Even with all this, Moscow wasn't willing to let go of one of its few nuclear subs. Khrushchev was still racing the Americans. Men would one day be sent back into K-19, back into that reactor compartment. Only now, K-19 would bear a new name. She would be known as the Hiroshima.
In 1962 the Soviet Navy wanted very much to appease Khrushchev, who wanted very much to see a nuclear submarine launch a ballistic missile from underwater. His naval leaders came forward with a sub that they told him would give him just what he demanded, another success to herald in the Krasnaya Zvezda newspaper.
Khrushchev witnessed just such a test and was so delighted that he declared a reward for a perfect missile firing to the crew of the nuclear sub on display, the K-3, which had also just made a successful transit to the North Pole. Nobody would ever dare tell him he had just offered up an award for a clever illusion.
The Soviet Navy was still having too many problems getting its nukes to shoot, much less shoot straight, to risk yet another failure with Khrushchev looking on. So, instead of letting K-3 even make the attempt, commanders strategically positioned a Golf diesel sub near the nuke. Hidden and in anonymity, it was the diesel boat that made the perfect shot.
And so Soviet naval history marched on, intermingling the heroic, the tragic, and the comic.
It was June 1967, the eve of the Arab-Israeli War, and the K-131 had been sent to the Adriatic Sea, outside the Mediterranean, to await orders from command. Those orders came as the first shots were fired. Captain Vadim Kulinchenko was given fifteen hours to bring his sub in position to aim nuclear missiles at Tel Aviv.
The captain was flabbergasted. He knew he didn't want to fire nuclear weapons at Israel, but he also knew he wouldn't have to. In order to make it from the Adriatic to the Mediterranean, in order to race past Greece, past Crete, and arrive within reach of Israel's coast, K-131 would have to somehow reach speeds of fifty-seven knots. Her normal transit speed was twenty knots.
He had to make a show of trying, but when the war ended six days later, Kulinchenko, K-131, and her nuclear weapons were still in transit. Eventually he met up with his battle group in the Med, forty surface ships and ten diesel subs from the Black Sea fleet. The K-131 didn't belong with this group, she wasn't from the Black Sea. But for their show of force in the Med, the Soviets wanted one of their new Northern Fleet nuclear submarines. It was a beginning. Soon the Med would be the new battleground in the submarine wars.
For now, however, most of the Soviet Navy had little idea of what nuclear subs couldn't do, or for that matter, what they could. Indeed, before the war, when K-131 was on her way to the Adriatic, a supply ship helpfully offered fuel and water-although, the supply ship noted, those were two commodities it was running low on.
"We have fresh water, as much as you like," came the answer from the submarine. "We've just cooked it and are ready to give it to you." The Black Sea fleet didn't have nuclear subs, and the astonished supply crew had no idea that water and fuel were two of the things any nuclear boat can produce for itself.
One of the next Soviet subs to travel to the Mediterranean was the K3, the same sub that Khrushchev had rewarded for the nonexistent missile launch. Only this time, one of her officers, Lev Kamorkin, had a had feeling.
Two days before embarking from a port in the Barents, he walked with his five-year-old daughter and a friend, who recalls him confiding: "I don't know why, but I don't want at all to go to this voyage."
The feeling was so strong, the urge not to leave so powerful, that Kamorkin swore that this would be his very last trip on a submarine. Sadly for the little girl who listened as her father talked of his misgivings, Kamorkin was right.
On September 8, 1967, at 1:52 A.M., a fire broke out in one of K-3's oxygen generators. She was returning from that run to the Mediterranean and was near home, just off the North Cape of Norway, just about where Cochino had suffered her first explosion.
Showing much of the honor of Cochino's Rafael C. Benitez, Kamorkin raced to prevent the fires from blowing the torpedoes and sinking his boat. He ordered everyone out of the weapons compartment and stayed behind to let the ocean in and flood the room. As he watched the waters rise to cover the torpedoes, he knew that he had engineered his own death. He drowned alongside the weapons.
He would never know that forty of the men he had tried so valiantly to save would succumb to carbon monoxide poisoning and die moments after he did.
The sub already known as Hiroshima continued to cause problems for the Soviet sub command. In November 1969, she ran into the USS Cato with a blow that forced her into a steep bow-first dive, sending the huge volume of Navigational Astronomy tumbling down off a bookshelf and onto Captain Valentin Anatolievich Shabanov, who had been dozing. The collision also knocked out the sub's forward sonar and crushed the doors of her torpedo tubes.
Still, Hiroshima continued to operate long enough for one final disaster. In 1972 fire broke out on the sub when she was about six hundred miles northeast of Newfoundland. This time, twenty-six officers and crewmen were killed. There were twelve others who expected to die, men who were entombed inside the sub's stern compartment, unable to make it through the gassed portions of the sub. They stayed there for twenty-three days until Hiroshima limped home.
That those twelve men lived is the only happy ending ever written for Hiroshima. She is remembered and memorialized as the submarine that earned her name for fire, radiation, and death.
The Soviets added a twist to the at-sea espionage routine by supplementing their fleets of subs with surface trawlers (specially equipped to eavesdrop), known as AGIs. There was a certain genius in this since it was the cheapest and easiest way for the Soviet Union to post a sentry off all the major U.S. bases, both here and abroad. U.S. missile boats went to great lengths to avoid these trawlers. One sub even grounded in the late 1960s while trying to keep from being detected by an AGI lurking off of Holy Loch, Scotland.
Mostly, the trawlers just sat there, but sometimes they were downright brazen. That was the case in 1979 when the crew of one trawler operating near Guam reached out and grabbed a torpedo fired in a practice round by a U.S. missile sub USS Sam Houston (SSBN-704). The trawler just rushed up, made the snatch, then began heading in a slow crawl back to the Soviet Union. Operational commanders were dumbstruck. They were also at a loss at just what to do. After some debate, they decided that sometimes there is no alternative to sending an obvious message, a show of military force to make sure no other Soviet vessel ever tried anything this audacious again.
Within twelve hours, two aircraft carrier battle groups were sent from Yokosuka and the Philippines to corner the trawler. A day or two later, the trawler was boxed in outside of Okinawa. By now, the Navy had gotten the State Department involved, and messages were flying back and forth between U.S. diplomats and high-ranking Soviets. Finally, the trawler captain, who had stared down the American ships, dropped the torpedo over the side. Attached was a note, written in English, deft and to the point. The captain simply said the torpedo had come alongside his ship. To Naval Intelligence officers looking on, it seemed as though the Soviet was saying "look what I found," as if he had just landed a big fish and it was the most natural and innocent thing in the world.