r/engineering • u/Soreknees38529 • 5d ago
[MECHANICAL] K-141 Kursk Sinking
This story has been reposted every few years on CatastropicFailure but doesn’t hurt to share here. The nuclear submarine K-141 Kursk exploded during a naval exercise in the Barents Sea, sinking in 107 meters of water. All 118 crew died.
A practice torpedo powered by high-test peroxide (HTP), a concentrated hydrogen peroxide oxidizer most Western navies abandoned as too dangerous, leaked through a faulty weld. At 11:28 local time, the catalytic reaction detonated the torpedo tube (~100-250 kg TNT equivalent), killing the forward crew and starting a fire. 135 seconds later, the remaining warheads cooked off simultaneously with 3-7 tons TNT equivalent, obliterating the bow.
At least 23 sailors survived in the aft compartments for hours, using chemical oxygen cartridges. Captain-Lieutenant Kolesnikov's recovered note read: *"It's dark here to write, but I'll try by feel. It seems like there are no chances, 10-20%. Let's hope that at least someone will read this."*
*Root causes:*
- *HTP torpedoes* — known unstable. Britain abandoned them after HMS *Sidon* exploded in 1955. Russia kept them because they were cheap and already in inventory.
- *Maintenance culture* — the failed torpedo had been in service since 1990, flagged for propellant leaks, and returned to service anyway. The 133-volume investigation described "stunning breaches of discipline, shoddy, obsolete and poorly maintained equipment."
- *Rescue decay* — Russia's submarine rescue infrastructure was non-functional post-Soviet collapse.
- *Pride over lives* — delayed acceptance of foreign help while sailors were still alive on the seabed.
Photos and additional detail here. https://www.eugeneleeslover.com/ENGINEERING/Russian_Kursk_Sub.php
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u/overcoil 5d ago
I remember this. Pre 9/11 I think this and the Concorde crash were the most engaging disasters I saw on the news.
I also remember that Putin stayed on holiday and a mother at Murmansk (I think?) was ranting at a Minister about their inactivity only to be carted off after being injected with something.
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u/coffeescious 5d ago
Kursk was a changing point in Putins Russia. After Kursk press was censored and the access of western journalists were limited.
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u/Fit_Cut_4238 5d ago
Yeah he was everyone’s new buddy for a short while. And for a short time after 911
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u/Dave_A480 1d ago
The Yeltsin years were rather corrupt/monned-up and the initial reception of Putin was 'hey, this guy is going to put the gangsters in their place and clean up Russia'.....
Hence Bush's 'I looked into his eyes' and Hillary giving him a 'Reset' button after the Obama administration got started....
It seems only McCain and Romney really understood what was going on ('I looked into his eyes and I saw... The KGB')....
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u/Fit_Cut_4238 1d ago
Yeah and even if we recognized him as a strong hand, we were fine with that if it would bring some order to post Soviet Russia. Especially as western investors were buying up assets.
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u/Calicuervo 5d ago
Yep i remember reading about that. The mom of a sailor who was on the ship yelling at them from the crowd while they were on TV or something, then they injected her with sedative and took her away.
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u/jvd0928 4d ago
That’s pure George Orwell.
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u/Sawfish1212 7h ago
Orwell was a communist who realized how it failed in reality and wrote books to make it obvious
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u/Soreknees38529 5d ago
I want to add this link which has some extra detail. This author says it wasn’t a bad weld but more likely a valve stuck partially open which allowed mixing of fuel and dirty compressed air triggering the first explosion. There are some diagram but nothing from source material. https://kursk.infografika.agency/en/
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u/SufficientVariety 4d ago
Check out the book “under pressure” which tells the story of a a WW1 sub on a maintenance test in 1920s off the coast of New Jersey, most of the crew survived. It’s a fairly short read and gripping.
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u/tkitta 3d ago
Russia after Soviet collapse was a disaster.
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u/superanth 3d ago
It’s not much better right now.
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u/ADHD_DEEZ_NUTS 5d ago
Im guessing the expanding foam is a safety measure after sinking?
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u/Soreknees38529 5d ago
I’d guess it was added after recovery to stabilize it until it could be removed properly.
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u/talltime 5d ago
Yeah what is pic 3? Part of making it more seaworthy after they re-floated it?
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u/Soreknees38529 5d ago
This isn’t definitive, but another Reddit post with this photo says it’s the crushed nose of a cruise missile. The nose would likely have its own 1atm compartment so hydrostatic pressure could have crushed it when the compartment flooded.
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u/full_metal_codpiece 3d ago
Looks like a P-700 missile that's been fixed in place with expanding foam, maybe for safety during the salvage.
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u/MiyuHogosha 2d ago edited 2d ago
Russia's submarine rescue infrastructure was non-functional post-Soviet collapse.
There is nothing could be done even if they found them in time, which was literally hours - none of compartmens were left fully hermetic. Escape hatch's receiver was cracked and wouldn't provide seal also sumbarine listed to its side at bad angle - existing hardware wouldn't connect.
*Pride over lives* — delayed acceptance of foreign help while sailors were still alive on the seabed.
Tha's a valid critique. But it's also "secrecy". They didn't want aonyone to ae abel toa ccess vessel wich possibly had ОВ (That's two levels above typical СЧ - "Top Secret") information on board.
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u/monorels 2d ago
While these are certainly arguments, this reflects the typical russian attitude toward people.
The ordinary person in Russia is nothing - just expendable material.
And the reasons these sailors weren't rescued likely have nothing to do with an inability to save them. Maybe someone was just covering their own ass to ensure there were no witnesses.
That’s standard practice there.
I don’t believe any of the official versions,
because they were chosen based on what was convenient for the higher-ups.
That’s how everything is done there.2
u/Few_Wolf_4634 2d ago
There’s footage of a press conference where a relative is asking for answers - some guy comes up behind her with a syringe and takes her out.
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u/dan_dares 1d ago
Russian nuclear submarine Kursk disaster "investigation"
skip to 1 minute, and the doctor/agent has the needle in her hand, not sure why people downvoted you..
Sus.
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u/BetweenTwoTowers 23h ago
The idea that the hatch was cracked or the angle prevented docking is very commonly believed to be an attempt to cover the defective recovery equipment the Russians used as well as the limited capabilities of their rescue efforts.
We know for a fact Norwegian divers manually opened that very hatch days later with no issue. While the Russian AS-34 submersibles couldn't get a seal due to poor maintenance, foreign equipment like the British LR5 were specifically designed to mate at severe angles and could have easily connected.
Even though the crew's actual survival window turned out to be tragically short due to a flash fire, a successful docking was absolutely physically possible.
The failure to dock was entirely due to defective Soviet-era equipment and the fatal delay in accepting capable foreign help.
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u/PerthlyPerson 5d ago
The front fell off...
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2d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/PerthlyPerson 2d ago
Well duh... https://youtu.be/3m5qxZm_JqM?si=SJnP8E-BU-GGWaWB
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u/LeatherRole2297 4d ago
Ah, back to the distant past, a more sophisticated and gentle age. Back when the incompetent slaughter of 23 Russian servicemen nearly ended Putin’s presidency. These days, 1.5 million casualties and he’s still in power 🤦♂️
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u/RecommendationOnly41 3d ago
As Putin always says when asked what happened: "It sank."
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u/Rockdrummer357 3d ago
Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe submarines are designed to sink. They're not designed to explode though - well, except for this one maybe.
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u/andynzor 3d ago
Submarines are designed to be neutrally buoyant, not sink.
Yes, I'm an unfunny person.
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u/BaseballParking9182 3d ago
My favourite fact with Kursk is that when the last guys were left in the aft compartment, they lit an oxygen candle to generate O2. They generate extreme heat, and It set fire to the oil and fuel on top of the seawater and killed them by causing a fire. Ironically, it probably ate the last of the oxygen in the compartment.
An oxygen candle was also the cause of death for two guys on HMS Tireless a few years before, when one exploded upon being lit whilst at sea under the ice (the worst possible fucking place to be for the incident), and the boat was only narrowly saved.
These oxygen candles were, until the Tireless incident, treat like shit. We would kick them down three deck, load them in bin bags, throw them about and usually they were stored in showers whilst at sea. No care and attention.
They resembled a tall metal corned beef tin, and they contain a sort of charcoal briquette and it was deemed that cracks in this had caused the Tireless incident.
From then on, they were handled with kid gloves and stored in special lockers in special bags. You couldn't even load them on the submarine if it was raining.
They are also stored on the ISS.
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u/Lost_refugee 4d ago
Why Putin is not mentioned? Waited 4 days to announce tragedy, then International assistance was refused. Their own rescue has failed
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u/full_metal_codpiece 3d ago
Then there was the mother of one of the crew who was injected with sedative on camera when she protested to officials about her son's death.
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u/Soreknees38529 1d ago
Yes good point and he has large influence over the recovery plans as head of state. My intent here was primarily to point at the engineering/design aspects…Lack of maintenance, improper testing, poor training, volatile fuels. These conditions were established long before Putin.
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u/Berkamin 1d ago edited 1d ago
- *Pride over lives* — delayed acceptance of foreign help while sailors were still alive on the seabed.
Vanity at the cost of the lives of their soldiers and sailors is a consistent characteristic of Russia.
When this submarine disaster happened, Russia blamed it on a covert foreign attack.
When Ukraine sank the missile cruiser Moskva, which was the flag ship of the Black Sea Fleet (an actual foreign nation attacking them in time of war), Russia blamed the sinking on an accident.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, their soldiers dug trenches in the "red forest" near Pripiyat, an area that was badly contaminated by radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster because they were never taught about it. Russia covers up its embarrassments, and as a consequence, they never learn from them, and are doomed to repeat the same mistakes.
The Russian army suffers over 40,000 casualties per month in their futile attempt to conquer Ukraine. In September, they lost 50,000 men. They've suffered 1.5 million casualties and the destruction of their economy; their refineries, e-commerce logistics warehouses, and now data centers are all being systematically destroyed, but stopping the war means all the losses they've suffered up to this point would have been for too little gained, so they will protect their pride at the cost of more Russian lives, until the whole system collapses.
This deadly vanity that protects pride rather than human lives has shown itself over and over, from Chernobyl, to the Kursk disaster, to the continued war in Ukraine.
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u/BackgroundAncient174 1d ago
And yet if you are part of the cult Russia has been very good to us. I hate this time line.
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u/Rubbrbandman420 20h ago
I remember at the start of the war seeing them rushing to Chernobyl and just thinking “like dude why?”
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u/Berkamin 20h ago
Large numbers of soldiers who dug trenches in the red forest got severe radiation sickness and were taken to Belarus for medical treatment, but chances are they died a terrible death after that.
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5d ago
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u/engineering-ModTeam 4d ago
Hi, your comment was reported and removed for not adhering to Comment Rule 2:
Be substantive. No low-effort one-liner comments, memes, or off-topic replies. Limit the use of engineering jokes.
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u/Ok-Branch-5321 4d ago
if its nuclear, what about radiation?
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u/Soreknees38529 4d ago
Reactor was shut down by crew and the containment system worked. And a year later the sub was recovered to a salvage yard like you see here.
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u/oilpanhead 2d ago
Nuclear aint as scary as you all blab on about
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u/dan_dares 1d ago
Nuclear isn't scary, but a sinking *russian* nuclear submarine is scary.
they don't maintain things very well, but the blast was far away from the reactor, IIRC nothing leaked.
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u/Ok-Branch-5321 2d ago
But after explosion, the nuclear fuel should have caused radiation hazard but nothing is mentioned on this post.
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u/hornet_221 2d ago
As mentioned below, it was shut down and contained, but in addition even if it had failed, its surrounded by miles of water, so nothing would have happened besides in a very miniscule localised area around the sub, if at all
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u/Soreknees38529 2d ago
The explosion didn’t directly damage the reactor compartment. No loss of containment.
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u/Odd-Masterpiece7304 3d ago
Looks similar to the current Russian submarine fleet, at the bottom of the black Sea.
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u/TedMich23 3d ago
Soviets also used potassium superoxide (KO₂) for their rebreathers to scrub CO2. Its very potent BUT has the nasty characteristic of blowing up on contact with water, which the survivors compartment was filling with. Likely someone dropped a rebreather in the water and their remaining O2 was instantly combusted.
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u/eeddddddd 2d ago
The space between the inner and outer hulls: does that fill up with sea water, and does that cause corrosion issues?
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u/Soreknees38529 2d ago
Yes, certain zones at least. Everything in that zone is designed to survive it until its planned maintenance period. Use a lot of stainless, inconels, nickel bronze, duplex, etc. or straight up paint and cathodic protection.
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u/Dave_A480 2d ago
Experimental torpedo malfunction IIRC....
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u/Soreknees38529 1d ago edited 1d ago
I didn’t find any modern sources to this effect (regarding being experiential). Perhaps this is what was reported at the time of the event.
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u/Dave_A480 1d ago
That is still the presumed cause. HTP leak from a torpedo
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u/Soreknees38529 1d ago
Yes on all that. I think the word experimental in your reply caught my attention. I’m making best use of internet but the 65-76 Kit entered service in 1976. I think after 24 years of service it’s not really experimental anymore.
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u/BetweenTwoTowers 23h ago
I believe the 'experimental' label might come from a misunderstanding or mistranslation of the torpedo being used for training or a training exercise being done when the accident occurred.
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u/Krinky107 2d ago
We’re the missiles spray foamed in place
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u/Soreknees38529 1d ago
Yes. Discussed a bit in another reply. This appears to be a safety measure, secure the load until it could be made safe and demobilized.
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u/No_Interaction_6075 1d ago
old good times seeing putler calling sailor mother a prostitute and kgb drugging other on live TV...
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u/ost2life 1d ago
As they say on WTYP... It's not supposed to look like that.
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u/fleetelite 1d ago
What I find very interesting is the depth at which it sank. The submarine was longer than the depth of the water. Really shallow for that size sub.
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u/Tasty_Opportunity_71 23h ago
There is a book written by a UK diver on the recovery of the Kursk called "Go get a wooly hat". The grammar isn't perfect in it but it's well worth a read
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u/choddles 5d ago
Hires would help us all
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u/Soreknees38529 5d ago
I’m not holding back. The salvage photos are from around 2001 and 2002. 1-3mp was about normal for the time.
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u/spectrumero 2d ago
Film was normal for the time (these have the look of being shot on film), and then the prints or negatives scanned. Scanners weren't all that great in 2001/2 either.
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u/boberchi 1d ago
Я был бы удивлён, если бы в этом посте не нашлось бы ебланов э, ноющих про хохлов...
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u/wassona 5d ago
Jeez. Dying because of a WELL KNOWN issue.