Aug 12 2010
It was ten years ago today . . .
that the Russian submarine Kursk sank, killing 118. One of the side effects of doing military history is thinking about some very unpleasant things, and for me one of the worst is the plight of those men who survived the initial explosion. How long they survived is disputed (and the answer has important political implications), but it was at least long enough to leave notes behind.
Ten years ago was the very beginning of Putin’s regime, and the heady days of Putinmania in Russia. But what’s striking in hindsight is just how much continuity there is between the tragedy of the Kursk and what’s happening in Putin and Medvedev’s Russia today. Efforts to obfuscate, emphasis on image over real action, bureaucratic inertia, half-hearted and slapdash concern for human life, deep-seated mistrust of the outside world–all of those were clear in 2000. The difference is that the Russian public seems much angrier about them 10 years on.
Let me be clear–I’m not saying that prompt action and cooperation with foreign governments would have saved the sailors on the Kursk. They did have access to an escape hatch, and the submarine was only 100 meters deep. On the other hand, in World War II, sailors trapped in the Arizona at Pearl Harbor–essentially at the surface and in the middle of a US naval base, couldn’t be rescued. My point is that Putin’s government didn’t try.
I don’t know—the sixty years following Pearl Harbor, especially the sinking of the Thresher, caused the U.S. Navy, in particular, to spend a lot of time thinking about and working on ways to rescue trapped submarine crews.
I have a great-uncle who was a deep-sea diver and instructor for the Navy, and I spoke to him not long after the Kursk sank. He was livid, as he believed it was entirely within the U.S. Navy’s ability (and possibly that of a couple other Western navies) to rescue the trapped sailors, and the Russians’ failure to simply ask (along with their excuse of “technical incompatibilities”) was, in his opinion, the premeditated murder of those men.
It’s possible that he was misinformed, but he seemed to both know what he was talking about, and I don’t know if he’d have been as passionate if it had been a dodgy proposition.
Certainly the Navy claims it has vehicles capable of submarine rescues down to 850 feet:
http://www.navy.mil/navydata/cno/n87/usw/issue_9/sub_rescue.html
God rest the souls of those sailors.