How a penny copper ring killed nearly 40 submariners

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

A catastrophe struck the Norwegian Sea 50 years ago: an explosion on board the first Soviet nuclear-powered submarine, Leninsky Komsomol, on September 8, 1967, claimed the lives of 39 people. It was only thanks to the resourcefulness and courage of the commander and crew that even more dire consequences were avoided.

In even a relatively free Russia, it turned out to be impossible to hide the death of the Kursk in 2000. The Soviet authorities completely silenced the tragedy, although the information still reached the people, only in a distorted form.

All for the first time

The idea to use a nuclear reactor as a ship propulsion system was put forward in 1950 by Igor Kurchatov.

On September 12, 1952, Joseph Stalin signed a decree "On the design and construction of object 627", but they began to implement it three years later.

Your name will go down in history as the name of the person who made the largest technical revolution in shipbuilding, in the same meaning as the transition from sailing ships to steam

academician Alexander Alexandrov, from a letter to Vladimir Peregudov

On September 24, 1955, the boat was laid down at the Severodvinsk plant "Sevmash", on August 9, 1957, it was launched, on March 12, 1959, it was accepted into the fleet based in Severodvinsk under the number K-3.

The name "Leninsky Komsomol" was given to it in 1962 in honor of the diesel submarine of the Northern Fleet of the same name, which died during the war.

The construction was headed by the designers Vladimir Peregudov and Sergey Bazilevsky. 350 enterprises throughout the USSR worked on the unprecedented ship.

According to Lev Zhiltsov, the second commander of the Lenin Komsomol, it was almost as prestigious to be among the first officers of the nuclear-powered ship as a few years later in the cosmonaut corps, only less glory.

The first American nuclear submarine, the Nautilus, entered service in September 1954.

Superweapon

"Leninsky Komsomol": technical data

Length - 107.4 m

Case diameter - 7, 96 m

Displacement underwater - 3065 tons

Crew - 104 people

Submerged speed - 30 knots

Surface speed - 15, 5 knots

Immersion depth - 300 m

Autonomous swimming - 60 days

"Nautilus" was, in fact, an ordinary submarine, only with a reactor instead of diesel-electric thrust, was intended to combat surface ships and was equipped with 24 conventional torpedoes.

"K-3" was originally conceived as a carrier of strategic weapons against coastal targets.

But which one? Sea-based missiles did not exist in the early 1950s.

It turns out that they were going to equip the submarine with one, but a monstrous torpedo 24 meters long and two meters in diameter, carrying a thermonuclear warhead of 50 or even 100 kilotons.

In addition to the actual consequences of the explosion, it would have caused an artificial tsunami. Enough to wipe out the city of New York, if not the entire state of the same name.

I fantasized that a ramjet water-steam atomic jet engine could be developed for such a torpedo. Of course, the destruction of ports is inevitably associated with very large casualties. One of the first people with whom I discussed this was Rear Admiral Fomin. He was shocked by the "cannibalistic nature" of the project and remarked that sailors are used to fighting an armed enemy in open combat, and the idea of such a mass murder is disgusting to him. I was ashamed and did not discuss this project anymore

Andrey Sakharov, academician-nuclear scientist

The concept came to mind in 1949 to the young Andrei Sakharov, who had not yet become a great humanist, but was absorbed exclusively by the originality of ideas and the beauty of formulas.

Sakharov recalled that even among the professional military, the picture he painted aroused rejection.

The delay in the start of construction of the boat was associated primarily with the disputes over the "king-torpedo". Physicists and the political leadership of the state were impressed by the idea of grandeur.

The sailors were skeptical, not so much for moral reasons as for technical reasons.

Firstly, the recoil from the launch of the torpedo only four times less than the ship itself could violate the stability of the boat and sink it.

Secondly, the torpedo's battery power was only enough for a 30-kilometer distance, which would force the submarine to come dangerously close to the American coast. The US anti-submarine defense at a distance of up to 100 km was practically impenetrable.

They thought to increase the battery capacity by reducing the weight and power of the warhead, but then the "Sakharov effect" disappeared.

The point was set at a meeting chaired by Prime Minister Nikolai Bulganin in the spring of 1955. "I don't understand this submarine. We need a submarine that could destroy ships on communications. But this requires more than one torpedo, for this there must be a large supply, we need torpedoes with conventional ammunition, and we also need nuclear torpedoes," he said Minister of the Navy Nikolai Kuznetsov.

The construction began, changing the design for armament with 20 conventional and six nuclear torpedoes with 15 kiloton warheads.

Polar hike

Before the tragedy, there was a triumph in the history of the Lenin Komsomol: the first expedition to the North Pole in the history of the Soviet submarine fleet.

The Nautilus visited it on August 3, 1958.

The Soviet submarine reached the pole point on July 17, 1962 at 6 hours 50 minutes and 10 seconds. Someone in the wheelhouse, jokingly, suggested that the midshipman-helmsman slightly deviate to the side, "so as not to bend the earth's axis."

We are floating. As soon as clear water appears, we give a short push with one motor forward, and the bow of the boat freezes at the very edge. I open the conning tower hatch and stick my head out into the light of day. From any side, you can jump onto the ice directly from the bridge. The silence around is such that it rings in my ears. Not the slightest breeze, and the clouds were very low

Lev Zhiltsov, the commander of the "Lenin Komsomol"

Having found a suitable size wormwood, surfaced. The USSR flag was hoisted on a high hummock. Commander Lev Zhiltsov announced "shore leave".

“The divers behaved like small children: they fought, pushed, ran into launches, climbed high hummocks, threw snowballs,” he recalled. “Lively photographers captured the boat in the ice, and many funny situations. the whole ship: not a single camera on board should be! But who better knows the boat and all the secret places - counterintelligence officers or submariners?"

On the way to the Pole, the underwater Gakkel Ridge was discovered.

In Severomorsk, at the pier, the boat was met by Nikita Khrushchev and Defense Minister Rodion Malinovsky. The prime minister immediately handed the hero stars to the head of the campaign, Rear Admiral Alexander Petelin, the commander Lev Zhiltsov and the head of the reactor facility, Rurik Timofeev. Orders and medals were awarded to all participants in the campaign.

Unsuccessful mission

During the Six Day War in the Middle East, the Leninist Komsomol was secretly deployed to the shores of Israel and spent 49 days in the Mediterranean.

As a result of the endless solemn, worthless events that accompanied the submarine for several years after the voyage to the Pole, a fetish was made of it. The crew was not up to combat training. Exhausted by the absence of a real case, the commanders quietly drank themselves, then they were just as quietly dismissed from their posts

Alexander Leskov, assistant commander of the "Lenin Komsomolets"

Another boat was supposed to go according to the plan, but at the last moment a serious malfunction was discovered on it.

After the expedition to the North Pole, the crew was constantly distracted from combat training by attending political events and meeting with Soviet workers. Commander Yuri Stepanov took over a new position a month before sailing, and his assistant, Alexander Leskov, two days before.

"Lenin Komsomol" in the campaign endlessly pursued technical problems. The temperature in the turbine compartment did not drop below plus 60.

The mission ended with the fact that one of the crew members required a surgical operation (according to other sources, the sailor died). To transfer a sick person (or a body) to a surface ship, I had to surface and thus declassify myself.

Floating coffin

Although the beginning of the construction of the boat was delayed, but then it went in an emergency mode. Less than two years from laying to launching is very little for such a ship, which also contained many untested technical solutions.

The submarine was accepted conditionally, under the guarantee of the industry to eliminate the shortcomings, on the first combat duty in the Atlantic went out more than two years after the flag was raised on it, and over the next five years it was subjected to dock repair four times, one of which lasted 20 months.

This was officially called "trial operation" and "machine revision".

Why, knowing about the almost emergency condition of our boat, when deciding the issue of state importance about the march to the Pole, designed to declare to the whole world that our country is in control of the polar possessions, did they stop at K-3? The answer, perhaps strange to foreigners, is quite obvious to Russians. Choosing between technology and people, we have always relied more on the latter

In the opinion of the first commanders Leonid Osipenko and Lev Zhiltsov, the Leninsky Komsomol generally went to sea solely due to the fact that highly qualified specialists were selected for the crew, capable of independently and almost continuously eliminating problems.

The main weak point of the boat was poorly designed and poorly manufactured steam generators, in which microscopic, hardly recognizable cracks constantly appeared.

The large number of welds left after countless alterations also affected.

"There was literally no living space on the steam generating system - hundreds of cut off, digested and damped tubes. The radioactivity of the primary circuit was thousands of times higher than on serial boats," Lev Zhiltsov testified in his memoirs.

Due to leaks of radioactive boiling water, the radiation in the reactor compartment was thousands of times higher than the natural background and about a hundred times higher than the radiation level in other parts of the ship.

In the submerged position, the air between the compartments was stirred to reduce contamination in the reactor compartment, but even the coca was irradiated equally with everyone else.

Sometimes an ambulance waited for the returning boat at the pier. For the sake of secrecy, false diagnoses were recorded for victims of radiation sickness. All this was considered an inevitable evil: "people are doing their duty."

Disaster struck on the way back from the coast of Israel.

I was in hell

The boat was sailing at a depth of 49 meters. The night watch at the central control post was held by the assistant commander, Lieutenant-Commander Leskov.

At that time, not a single Soviet submarine was really ready for long-distance campaigns. Our boat played the role of a prototype. Alterations, disassembly, welding went on it endlessly. By 1962, the K-3 had developed the service life of the main equipment. The reactors worked "on exhalation", part of the uranium fuel elements was destroyed. Steam generators were especially dangerous, they could fail at any moment

Yuri Kalutsky, commander of the turbine group

At 01:52 on September 8, a call came from the forward torpedo compartment. Leskov turned on the speakerphone and asked: "Who is talking?" - and heard screams, which, according to him, had kept him awake for many years.38 people, who were in two adjacent compartments, burned down in a minute or two.

Torpedoes were about to explode, four of which carried nuclear warheads.

Awakened by an alarm signal, commander Yuri Stepanov made a seemingly suicidal, but salvific decision: he ordered the surviving crew to put on gas masks and open the sealed bulkheads between the compartments. Hot air and poisonous black smoke rushed into the central and aft parts of the ship with a roar.

The 39th crew member was killed - a sailor who had worn a gas mask incorrectly.

But the air pressure in the torpedo compartments dropped sharply, and TNT is known to explode from a combination of high temperature and pressure.

The people said that the command forbade the burning boat to surface so as not to reveal its location to the Americans. This is a myth, the order to surface was given eight minutes after the explosion, and returned to the Leninsky Komsomol base on the surface.

“I was in hell,” said Pavel Dorozhinsky, an officer of the coastal technical service, who entered the torpedo compartment first. The bodies of the dead, burnt beyond recognition, were sintered into one mass.

Fatal trifle

The investigation identified the cause of the disaster: the breakthrough of a flammable liquid from a hydraulic device for opening and closing the ballast tank. The oil jet hit a red-hot light bulb, but the plafond was not on it - it had recently crashed in a storm.

The leak occurred due to the fact that in place of the copper O-ring in the hydraulic device there was an artisanally cut washer made of paronite, an asbestos-based substance used in automobile engines. From constant pressure surges, the unreliable material became limp and burst.

This could only be done by civilian workers during the next dock repair: red copper, from which the original part was made, was highly appreciated by craftsmen for various crafts.

Forgotten heroes

The then Commander-in-Chief of the Navy, Sergei Gorshkov, about a month after the disaster, said at a meeting of the board of the Ministry of Defense that the emergency happened due to the negligence of the crew. The technical commission came to different conclusions, but you can't really argue with high bosses.

As a result, the assessment of what happened remained in limbo. Only on the eve of the 45th anniversary of the tragedy, when half of the sailors who survived and saved the ship miraculously passed away, and the rest were well over 70, the technical department of the main headquarters of the Navy officially confirmed that the crew was not guilty.

The enemy enters the city, sparing the prisoners, because there was no nail in the forge

Samuel Marshak, poet

Since, over the years, it was difficult to assess the contribution of everyone, all fire extinguishers, living and dead, were awarded the same way: the Order of Courage.

After the disaster, Commander Anatoly Stepanov was modestly awarded the Order of the Red Star, and after severe carbon monoxide poisoning he was transferred to teach at the Sevastopol Higher Naval School.

A small obelisk was erected in a poorly populated place: "To the submariners who died in the ocean on 1967-08-09."

The first Soviet nuclear-powered submarine, after a major overhaul, continued to serve in the Northern Fleet until 1991, when it was decided to turn it into a museum, but it is still rusting at the Nerpa shipyard: it’s a pity to spend money on restoration, it’s awkward to cut it into scrap metal.

Hello from the 50s

According to Russian TV channels, on November 10, 2015, a sketch and technical data of the Status-6 nuclear torpedo with a range of 10 thousand kilometers, that is, capable of striking from any point The world's oceans, and a 10 megaton thermonuclear warhead.

The crew's actions to localize the accident prevented the death of the ship and a man-made disaster. The personnel showed professionalism, heroism, courage and courage, worthy of presentation for awarding state awards

conclusion of the expert council at the Main Naval Headquarters, July 2012

The declared topic of the meeting was possible countermeasures to the American missile defense system. A piece of paper with poorly legible text was allegedly accidentally shown in news reports. Numerous comments from Western media followed and a reaction on the Runet in the spirit of: "Americans are in shock!"

Potential carriers of the new "tsar-torpedo" could be promising nuclear submarines of projects 09852 Belgorod and 09851 Khabarovsk. But, according to available data, such weapons do not exist in metal. Most experts believe that there was a deliberate leak with the aim of psychological pressure on the United States.