....Russian servicemen ‘averted planetary catastrophe’ during nuclear submarine accident, military official claims at funeral....We now know the officer who made this extraordinary statement was himself a Captain so probably authorized to speak, whether injudicious or deceptive I do not know.
Here, a deep dive, so to speak, from the New York Times, April 20:
OFF THE COAST OF NORWAY — There could hardly have been a more terrifying place to fight a fire than in the belly of the Losharik, a mysterious deep-diving Russian submarine.....MUCH MORE
Something, it appears, had gone terribly wrong in the battery compartment as the sub made its way through Russian waters 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle on the First of July.
A fire on any submarine may be a mariner’s worst nightmare, but a fire on the Losharik was a threat of another order altogether. The vessel is able to dive far deeper than almost any other sub, but the feats of engineering that allow it do so may have helped seal the fate of the 14 sailors killed in the disaster.
The only thing more mysterious than what exactly went wrong that day is what the sub was doing in a thousand feet of water just 60 nautical miles east of Norway in the first place.
The extraordinary incident may offer yet another a clue to Russia’s military ambitions in the deep sea, and how they figure into a plan to leverage Arctic naval power to achieve its strategic goals around the globe — including the ability to choke off vital international communication channels at will.
Moscow has been unforthcoming about the Losharik disaster, and insists that the sub was merely a research vessel. The Norwegian military, whose observation posts, navy and surveillance aircraft track Russia’s Northern Fleet for NATO, refuses to say what it may have seen. The only civilian witnesses to the rescue that followed the fire may have been a ragtag band of Russians fishing illegally in the area.
But it was clearly a mission of the highest sensitivity, and the roster of the dead included some of the most decorated and experienced officers of the Russian submarine corps.
To understand why these men may have found themselves on a submarine that can dive to perhaps 20,000 feet — more than 10 times deeper than manned American subs are believed to operate — consider what crisscrosses the floor of the North Atlantic: endless miles of fiber-optic cables that carry a large fraction of the world’s internet traffic, including trillions of dollars in financial transactions. There are also cables linking the sonar listening devices that litter the ocean floor.
Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, and his commanders have increasingly stressed the importance of controlling the flow of information to keep the upper hand in a conflict, said Katarzyna Zysk, head of the Center for Security Policy at the Norwegian Institute for Defense Studies in Oslo.
No matter where in the world a conflict might be brewing, cutting those undersea cables, Professor Zysk said, might force an adversary to think twice before risking an escalation of the dispute.
“The Russian understanding is that the level of unacceptable damage is much lower in Europe and the West than during the Cold War,” she said. “So you might not have to do too much.”
Not just any submarine can do that — at least, not across nearly the entire expanse of the sea bottom.
But the Losharik is not just any submarine. Its inner hull is thought to consist of a series of titanium spheres holding the control room, the bunks, the nuclear reactor and other equipment. Its name, it appears, was taken from an old Russian cartoon character, a horse assembled from small spheres.
The spheres are cramped, and they are joined by even smaller passageways.
A common procedure when there is a fire on a sub is to close the hatches to slow its spread. If that was done on the Losharik, the crew members may have found themselves trapped in small, dim, smoke-filled chambers.
And if they were in the chamber containing the battery compartment where the trouble appears to have started, they may have been battling flames raging in spaces as narrow as a couple of feet, said Peter Lobner, a former electrical officer on a United States submarine.
“That’s the creepiest place you ever want to be on a submarine,” Mr. Lobner said.
‘A Very Russian Story’
The Russian fisherman were out in a small boat, moving eastward, probably in restricted waters, when a submarine burst from the water in front of them, one later told a local newspaper in Murmansk, The SeverPost.
“We were heading towards Kildin,” a nearby island, the fisherman told a SeverPost reporter in a phone call, “and then, about half past nine in the evening, a submarine surfaces. Suddenly and completely surfaces. I have never seen anything like it in my life. On the deck, people were running around making a fuss.”
The submarine they saw was not the Losharik but a much larger vessel: its mothership. The Losharik is designed to fasten to its underside, so it can be carried along for servicing, transport over long distances or — as may have happened on July 1 off Norway — rescue.
Why Russia did not secure the area is unknown, but if the fisherman’s account is accurate, it appears they were the only outside witnesses to the secret rescue operation. They were fishing in a restricted area — but they decided to talk about what they saw anyway.
“This is a very Russian story,” said Jeffrey Mankoff, a senior fellow with the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
The submarine sped away, but there was no immediate alert from Russia to the Norwegian Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority about a possible nuclear incident in the Barents Sea, said Astrid Liland, head of the nuclear preparedness section.
TASS, the official Russian news agency, reported the accident the following day without mentioning that the submarine was nuclear powered. The SeverPost story appeared the next morning....
July 25
Tragedy at Sea: The Russian Submariners Could Have Been Saved
July 7
Just What Was That Stricken Russian Submarine Carrying?
The Barents Observer has been doing their best to figure out what's going on, starting from their first report:
July 2
Fire onboard nuclear-powered submarine, 14 sailors killed
July 3
Fishermen witnessed nuclear submarine drama
July 3
Defense minster confirms fire onboard the «Losharik»
July 4
Report to the President: super-secret submarine «Losharik» will be repaired and taken back in service
The fire started in the battery compartment, but did not affect the reactor, Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu reports to Vladimir Putin. ...
Tragic, and potentially disastrous for the immediate area if the reactor casing had opened but not something you'd call "a planetary catastrophe".
Among other reports we've seen (not verified so grain of salt) is that seven of the dead were captains, meaning whatever they were up to was pretty important. The fact the Russians are repairing and returning the boat to its mission would also point in that direction.
So what was the submarine or its submersible—capable of 20,000 foot dives—carrying?
The best guess I've seen is a high-yield, 100 - 200 megaton, cobalt thermonuclear bomb.
A bomb that size, two to four times more powerful than the biggest ever exploded, the Soviet Tsar Bomba (limited to 50 MT to allow the delivery plane a chance to escape) a bomb that size is awful enough but if it is encased in cobalt it becomes the most lethal munition ever built.
Here's MIT physicist Max
Dr. Strangelove Is Back: Say ‘Hi’ to the Cobalt Bomb!
"Now Most Dreaded Weapon, Cobalt Bomb, Can Be Built
It is this type of hydrogen bomb of which Albert Einstein said: "If successful, radioactive poisoning of the atmosphere, and hence annihilation of any life on earth will have been brought with in the range of technical possibilities."Volume 72, 2016 - Issue 4: Security at sea, and under it:
Would Russia’s undersea “doomsday drone” carry a cobalt bomb?
People smarter than I are speculating this might be what's going on up in the Arctic.
