On the morning of August 12, 2000 the Kursk, a 154-meter Oscar II cruise-missile submarine and one of the newest boats in the Russian Northern Fleet, was taking part in the largest Russian naval exercise in a decade in the Barents Sea. Shortly before half past eleven, Moscow time, the crew prepared to fire a practice torpedo at a group of surface ships. Seconds later the bow was wrecked by an explosion, and a little over two minutes after that a far larger blast tore through the forward compartments. The submarine settled on the seabed at a depth of about 108 meters. All 118 men aboard died.
What happened
Most of the crew were killed outright, but 23 sailors made it to the ninth compartment at the stern. A note written there by Lieutenant Captain Dmitry Kolesnikov, found later on his body, recorded their names and their hope of escape. Russia’s response was slow and secretive. The fleet took hours to start a search, officials told the public that contact had been made with the crew and that air was being supplied, and decrepit Russian rescue submersibles failed repeatedly to lock onto the escape hatch. President Vladimir Putin stayed on holiday for days. Only on August 17 did Moscow accept British and Norwegian help; Norwegian divers opened the hatch on August 21 and found the compartment flooded. Investigators later concluded that the men there died within hours of carbon monoxide poisoning. In October 2001 a Dutch salvage consortium lifted the hull, minus its shattered bow, and brought it to a dry dock near Murmansk.
The collision story
From the start, senior officers offered an outside cause. Within weeks a government commission said the sinking was probably the result of a strong external impact, perhaps a Second World War mine or a collision with a foreign submarine. Russian media reported that two American submarines and a British one had been shadowing the exercise. The USS Memphis, which put into Bergen in Norway shortly afterward, was singled out as the likely culprit, and some writers went further, claiming an American submarine had fired a torpedo at the Kursk. The United States and Britain denied any involvement. In November 2021 Admiral Vyacheslav Popov, who had commanded the Northern Fleet in 2000 and was widely criticized for the bungled rescue, told the RIA Novosti agency that a NATO submarine had bumped the Kursk while trailing it and had itself sent a distress signal. He named no boat and, according to the Associated Press, acknowledged he could not prove it.
The evidence
The physical and seismic record points the other way. Seismic stations in northern Europe and beyond recorded two events 135 seconds apart. Seismologists from the University of Arizona and Los Alamos National Laboratory, writing in the American Geophysical Union’s newspaper Eos in January 2001, found the signals carried the bubble-pulse signature of underwater explosions rather than an impact. The first was consistent with about 250 kilograms of explosive, roughly a torpedo warhead; the second, about 250 times larger and equal to several tons of TNT, came from a far bigger detonation of the weapons on board.
Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov’s investigation, which examined the raised hull and later recovered pieces of the torpedo room, reached the same conclusion in a 133-volume report in 2002. High-test peroxide, the volatile oxidizer that drove the practice torpedo, had leaked through a faulty weld in the weapon’s casing and reacted explosively inside tube number four; the resulting fire set off the warheads of the combat torpedoes. Investigators said they had found no sign of another vessel near the Kursk. The navy chief admitted the fleet had placed unfounded trust in a fuel that Britain abandoned after it destroyed HMS Sidon in 1955. Ustinov’s summary, published in the government newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta, also described poor maintenance, missing records, a disabled emergency buoy and widespread indiscipline. Yet it charged no one. The torpedo’s designers disputed the finding, insisting their weapon could not explode without an outside fire.
Where it stands
Every independent analysis since 2000 supports an internal torpedo explosion. The collision theory has been kept alive mainly by officers whose own performance the disaster called into question, and by the Russian state’s early instinct to look abroad for blame. What was concealed in August 2000 was the condition of the fleet and the failure of the rescue, not a foreign attack. The Kremlin, asked about Popov’s 2021 claim, simply pointed back to the official finding.