically engaged and learn something that could potentially save your life, our work is done. So with all that said, shoot the kids out of the room, put on your headphones and safety glasses, and let's begin. I don't know what your particular take on war and warfare is, but from one who has studied the techniques and evolution of man's cruelest pastime, I think success favors the larger ale. Allow me to explain, we are taught to think of war as a noble contest, bravery and valor. You know, soldiers charging, clashing. Into battle and creating a melee of limbs, pirouetting out of a battlefield sized cloud of dust and screaming. But if you look at the history of it, valor rarely decides anything. Cleverness does, and more often than not, victory belongs to the side willing to be a little more underhanded is probably the kindest way to say it. Case in point, one of the very first machines of war wasn't even a weapon. It was a trap. You could almost have called it an arts and craft project. About thirty two hundred years ago, after almost a decade of playing little pig let me in with the city of Troy, the Greek said, hey, let's not make this weird. In fact, here have this big ass wooden horse and we're just going to take off, And then they pretended to just sail away. The Trojans hauled it through the gates right into the city, and after everyone had gone to sleep, soldiers poured out of the horse's anal hatch and killed and killed and killed until Troy was finally sacked. Now that kind of a trick was really only going to work that one time, so now they had to improvise. Imagine spending a billion gold ingots building a two foot thick stone wall around your city, only for an enemy to roll up with a catapult capable of hurling stones right over your fancy wall like it wasn't even there, or a comically large crossbow. Imagine being the first person who found themselves pinned to the ground like a bug by a giant arrow. And then when you don't think you could slap yourself any harder, some other ass comes by and says, you know what's better than a forty foot wall, a forty one foot ladder. And you know what's forty times more dangerous than a ladder, a rolling wooden skyscraper called a siege tower that gave attacking armies the high ground so they could look down on you and pepper you with arrows or spears or feces or whatever they liked, and you don't get a vote. Fast forward to the Middle Ages, and engineers were now constructing trebouchets, which are light catapults, but these had enormous counterweights that made them powerful enough to throw half ton stones, which are the last thing that you want to play catch with. Actually, the last thing you want to play catch with were the dead animals or plague soaked corpses pin wheeling over the wall and spreading disease when they exploded on landing. I would rather catch the giant stone. Again. None of this is exactly nightly behavior, but underhanded is the sad point. Famously, in fourteen fifty three, the Ottoman Empire hauled massive cannons to Constantinople and just pulverized their way in with gunpowder, which we've talked about before. Imagine being protected by a wall for eight thousand years and then some army wheels up and detetrises it in an afternoon. By the time World War One popped off, war had evolved or devolved into something so depraved even the Ottomans would have thrown up in their helmets. Getting peppered by machine gun fire and raked by barbed wire and frickasy by flamethrowers would have seemed unimaginable. So try to imagine how a Roman soldier would interpret a tank. Even before you watched a shell loudly remove someone's head, their slow, loud and terrifying approach would have filled the battlefield with feces and the soldiers who died supplying it. Across thousands of years, humans have built defenses to make themselves feel safe, and then other humans pioneer some new machine or tactic and just wreck everything, and the escalating pattern of callous in human indifference and merciless barbarity just peeps, repeating, And the winner said in quotes, because I really want you to stop and think about what you're plotting is more often than not the side that is most shamelessly willing to really bury the needle on their humanity. From my point of view, all that warfare has ever really accomplished is normalizing cruelty. I don't know, maybe it's just me to tell our story. Today, we are going to spend time aboard the purest modern descendant of the Trojan horse idea, an ambush weapon designed to approach unseen and obscure the danger hidden within. Instead of hiding soldiers outside of a city gate, though submarines hide an entire warship beneath the waves, where it sneaks silently up and strikes without warning. During World War One, a single torpedo launched from a German U boat could send a ship to the bottom in minutes. Imagine an eyeball popping out of the waves from a periscope, and then a commander casually eating an apple decides you and everyone on your ship needs to die. And while you are screaming and sinking into the ocean, they are already celebrating the radar operator's birthday with a slab cake. During the Cold War, submarines went nuclear, and now they could stay underwater for months, crossing entire oceans without ever getting a breath of fresh air. And in a considerable upgrade over trying to staple a bomb to a hull, these new vessels carried ballistic missiles capable of destroying it entire cities. The submarine maybe the most sophisticated trojan horse humanity has ever built. It's also most likely the most frightening vehicle we have ever yet visited in the history of this show. And I will remind you we did an episode where people fell over a mile in an elevator. Our story today is going to take place August the twelfth, two thousand, but before we get into it, let's jump around in time a little more towards the end of the Cold War, the United States had aircraft carriers, which yeah, I mean, the name explains, but really these were floating air bases capable of projecting military power anywhere in the world, and the Soviet Navy recognized this, and they knew they probably could not defeat them head to head on the open seas, so they built something sneaky. Instead of matching carriers with carriers, Soviet planners created huge submarines designed to ambush entire carrier groups and pepper them with volleys of anti ship cruise missiles intended to overwhelm carrier defenses from long range. And then something weird happened. The Cold War, the geopolitical struggle that drove decades of nuclear weapons development and spy satellites and giant submarines just ended. The Soviet Union collapsed in nineteen ninety one, but long story short, thousands of workers were already elbowed deep building submarines, so construction continued, and today we will be focusing on one of those late entries, an OSCAR two class submarine specifically designed to destroy entire US aircraft carrier groups. But before she could do any of that would just a blueprint on an engineering Department's desk at factory number sixty six y two at Severodvinsk. Severrodvinsk sits on the southern shore of the White Sea in Russia's far northeast, which I have heard described as looking like a three fingered hand if that hand owed money to the wrong people. Maybe I think it looks more like angry batman staring at Finland. Severrodvinsk was home to the Russian State Center for Nuclear Shipbuilding and existed for one purpose building submarines. Today we are here at the sev Mass Shipyard to witness the launch of Russia's newest sub, the K one forty one Kursk. The K stands for krazer, which in Russian just means cruiser, and one forty one is the hull number. There are subs that defend the motherland from interlopers, and then there are floating weapons platforms could do anything from turn your carrier fleet into artificial fish habitats or flatten a chunk of your country with the specific kind of scrubbing action that only a nuclear warhead can really supply. The first plank of her Keel was laid in nineteen ninety and after teams of welders and pipe fitters and electricians and hydraulic texts and gear machinists and instrument texts and structural engineers and material engineers and radar specialists and communication technicians and control systems engineers and navigation system specialists and ship fitters and propulsion shaft specialists and reactors specialists and machinists and hundreds of other specialists who assembled hundreds of kilometers of wiring and piping and valves and thousands of random individual parts and buttons and knobs. She was launched just four years later, on May sixteenth, nineteen ninety four. Her name was taken from a mid sized regional city in Western Russia, and not any ordinary mid sized regional city in Western Russia. From July the fifth to August twenty third in nineteen forty three, the Battle of Kerse became the largest tank battle in history. Try to picture about three thousand German tanks squaring off against about fifty three hundred Soviet ones in close quarters. Germany ended up losing a bunch of teeth and were never really able to stick it to the Soviet Union after that, so the name Kerse became a symbol of Soviet resilience and military strength. When you've thought about submarines, you probably picture crewmen crouching in a cramped metal tube with barely enough room to stand, and that does happen, but not here. Kerse was generous with every proportion. When she was designed, she was separated into nine watertight compartments, arranged one after another along her length, and then stacked across multiple decks, all connected by steep ladders. It was a lot like being inside of a building that was turned sideways. And each of these compartments served a different function, like the control center or the living areas, or the turbine machinery, and of course the reactor space and the torpedo room. Heavy steel bulkheads separated each of these sections so that if one of them flooded or was damaged, it was not the end of the world. It could not have been easy trying to sleep in a confined space filled with the constant background noise of pomps and turbines and ventilation fans, and people slept where they worked. Crewman would share bunks in a rotation, so that someone was always sleeping while someone else was always working. Officers shared cabins maybe the size of a couple booths, and Applebee's, which was a far sight better than older subs where crews were forced to simply put a bucket over their head where they stood and try to sleep there. Compared to earlier subs, Kerk's designers understood how important it was for sailors who would be trapped aboard this thing for months at a time, to not go crackers. The bottom line for sub mariners then and now is that you trade the sky and sun and moon for a twenty four hour windowless view of instruments and buttons and knobs and pipes, which I am led to believe anecdotally is said to be not as good, and everything smells worse than you'd hope. Still knowing this, the curse came with a couple of provisions to help you get over it, including a galley where you could grab a hot meal around the clock, and then maybe you decide to go relax in the onboard sauna for a bit before cooling off in the onboard pool. She had the room, and I'm not making that up. All told, she was about one hundred and fifty five meters or five hundred and ten feet long, eighteen meters or sixty feet wide, and about nine meters or thirty feet tall. To make it easier to understand, she's about thirty two dodge caravans long. She weighed about fourteen thousand, seven hundred tons or forty million pounds, and when she descended the slipway out of Sevmashes massive shipbuilding complex and splooshed into the flat, cold gray of the white sea, still with the smell of fresh paint coming off her, she displaced as much as twenty four thousand tons of water. Kursk was one of the largest cruise missile submarines ever built. Engineers and foremen and welders and electricians and officers and naval representatives and local officials gathered along the launch area. There would have been a military band playing, and speeches about symbolism and naval strength, and a whole lot of applause from a whole lot of officials. Unlike most naval vessels, when surfaced, submarines only reveal a fraction of their true size. What you see is a long, dark mass riding very low in the water. Nearly two thirds of it is obscured below the surface, so imagine you're just an ordinary swimmer floating around in the open water and everything is calm, just a vast blue space with nothing around, and then you sense a faint pressure moving through the water. The water beneath you darkens and you feel it before you see it, and then it emerges. This is a machine longer than a football field. It would appear impossibly large, and psychologically you just ain't having it. If you have sub mechanophobia, your brain interprets what you are seeing as an immediate and overwhelming loss of control. Sub Mechanophobia is the fear of submerged man made objects like sunken ships or airplanes, atlantis, whatever, and put most simply big things underwater make scary, and even more specifically, it's the realization that something so enormous could even exist, let alone silently and visibly sneak up on you and you wouldn't even notice until it was right on you, and you soft, small, squishy, and totally exposed feel and are staggeringly small and fragile by comparison. Psychologists call this a scheme of violation. It's where you're surrounding suddenly out of nowhere, no longer match what your brain expects it to the Amygdala in your brain goes deafcon three and activates the fight or flight response and starts wholesaling on adrenaline. When you're in water, your brain understands that your visibility is impaired and trying to escape from water is slower and not inhaling. To scream depends entirely on you staying calm, which is easier said than done, and it doesn't even have to be moving. Your brain is screaming about potentially being crushed or being pulled underwater. That's something that doesn't even notice you, which balloons into fears around being pulled into a propeller or sucked against a hull, or being dragged underwater by turbulence and just becoming trapped beneath the vessel itself. These thoughts will happen involuntarily and overlap wildly, and it doesn't matter if it's really happening. Your poor brain will fill in they answers it's missing with the worst thoughts you can have. So this turns into panic, and panic turns into a disorienting and overwhelming need to escape. And if that panic turns into a loop, and your fear of suffocation turns into you swimming into a tunnel of bright white light with all of your old relatives holding out towels and waving you in. Well, it was great knowing you. A person floating in the ocean wants to believe that the water around them is empty, and some mechanophobia corrects that assumption as frighteningly as possible. So you're on vacation, perhaps listening to some podcast with your waterproof headphones, while floating around on the ocean, enjoying the sun and the peace of it all, when you sense something massive and dark about the size of your hotel, passing almost silently beneath you, and you want to run back to shore. But that doesn't work because cartoon physics aren't transferable, and the only other thing you can think to do is shed all the dead weight of your body holding you back by simply dying and flying away in ghost form. But these are all terrible options. Would you know what to do? Your first and most important task is controlling your breathing. Panic leads to rapid breathing, which leads to fatigue, which leads to disorientation, which leads to accidental inhalation of water. Start by taking a few slow breaths and focus on floating if possible. The submarine isn't actually pursuing you, It is simply traveling on its course. So try to control your screaming and let's get out of the way. Screaming is basically how your body vomits out anxiety and fear. However, we are going to want to save up as much of our energy as we can for what happens next. Don't do that panicky movie trope thing of trying to outrun it. Just whim sideways to the direction it's moving like a bullfighter. The further you get away from it, the further you are from the bow, where the water displacement will be the strongest, and of course where the propeller wash will pass. And we will get to that. And although I'm trying to calm you, I feel like I do have to point out that the stern or propeller area is the most dangerous part of any vessel unless you are cool, with strong currents and turbulence sucking you towards it. Propeller turbulence dissipates with distance, but even after it passes, you can still feel rolling currents of upward and downward poles or surface chop. So focus on steady swimming and floating until the water calms. Just try to ignore all of the violence and the slashing water and the giant blades. And at this. Point I want you to float on your back and try to slow your breathing like I said, and try to remind yourself that this too shall pass. And understand that subs usually operate well below the surface or in restricted naval area is where you weren't going to be swimming anyways, and that although there are incidents between swimmers and submarines, they are pretty rare. And also subs do not tend to sail information, so there probably will not be a second and third one following closely behind. Just focus on that breathing. Recognize that all the adrenaline probably used up a lot of energy, and you need to conserve what you've got left. Also, if this did happen to you, here are some lottery numbers three, seven, fifteen, twenty three, forty one, forty six, then you should play those. But even if they don't work, try not to feel bad because you've already won a lottery curse. Had a very smooth appearance. She was painted with a dull matt tone, and she was almost completely featureless, with the obvious exception of the tall rectangular tower that r from her center and the colorful coat of arms emblazoned on the front. They used to call this a conning tower, but now they just call it a sail. It's home to all of the radar and communications antennas and the periscope, and when surfaced, it can kind of feel like an industrial tree fort, perfect for getting a little sun, airing out some fart smell, or just eyeballing far off enemies. The coat of arms is a wreathed shield with three partridges arranged along a diagonal blue band, and the whole thing is capped with a crown, and the design dates all the way back to Catherine the Great, who we have also talked about before. When a sub wants to dive, they simply fill the tanks and it becomes heavier than the water is displacing. Once that happens, the whole thing disappears. When they want to resurface, the water is forced out by blowing the tanks with compressed air, and up they go. The typical operating depth for modern military subs is usually between one hundred and fifty and two hundred and fifty meters or five hundred to eight hundred feet. Kursk's maximum tested depth was about three hundred meters or nine hundred and eighty five feet. So if you can picture the statue of Liberty with big Ben plunked on top, and then another statue of Liberty on top of that, she can go lower. Crush depth as a term is pretty self explanatory, and that number is usually classified, but it generally sits about one point three to two times the test depth. But fear not, no one is getting crushed to death today, not really. In August of two thousand, a good chunk of the Russian Navy converged on the Barren Sea to participate in the largest naval exercise that Russia had thrown in years. They wanted to remind the world that Russia still meant business and had the teeth to back it up. This was a show of force. The Cursk was designed to hunt and overwhelm enemy aircraft carriers and their escort ships with a barrage of two dozen long range P seven hundred granite anti ship missiles and torpedoes and when I say missile, a P seven hundred weighs about seven tons each and could theoretically treat your radiation detectors to a show more than thirty times as powerful as the explosion at Hiroshima. Large angled launch tubes ran along the sides of the sub and from there they could fly up to six hundred kilometers or three hundred and seventy miles at up to mock two point five. That's almost thirty one hundred kilometers or nineteen hundred miles per hour. And mock, if you don't know, is the way that they describe speed relative to the speed of sound, so that is fast enough to cross the Atlantic in under two hours. The crew complement on this day included one hundred and eleven men plus five officers from head office, so to speak, plus two other specialists that were also too far above our pay grade to talk to, and they are all there to oversee the exercise. Captaining her this day would be Captain first Rank Gannadi Layachin, a respected commander with twenty eight years in the service and a reputation for strict professionalism. The exercise itself began on August ten, two thousand, thirty two surface ships, three subs plus support vessels, plus navy plane circling overhead, and about ten thousand personnel would take part, and Kirsk's job was to attack the Russian battle group, acting as the enemy. She would approach undetected from underneath before firing a training torpedo at one of the surface ships, and that would act as the starter pistol. The massive nuclear powered battle cruise Pyotr Veliki circled overhead while anti submarine helicopters plunked sonar booies to find them. The surface ships were practicing detection and defense while submarines practiced their stealth attacks. They were simulating a Western carrier strike group approaching Russia's northern waters. The Kersk's crew were focused entirely on the exercise. The weapons crew would load a practice torpedo into the launch tube and then await the captain's order, the torpedo tubes, of course, being in the forward compartment. While sonar operators listened for the sounds of ships overhead. Torpedomen removed a sixty five seventy six A kit torpedo from the storage racks, aligned it with the tube operated a mechanical loading system to slide it into the tube, and then connected the electrical and firing interfaces before sealing the door. The test torpedo was nearly eleven meters longs picture two Dodge caravans park pumpered a bumper, and it weighed more than four and a half tons. Everything was going to plan until at eleven twenty eight and twenty six seconds, the first is rocked by a sudden and violent jolt. There had been an explosion inside the torpedo room. Fire spread quickly as the crew realized something catastrophic has happened. The crew inside the torpedo room had been killed, and the crew inside the second compartment just felt like they had because of the violent over pressure. They would have lost their hearing and the sub would have lost buoyancy control. They began emergency surfacing procedures and reactors, shut down protocols and sealing off the damaged compartment, but it was too late. Fire in the first compartment heated other live torpedoes, each carrying much more powerful warheads, and after just over two minutes, they detonated simultaneously. This second explosion was estimated to be as powerful as seven tons of TNT, and seismic stations across northern Europe detected the blast. This explosion destroyed the first three compartments of the submarine, and inside the sub the hull trapped and contained energy from the blast and pressure inside built unbelievably fast, with shock waves bouncing violently off the steel bulkheads and fire and shrapnel ricocheting throughout the tight space. It is worth pointing out that the second compartment had been the command center and the third department had been the communications center. The forward hull had been obliterated, bulkheads collapsed, and the sub lost all control and began rapidly sinking, and it didn't take long before the sub struck the bottom at an angle before coming to rest in the soft seafloor one hundred and eight meters or three hundred and fifty four feet below the surface. Most of the crew in the forward sections have been killed instantly by the explosions. However, at least twenty three crew members have survived, and they begin to make their way towards the ninth compartment at the stern furthest from the bow. Among them is Captain Lieutenant Dmitri Kolesnikov, who picked a bad day to tag along on a training exercise. The ninth compartment was home to the steering gear and rudder control and the hydraulic machinery. Of course, fat lot of good any of that does trapped on the seafloor, but it also contained an emergency escape hatch that theoretically would allow them to escape to the surface using survival suits. Sailors just enter a small airlock, flood the chamber, open the utter hatch, and shoot upward to freedom. Horrible, horrible freedom. I have heard it described as one of the most frightening emergency procedures in the world. Let's discuss the escape hatch has to be flooded completely before the outer hatch can be opened, which means the sailor must stand inside it while freezing seawater fills it and barren. Seawater in August is typically around to celsius or thirty five fahrenheit, just for reference, if your drink were that cold, it would hurt your teeth. Within seconds, breathing becomes difficult and your muscles tightened, and it's not weird or uncommon to just start panicking and then you'll launch people describe rapid, uncontrolled spinning and violent expansion of air in the suit, and painful pressure changes in the ears and lungs. And I've only recently come to understand how often people unintentionally or unconsciously hold their breath in a panic situation. In this panic situation, though, the air that you're holding in your lungs will expand and rupture fatally, so you are supposed to continuously exhale the entire way up. Add to that, the trip to the surface could take as much as two minutes. In practicality, I figure the trip would look more like this, deep in hail, screaming until empty, Deep in hail, screaming until empty. I haven't even mentioned the decompression, sickness, and gas embolism waiting for you on the surface. And luckily for them, this form of escape was rendered impossible. They found themselves in the dark in a flooding compartment, and the escape hatch was already partially flooded, and the systems required to even make it work were dead. So so much for that, And even if everything had been perfect, prepping the suits and operating the equipment, only by the dim beam of a small emergency light was impossible not to mention these men had suffered burns and concussion injuries and smoke inhalation and all the things that would have killed them terribly during the ascent. And I'm not trying to be dramanic for drama's sake. Sub crews themselves are trained to think of the escape hatch as the last resort. If the hull was intact and resting on the seabed, the preferred strategy was to seal yourself somewhere safe, conserve your air, and wait for rescue, and they would have every reason to believe that rescue subs or divers would arrive before long. All the same, Using the pencil on wet paper in the darkness, Dmitri Kolesnikov managed to scribble out a note recording the time, a list of survivors and their location. The first lines read roughly thirteen fifteen. All personnel from Compartment six, seven, and eight moved into Compartment nine. There are twenty three people here. We made this decision as a result of the accident. Part of the problem for them was that without the electrical system scrubbing the air, carbon dioxide levels were rising, while the oxygen levels were decreasing, and to make things worse, the temperature was steadily dropping. Luckily for them, they were able to use a chemical oxygen generator to create more oxygen in the space, but it wouldn't be enough. These devices release oxygen through a chemical reaction, but they become extremely hot, like over six hundred celsius or eleven hundred fahrenheit while doing it, and unluckily for them, at some point the oxygen generator came into contact with either the sea water or the oil, and the chemical compound inside the generator produced a violent flash fire that replaced all of the oxygen in the room with toxic gases. The surviving crew would have lost consciousness quickly and did not suffer more than they already had and quietly passed away. All one hundred and eighteen men aboard died that day. So what happened while the men had been trapped below events on the surface unfolded slow. At first, the fleet thought that the explosions were just part of the training scenario. When Kursk failed to report, commanders began trying to make contact for several hours. It took a while before the Navy realized that something was actually wrong. Rescue subs weren't dispatched until twelve hours after the explosions, and by then a laundry list of everything from strong currents to technical issues interfered even further, and by the time a Russian rescue sub made it to the wreck about twenty four hours later, it could not dock with the Kersk's escape hatch. What had started as a show of force was turning into a show. Finally, finally, the Russian government accepted help from the Royal Norwegian Navy and just to scant. Nine days after the sinking, divers were able to confirm that everyone on board was dead. Most believe that if they had accepted the assistance earlier, it would have hurried the rescue, but no one could say definitely that it would have made any difference. Several investigations were conducted, one from the government, one from Russian naval engineers and scientific institutes, and several from foreign experts, and all of them agreed on the same basic cause. The explosion was traced to a chemical leak inside one of the torpedoes, a weapon that had otherwise been considered reliable for decades by the Russian Navy. Sixty five seventy six torpedoes used a highly concentrated form of hydrogen peroxide called high test peroxide as a propellant. We're just going to call it HTP for short in the pro column. These torpedoes could reach up to fifty knots, which was extremely fast for a torpedo, and they could travel as far as fifty kilometers or thirty one miles, carrying about nine hundred and ninety pounds of explosives, which would be powerful enough to break the keel of an aircraft carrier. The only downside was high test peroxide was chemically unstable. If it leaked and touched certain metals or contaminants, it rapidly decomposed into oxygen and superheated steam, which expands violently and creates enormous pressure. And that is exactly what happened here. A faulty welled or seal inside the torpedo allowed peroxide to leak, and when that liquid came into contact with metal surfaces inside the torpedo casing, the reaction accelerated quickly, building heat and pressure until it exploded inside its tube. The first explosion had been roughly equivalent to one hundred two as much as two hundred and fifty kilograms of TNT and tore through the forward torpedo compartment, destroying other torpedo tubes and igniting fuel from other torpedoes. Kirsk was carrying twenty two torpedoes at the time. The submarine's thick pressure hull contained the blast, so the damage inside the compartment was catastrophic. Two minutes later those damage secondary weapons detonated pretty much simultaneously, which was estimated to have as much power as seven tons of TNT, which killed the torpedo crew, sailors working in the command center, and likely some in the communications compartment. That second blast was powerful enough to destroy the entire forward section of the sub rupturing both hulls, instantly killing most of the crew forward of the reactor compartment, and sending shockwaves detectable all across Russia, Finland, and Norway. As many as ninety five sailors and officers likely died in the initial blast. Within a year of the disaster, Russia had made plans to raise the Cursk. They had become worried that the reactors could leak and poison the barren sea. Not to mention the families wanted their sons back, and of course they definitely wanted to protect any military secrets being kept aboard, and authorities and investigators were really hoping to actually see the torpedo room. The raising of the Cursk became one of the largest and most technically complicated marine salvage operations ever attempted, and there was concern learned that the bow might still contained undetonated torpedoes and if it were to break off, all hell would break loose. So divers used an underwater diamond wire saw similar to a giant cheese cutter, to slice through the hull and cut off the first sixty five feet or so. After that, twenty six massive steel cables were passed under the rest of the sub and she was lifted and barged back to dry dock. When the wreck of the Cursk was recovered in two thousand one, investigators only located one hundred and fifteen of the one hundred and eighteen bodies, three had been comprehensively destroyed. They also found Klesnikov's note still in his pocket. It ended simply, it seems there are no chances ten to twenty percent. Let's hope that at least someone will read this. The bodies of the last Soul were returned to their families and buried with military honors. Oh and a year later they returned and scooped up the bow Section two. When it came to assigning blame, no one was criminally charged. Blame was assigned to the use of HTP fuel, the torpedo storage, and poor maintenance of aging Soviet era equipment. The disaster put a real spotlight on how dangerous torpedoes can be and how poor Russia's naval rescue game had become. Subs have always been a problem, and this was not the first time one had been lost because of a self sabotaging torpedo. In nineteen sixty eight, the USS Scorpion failed to arrive in port after a three month deployment to the Mediterranean. Turns out, one of her own torpedoes, a fourteen hundred pound Mark thirty seven torpedo carrying three hundred and thirty pounds of high explosives, accidentally began running while still in the tube. And this was no ordinary torpedo. This was a homing torpedo. Normally, the way it works is a torpedo is basically spit out of the submarine by compressed air and then the motor kicks in and off it goes. But this one ran hot, as they call it, just spinning away in the tube while the components heated up with nowhere to go. And then, like all good homing torpedoes, it found its target, which in this case was the USS scorpion, and before the crew could properly eject it, it armed itself and detonated, killing ninety nine. Then again in nineteen eighty six, when Russia's K two nineteen nuclear submarine was patrolling near Bermuda. Really long story short, one of her torpedoes got unintentionally hosed with seawater from the failure of a tube patch. And I will spare you an entire chemistry lesson here. Let me simply say it reacted with residue from the torpedo, and acids were formed and toxic gases were made, and the fuel tank exploded, taking several crewmen with it. And in this case they were able to fight the resulting fires and the flooding, and even with electrical systems frying left and right, they actually managed to surface the sub. It was at this point that they realized the automatic nuclear reactor shutdown had failed, so a young reactor technician, Sergei Priminen, entered the reactor compartment and manually inserted the control rods, which did shut the reactor down and prevented a nuclear meltdown. However, he died in the process, and today he is regarded as a hero of the Soviet Navy. Rightfully so. The crew of the Kursk were also posthumously honoured across Russia. Many of the sailors received state decorations, and Layatchin was awarded the title Hero of the Russian Federation. When the Cursk sank, she became the first major naval disaster of the new twenty four hour news cycle. It also became a political crisis for Vladimir Putin, who had only been president for a few months at the time. The loss of Kursk remains one of the deadliest submarine disasters in modern naval history, and the deadliest in the history of the Russian Navy. It is also the second deadliest loss of a submarine in the history of the world, only behind the USS Thresher, which was lost in nineteen sixty three, but that is a different story. When we were kids, a bunch of us had the plan the waterproof a shed connected to an air hose and then sink it in a lake. You could experienced the world beneath the waterline as explorers looking back. The abject horror of actually attempting this would have been shocking, and the only thing we were going to be exploring was the satiny lining of child size coffins. In fact, if I ever had the chance to travel back in time and meet myself at that age, I'd probably forget to hand them the lottery numbers I brought and just end up scolding him for being so dumb. But I would like to assure him that he will be smart one day, just not today. We would have been crushed by the water pressure on the shed way before we suffocated. So as much as I do love the water, I'm also completely terrified of it. Over the years, I've run into fish bigger than me, snapping turtles. I saw a snake that turned out to be extremely venomous, and a shark which turned out to be harmless. I even ran into a manateee one time. But for some reason, I am more afraid of large man made objects, so that just shouldn't be there. I definitely have sub mechanophobia, and for a long time I thought that it actually started because of this time when young me was snorkeling and diving at a cottage and got hit in the head by a boat hull. I mean, that might have done it. But you ever swim on a lake with one of those old forests sticking out of the bottom. You ever do it on one that also had a small plane sunk in it? Let me ask you this. You ever dog paddle away from something you're so afraid of at one mile per hour because your limbs are partially frozen with fear. Yep, I did that too, and I think it was pretty much over for me right there. And then, frankly, it's harder for anything that terrifying to sneak up on you on land, so I do what I can to stay safe here. And that's really the goal of the show, just to make you feel a little bit safer. And it is at this point of the show where I suggest if you have or have not been scared out of your wits by something in the water a I would love to hear about it, So reach out to me on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. As Doomsday Podcast, or fire me an email to doomsdaypod at gmail dot com, and b you could tell me all about it at patreon dot com slash funeral Kazoo, or even at buy me a Coffee dot com slash Doomsday. On Patreon, you get all the ad free episodes and extra content and behind the scenes stuff, safety stuff, and as much of my attention as you might like. While over at buy me a coffee dot com you could just make a one time donation and rest with a warm feeling that only supporting something you truly enjoy can provide. The majority of Patreon supporters just sign up, make a small monthly donation to sustain the show, and then, just like the forward section of the Curse, they just disappear. And that's okay. Support is support, and I appreciate it more than you could know. I would like to offer a quick but heartfelt shout out to Angelo DeJesus, Caroline Olsen, and Brupe pesh Chowdri for showing their support on Patreon. I'm also taking a minute to shut out Veronica with a k from Belgium who wanted to tell her boss it was serious that she could have died and The reason she is playing this for you right now is because she is quitting, and you can right off now from me, I am saying in your position, listening is as an important skill as talking, and your negligent irresponsibility could have affected Veronica physically instead of just emotionally, and that was your choice. Just accept the criticism and grow from it. You can do better by others in the future and become the kind of manager that people respect instead of fear and loathe, just not by Veronica. She gone. Older episodes can be found wherever you found this one, and while you are there, please leave us so review and tell your friends. I always thank everyone for their support, and I always also ask that if you could spare the money and had to choose, to consider making a donation to Global Medic. Global Medic is a rapid response agency of Canadian volunteers offering assistance around the world to aid in the aftermath of disasters and crises. They're often the first and sometimes only team to get critical interventions to people in life threatening situations, and to date they have helped over six million people across eighty nine different countries. You can learn more and donate at globalmedic dot CA. On the next episode, we are going to learn two very important things. First, you might not know what ammonium nitrate is, but it is crucial to global agriculture. And on the next episode we are going to find out at what quantity it can be used for landscaping purposes and becomes the loudest fertilizer in human history. And we will see why they say curiosity sometimes kills cats and sometimes it vaporizes them. It's the Texas City disaster of nineteen forty seven. We'll talk soon. Safety Gog goes off and thanks for listening.