U.S. Spy Sub Said to Record Torpedo Blast Aboard Kursk
By STEVEN LEE MYERS AND CHRISTOPHER DREW
Published: August 29, 2000
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.
U.S. Spy Sub Said to Record Torpedo Blast Aboard Kursk - New York Times