According to Russian Navy officials, the Splendid was surveying a Soviet sub in the Northern Fleet's training range in the Barents Sea when the Soviets noticed and tried to get away. The Russians say that at that point commanders of both subs made maneuvering mistakes, and the Soviet submarine brushed against the Splendid, snagging its towed sonar array. The Soviet sub, possibly one of the huge Typhoon missile boats, made her way back to base, still entwined in the array.
Baton Rouge (SSN-689) collided with a Russian Sierra-class sub near Murmansk. In an unprecedented move, and in response to Yeltsin's complaints, the Pentagon publicly announced that the collision had occurred (see chapter 12).
Grayling (SSN-646) collided with a Russian Delta III missile sub in the Barents Sea. Nobody was hurt, but Clinton was furious that the Navy was still taking such risks (see chapter 12).
Appendix B
FROM THE SOVIET SIDE
The U.S. Navy spent decades spying on Soviet submarines but never really knew much about what went on inside those boats, who their men were, or what they were going through. Periodically, word would come of horrible radiation accidents. The Pentagon was willing enough to share those incidents with the American public, along with constant and seemingly contradictory warnings about how big and dangerous the Soviet sub fleet was becoming. Now, with the end of the cold war, the Russian Navy has opened up and has been willing to offer some of the details about the tense days hack when the Soviet Navy scrambled to catch up to the Americans. Former Soviet submariners feel free to say what they never could before-that their commands put more emphasis on numbers and deadlines than on submarine safety. As a result, the Soviets suffered some of the most horrific accidents of the cold war.
In the early stages of the arms race in the mid-1950s, Khrushchev called for the Soviet Union "to catch up with and pass America." And so a fleet of nuclear submarines was designed and constructed, all in a hurry, all haphazardly. The work was so bad that in 1959 Commander Vladimir N. Chernavin (who would ultimately succeed Admiral Gorshkov as commander in chief of the Soviet Navy) refused to take one of the first Soviet nuclear attack submarines out of the yard for her first sea trials. He stood firm when his command was threatened, and he stood firm until his sub was repaired.
While Chernavin stood his ground, another submarine, the K-19, had already been sent to sea with the swing of a champagne bottle. That the bottle failed to break was one of those omens that every submariner, no matter what his rank, rate, or nationality, knew to be omi nous. It was an inauspicious beginning for the first Soviet nuclearpowered submarine to carry ballistic missiles.
In the summer of 1961, K-19 was setting out for exercises in the North Atlantic, exercises code-named "Arctic Circle." She was to play the role of an American sub, hide beneath the surface, and make her way through Soviet antisubmarine forces. After that she was going to leave the rest of the fleet and find a polyi va, a break in the ice. She would surface at the edge of the Arctic and conduct a practice launch of a ballistic missile.
The rest of the fleet stayed behind to continue their exercises as K-19 broke away to make a submerged transit through the Norwegian Sea. The waters were calm. There were no storms. Her crew was already counting down to the end of this cruise and their homecoming.
On July 4, at 4:15 in the morning, just as the sub reached a point about one hundred miles off of Jan Mayen, the small Norwegian island above Iceland, K-19's radiation detection equipment came to life. A reactor scrammed, shutting down. The fuel rods in her nuclear core continued to heat. The primary cooling circuit had failed. A pipe had burst, pumps had broken, leaving nothing to control the chain reaction, nothing to stop the rods from heating up, nothing to prevent them from getting so hot that they would melt through the reactor itself. As the fuel rods climbed past one thousand degrees, the paint began burning on the reactor's outer plating. There should have been a backup cooling system, something to stop catastrophe. But K-19 was an early design, a first attempt.
Captain Yuri Posetiev gave the order to surface. He tried to radio for help, but communications had failed. Meanwhile, engineers on board began desperately trying to improvise a new cooling system from the sub's drinking water reserves. They came up with a desperate plan. Several men were going to have to walk into the now highly radioactive reactor compartment and climb inside "the Boa's Mouth."
Lieutenant Boris Korchilov was on his first submarine cruise, and he was the first to volunteer. Others from the reactor team followed. These men, still boys really, made their way into the compartment. There they stood, a team of eight, welding pipes, connecting them to pumps and valves. They remained in the compartment for two hours, braving the heat and the invisible particles that shot through their bodies. Each received one hundred times the lethal dose of radiation.
Ivan Kulakov, a twenty-two-year-old chief petty officer, watched as they came out of the compartment, each man barely able to move, unable to speak, their faces changed beyond recognition. He watched horrified as the first team's efforts failed. As the cooling pumps came apart, it became clear that someone had to jury-rig the jury-rig. Kulakov volunteered. He was certain that he could do the work fastest. And he was just as certain that he was going to die trying.
Kulakov's mind played back the faces of those first eight men, a running loop that wouldn't stop as he walked through a lake of radioactive water, ankle deep. As the water soaked through his leather shoes, as the radiation began to burn his feet, he thought he saw the walls and water shine, perhaps glow.
His hands were burned as he opened valves to draw steam from the reactor. He could barely see. He could barely breathe. All he could do was pray that he could finish, make his way out without falling headlong into the horrible, painful, radioactive lake that was already destroying his feet.
Finally, he did get out, only to watch another valve fail, only to know he had to go hack in. He had already taken on five times the lethal dose of radiation. Outside the compartment were the living dead. Back inside, he was more certain than ever that he was one of them.
Then, just as the fuel rods reached 1,470 degrees, the pipes held, the valves held. The makeshift cooling system began to do its work. Kulakov stumbled out of the boa's mouth, and Captain Posetiev turned K-19 around in a run toward the fleet they had left still conducting exercises a lifetime ago, at least eight men's lifetimes ago. He knew he couldn't try for home. His entire crew would be fatally irradiated if he didn't get them off the sub fast.
The team of eight, those first men into the compartment during the crisis, died before the week was out. They were buried in lead coffins.
Posetiev lingered longer: three weeks. Other crewmen who had come too close to the outer door of the reactor compartment lasted a month, some a little longer, before they too succumbed. Kulakov, whose feet and hands were irreparably burned, managed to survive with transfusions and bone marrow transplants. He would always be crippled.