It was US and UK that sank Russia's Kursk submarine?
Pravda
18.05.2012
Strategic submarine "Kursk" that sank in 2000 was sunk by the Americans. This theory discussed in Russia and abroad was once again raised by the Polish Wprost, referring to the information allegedly received from the Russian General Staff officer, "Lt. Col. Andrei."
According to the authors, the restraint of the Russians made it possible to avoid a full-scale nuclear war.
The fact that "Kursk" perished at the torpedo explosion was adopted as the official theory in Russia. The report of the Prosecutor General of Russia of 2002 stated that the torpedo was a teaching one, and it exploded on its own followed by a detonation of the ammunition.
Almost immediately after the accident a few admirals and officials claimed that "Kursk" was torpedoed by a U.S. submarine stationed in the area of the exercise.
Also, some military officials declared that Russian nuclear submarine collided with a foreign submarine.
The first information of any unexpected event that subsequently gets an official legend, as a rule, is the closest to the truth.
The same theory was also developed by French director Jean-Michel Carré in the movie "Kursk": "Submarine in turbid waters," (2005).
According to the movie, the Russian submarine was watched by two American submarines "Memphis" and "Toledo."
"Toledo" came dangerously close.
To prevent an attack of the Russian submarine at "Toledo", "Memphis" allegedly fired Mk-48 torpedo at "Kursk".
According to the Canadian History TV Channel, in the course of surveillance of "Kursk", "Toledo" tried to come closer, but by chance ran into the Russian nuclear submarine that was likely performing a maneuver.
The captain of "Memphis", thinking that "Kursk" attacked "Toledo" (presumably receiving an acoustic signal to open the torpedo locks), fired at the Russian submarine.
According to "Lieutenant Colonel Andrei", "small submarine AS-15 (apparently, "Kashalot" (Project 1910) - Ed.) quickly discovered "Kursk" after the accident. However, there was no decision on rescue operations - though, as the source claims, there were divers on board able to operate at depths up to 200 meters. "Kursk" was lying at a depth of 108 meters.
"Kashalots" are among the most secret Russian Navy submarines. To this day, it is unknown whether they obey the Navy command.
At least until 1986 (at the time the first submarine of this type was used for three years), they were registered with the GRU.*
*GRU,
Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravleniye
(Soviet Military Intelligence)
"We thought that the crew was killed, there was no contact with them," continued lieutenant colonel.
"The phone rang, Korabelnikov picked up, listed, turned pale, and murmured:
"The U.S. (...) sunk the ship, there will be a war!" Supposedly said Korabelnikov.
Of course, the American side rejected both theories.
Against this background, the presence of a British boat "Splendid" in the area was forgotten.
In 1986 it encountered a Soviet submarine "Simbirsk" and in 1999 struck at Serbia, and was supposedly scared by "Kursk" surfaced in the Mediterranean.
After the explosion at "Kursk" submarine, it left for repairs at NATO bases.
The presence of two boats in the area of the crash, along with the harmonization of positions on the force majeure between Moscow, Washington and London, as expected, could cause delays in the rescue operation of the Russian sailors.
Interestingly, it was possible to track down the route of the Americans after the incident, but the situation with the British nuclear submarine has not been clarified.
The idea of a possible involvement of "Splendid" in the death of "Kursk" concerns the British.
The British "Wikipedia" on the page devoted to this boat, made a very voluminous retreat.
It argues that the British submarine had nothing to do with the death of the Russian submarine.
"Although the charges were unfounded, the conspiracy theorists have developed them in different directions for a long time," said "Wikipedia".
Indeed, back in 2000, "Nezavisimaya Gazeta" published an opinion of one of the captain divers, according to which "Splendid" submarine found rest next to "Kursk" on the bottom of the Barents Sea, and was blown up during an operation aimed to raise the Russian submarine. The author suggests that we will soon hear of the death or retirement of this submarine.
In October of 2000, according to BBC, 12 nuclear submarines (including all submarines "Swiftsure") were removed from combat duty because of a leak in the cooling system of a nuclear reactor in a boat of Trafalgar class.
It is unknown how many boats later returned to the system.
According to "Jane's" catalog, the boat was written off in 2004.
Although it was the last and the newest boat of project "Swiftsure" (a total of six), it was the first one to be sent to scraps.
Six days after something went dreadfully wrong with the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk, another submarine quietly pulled into a Norwegian port, carrying some of the most detailed evidence so far of why the pride of Russia's navy sank to the bottom of the Barents Sea.
The other submarine was the Memphis, a nuclear-powered attack submarine based in Groton, Conn., and one of two American submarines that were spying on the largest Russian naval exercise in years when disaster struck the Kursk on the morning of Aug. 12.
By the time the Memphis reached Bergen, Norway, Russian officials, including the defense minister, Marshal Igor D. Sergeyev, had said the Kursk had probably sunk after colliding with a foreign submarine or a World War II mine. So the arrival of the Memphis spawned news reports in Russia that a damaged submarine needing repairs had limped into port.
Publicly, the Pentagon still refuses to comment on the whereabouts or the mission of the Memphis. And they say the most likely cause of the sinking is the misfiring of one of the Kursk's torpedoes.
They insist that the Memphis was not damaged. Nor was it, the other American submarine or any other foreign submarine involved in any collision, they said. The Memphis's arrival in Norway was a long-scheduled liberty call, they said.
The call allowed the submarine to unload sonar tapes and other recordings that the Americans say captured two explosions that ravaged and sank the Kursk, killing all 118 people on board.
Those tapes, now being analyzed at the National Maritime Intelligence Center in Suitland, Md., contain the strongest evidence, until now not discussed in detail, to support the leading American theory of what destroyed the Kursk.
And that theory, they said, does not include the collision that the Russians have said probably occurred. ''We have subs that hear everything that goes on,'' a senior officer in Washington said. ''It's pretty clear to us what happened.''
According to the American theory, a rocket-propelled torpedo being loaded or launched as part of an exercise misfired, its engine or its fuel exploding.
After 2 minutes and 15 seconds -- during which time the Kursk's captain either increased power from the nuclear reactor or blew ballast in an effort to surface -- a powerful explosion of the torpedo's warhead tore a gaping hole in the submarine's bow, killing most if not all of the crew instantly.
[In Vladivostok, Russia, today, a former submarine officer who is a member of a governmental commission investigating the explosion said a new weapons system was being tested on board the Kursk when it sank. But the former officer, Sergei V. Zhekov, would not elaborate on the system during a news conference, saying it was a state secret, the news agency Interfax reported.]
When the Kursk sank, the United States government knew within hours. The Americans collected telltale recordings by means of submarines and a surface ship, and even from shore.
They detected no sounds of a collision. And they monitored the Russian fleet's emergency radio transmissions closely during the aftermath.
In addition to two submarines, the Navy had a surface ship, the Loyal, in the Barents Sea.
The Loyal is one of a class of surveillance ships operated by civilian contractors, but with as many as 15 Navy sailors and officers aboard.
According to the Navy, ships like the Loyal have only a single mission: ''to gather underwater acoustical data'' in support of ''the antisubmarine warfare mission'' of fleet commanders.
The ship can tow an array of underwater listening devices that pick up the most minute data, and that, the officials said, was precisely what it was doing.
A senior American officer said the two submarines were ''a long ways away'' from the Kursk at the time of the explosions, but he declined to say how far. Another senior officer said that under the Navy's rules of engagement the submarines would not have gone any closer than five miles, especially because the Russian ships were testing weapons. The Loyal, whose presence would have been obvious to the Russian fleet, was presumably even farther away.
Still, the senior officer said, the submarines were close enough not only to detect the explosions with their sonar, but also to feel the underwater concussion caused by the second, larger blast.
Even so, there was no damage to the Memphis or the other submarine, all of the officials said. ''Not a teacup was rattled,'' the senior military officer said.
Britain, the other country whose submarines regularly prowl the Barents, has denied that it had a submarine in the area at the time.
Within hours of the explosions, both American submarines radioed messages back to fleet headquarters. ''They were alive and well and had no bumps,'' another senior officer said.
The American officials said that neither the two submarines nor the Loyal had detected any sounds that would suggest that the Kursk had been involved in a collision of any sort.
Even at great distances, the signals created by a collision or an explosion are easy to distinguish, the officials said.
One official also said that given the Kursk's immense size, larger than the American Trident ballistic missile submarines, it was unlikely that another vessel could have endured a collision without suffering significant, perhaps debilitating damage.
It is also unlikely, given the Kursk's double-hulled design intended to withstand crashes or torpedoes, that a collision alone could have caused the damage that doomed the Kursk, the officials and experts said.
Ever since the Kursk sank, Russian accounts of what happened have been imprecise and sometimes contradictory. Officials in Russia did not report the accident until early on Aug. 14, which was a Monday, a day after the they realized that something had gone wrong and nearly two days after the accident. Even then, they said it had happened on Sunday, rather than on Saturday.
The Russians do not deny that a massive explosion hit the Kursk. But they have insisted that the submarine first was involved in a collision with some huge object, possibly a submarine or a World War II mine.
The Russian assertions are based in part on five hours of underwater videotape now being examined by an investigative commission headed by Deputy Prime Minister Ilya I. Klebanov. Russians officials have cited external damage on the submarine's hull that they said could only have been caused by its scraping another large object, and they have reported detecting pieces from unknown foreign submarines on the ocean floor.
In a television interview a week ago, Marshal Sergeyev, the defense minister, said that Russian surface ships racing to rescue had detected a second vessel on the seabed near the Kursk and had found an unknown signal buoy like those used by submarines. Some Russian reports said the buoy's markers were green and white and did not match those of the Russian fleet. Mr. Sergeyev said the buoy had never been recovered.
American officials questioned the reports of a green and white buoy being found. They said rescue buoys on American and British submarines are orange, while emergency communication buoys are gray.
They also discounted the possibility that the second vessel the Russians claimed to have detected on the ocean floor could have been one of the two American submarines.
''They didn't go in that close to look at what happened,'' a senior intelligence official said.
But even after the explosion, the two submarines did not immediately leave the area, the officials said. They continued to gather intelligence, intercepting frantic, confused radio messages between the other Russian ships trying to determine what had happened to the Kursk and trying to coordinate a rescue effort, the officials said.
The officials and submarine experts said it was possible that some of the crew -- perhaps 15 men or more -- had survived the initial explosions if they had managed to shut the watertight doors to their compartments in the stern quickly.
The Russians said they had detected tapping sounds from within the Kursk at least two days after it had sunk, raising hopes that a rescue of some crewmen might be possible.
Some American officials said that neither the Loyal nor the American submarines had detected the sounds, though they might not have been able to do so if they had been too far away.
The officials said it also appeared likely that the force of the second explosion had torn the Kursk apart with the force of one to two tons of TNT. The Norwegian divers who reached the Kursk a week after the accident found the rear escape hatch deformed, suggesting that the force of the blast might have rocketed throughout the submarine's compartments.
One question is whether the American submarines could have done anything to help the rescue effort. The American officials said the American submarines had not carried the kind of rescue equipment, like a submersible vehicle, that could have helped.
While the Americans had a fair guess of what had happened to the Kursk early on, it was only after the Memphis unloaded its sonar tapes on Aug. 18 that officials in Washington began to offer the theory of the torpedo misfiring.
But how much the Pentagon will be prepared to say in public remains in question. The submarine fleet has been traditionally wrapped in silence, and even now, more than two weeks later, the Pentagon has not publicly acknowledged the presence of two submarines in the Barents. Officials privately confirmed the role of the Memphis only when the vessel surfaced in Norway, and they still will not disclose the name of the other submarine. Nor have the Americans provided information on the submarines' exact whereabouts when the Kursk went down.
Given that secrecy, and the likelihood that the Russians will not fully share what they learn even if they recover the wreckage, it will be difficult to learn with any certainty what happened to the Kursk.
In 1968 an American submarine, the Scorpion, sank in the Atlantic near the Azores. Like the Kursk, it may have have been destroyed in an accident involving a torpedo misfiring. Other experts have argued that a faulty battery led to a fire and explosion. But to this day there is no public explanation of what happened.
ADMIRAL POPOV, FORMER COMMANDER OF THE NORTHERN FLEET, HAS NEW APPOINTMENT
Kommersant, December 5, 2001, p. 2
Admiral Vyacheslav Popov, former Commander of the Northern Fleet, dismissed last Saturday by the president, has moved to the Nuclear Ministry. According to Kommersant, the admiral has been appointed chief of the department in charge of scrapping nuclear submarines. In other words, exactly he will be in charge of scrapping the Kursk submarine.
Vologda Governor Vyacheslav Pozgalev said: "The admiral is in rather optimistic spirits. He said he moves to Moscow where he has received a new apartment." Official representatives of the Nuclear Ministry do not know anything about the admiral's appointment. However, Kommersant's sources said on condition of anonymity that the admiral will control the department for scrapping nuclear submarines.
The admiral has been appointed to a very important post - his department will have to scrap over 150 nuclear submarines. Admiral Popov's new job will be linked with his previous responsibilities because the functions of scrapping nuclear submarines were passed over to the Nuclear Ministry from the Defense Ministry in 1998. Currently, the Navy has to pass over technical bases of the Northern and Pacific Fleets to the Nuclear Ministry's enterprises. The military do not want to part with their property because the maintenance of the bases is funded from the state budget. Admiral Popov will have to settle relations with his former subordinates.
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