#9 - RW 269
Moscow Times
August 14, 2003
Kursk's Lessons Unlearned
By Pavel Felgenhauer

Three years ago the Kursk nuclear submarine sank in the Barents Sea, killing all 118 men on board. Now it is known that the cause of the disaster was a faulty so-called practice torpedo without a warhead. The crew was preparing to fire the torpedo when its fuel leaked, causing an explosion that in turn caused the detonation of the warheads of battle torpedos in the bow compartment of the ship.

The magnitude of the second explosion has been estimated at 5 tons to 10 tons of TNT. It sank the great ship (some 155 meters long and displacing 24,000 tons of water when fully submerged).

Most of the crew was killed instantaneously; only 23 men in the stern survived the blast. The authorities insist the survivors were dead in less than eight hours and there was no chance to save them. But appa were recorded aboard rescue vessels near the Kursk up to three days later.

The attitude of the authorities was very Soviet in nature from day one of the Kursk saga: They withheld information, distorted information, stretched the truth, denied the obvious and presented xenophobic fantasies as solid facts. Tens of millions of dollars were misspent to screen kilometer upon kilometer of sea bottom to find evidence of the presence of the "foreign submarine" that "sank the Kursk." The remains of the Kursk were also scrutinized after salvage to find elements of a U.S. killer-torpedo.

A year and half ago, President Vladimir Putin ended the fruitless search for Western scapegoats. The Northern Fleet commander, Admiral Vyacheslav Popov, his deputy, Vice Admiral Mikhail Motsak, and 12 other high-ranking naval officials were ousted or demoted for "serious failures" in maintaining the fleet, mismanagement of the exercise in which the Kursk sank and the organization of the subsequent rescue operation.

The Kursk case was closed while government-controlled propaganda media was rewriting it into a heroic saga of men who died defending the motherland. Popov was appointed a senator, Motsak given a post in the presidential administration. The naval chief, Admiral Vladimir Kuroyedov, retained his post.

Kursk-type (Oscar-2 class) subs are specifically built to sink aircraft carriers. They are loaded with 24 Granit supersonic anti-ship cruise missiles with a range of over 500 kilometers -- the most modern in Russia's arsenal, designed to carry conventional or nuclear warheads.

The Kursk carried 22 armed Granits and one without a warhead. The Granits, in silos outside the hull, did not explode when the ship went down. They were removed after it was salvaged.

It was planned that during the first week of a World War III, the Oscar-2 subs would prevent large U.S. reinforcements from reaching Europe and Asia and not allow U.S. carriers to support ground troops. During that week, Russian tanks should have reached the Channel, occupying Europe.

After firing their Granit missiles, the Oscar-2 subs could not return to bases in Russia to reload -- the bases would have been destroyed. And, anyway, by the time they could go home and return to the high seas, the war would have been over, won or lost. Russian naval planners decided that instead the Kursk-type subs should press on with their attack with torpedos and maybe sink someone. Of course, a noisy oversize sub could not survive long as a torpedo boat. But it was built as a one-time use ship -- to die in battle, not to survive.

Three years ago the Kursk fired a practice Granit and the next day closed in to attack by torpedo a convoy of Russian ships posing as a carrier group. But the crew had only theoretical knowledge of how to fire a torpedo and, apparently, did something wrong.

The Kursk was a "constant readiness" boat that carried more than 20 armed torpedos during the exercise. There was no need for the Kursk to carry all that live ammunition during peacetime and risk lives. But Russian admirals still make careers pretending to constantly confront the U.S. Navy. In May, a Russian task force performed exercises in the Indian Ocean -- again pretending to "intercept" a carrier group.

Kuroyedov, apparently, has ambitions to become Russia's next defense minister. The exercise that killed the Kursk was intended to impress Putin, but it backfired. This year, xenophobia and patriotism are once again popular in the Kremlin and admirals are again running ambitious naval exercises -- all with anti-Western scenarios.

Since the ships are getting older and the crews are still badly trained, a new Kursk-type disaster seems unavoidable. The question is not if, but when?

Pavel Felgenhauer is an independent defense analyst.

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