Robert Moore (2)

A Time to Die was published in 2003, not long after the Kursk accident in August 2000. I vaguely remembered it and wanted to reread the events with the perspective of time. Most disaster books follow a certain script, either with the disaster happening half-way through after pages of background, or in a braided narrative technique with alternating chapters of background and disaster to hold interest. A Time to Die surprises because the accident happens very early, in the second chapter, and show more unfolds chronologically from there. The tension becomes if they will save the trapped crew in time, meaning 90% of the book is thrilling. Excellent.

However it's more than a thriller, it's insight into the death of an empire. Russia at this point was in the depths of its decay after the fall of the USSR. The Kursk disaster and their need to ask for outside help from the West was emblematic of how far they had fallen. It was like national suicide made flesh and steel. Putin had been in office for only a few months and it was the first test of his Presidency, another emblematic moment.

Overall an excellent book. The moment in Russian history has past, but it still rewards. show less

Life on a submarine - who would willingly choose it? Perhaps if you're living on one of the Arctic Russian military bases, the choice is easier, because the way of life portrayed here makes the social contact and conditions within a submarine seem almost cosy. This book was as much about the decline and changes within Soviet society that the Kursk disaster highlighted, but also the openness that the country was trying to awkwardly embrace. Okay, the Russians were slow to ask for outside show more assistance, but thirty years ago the submariners would have died in a veil of secrecy, and their suffering denied to the world. And the depiction of Putin being publicly interrogated by grieving relatives would never have happened pre-Gorbachev. Whether or not the West could have rescued the men in the Kursk even if they had been on the scene is a moot point, but there is no doubt that there would have been a better chance of it. Everyone tried their best under the circumstances, and it's strange to think that even as I sit and write this, there are probably hundreds of men submerged somewhere under our oceans, spying on one another. Rather them than me. show less

Excellent, what else can I say? Heartbreaking, definitely. The author wrote a spell-binding book about a sad story that otherwise would have been just another sad tale. Highly recommend for anyone into human interest stories - don't need to have an interest in war or military to enjoy. But be ready to feel queasy about the suffering depicted - it's sad.

The Kursk's brief life spanned a revolutionary period. She had been planned under Gorbachev, the keel had been "laid down" under Yeltsin, but when finally commissioned, the Soviet Union had self-destructed and she was commissioned into the Russian Northern Fleet, prepared for a war that seemed less and less likely. Huge -- there is a drawing of a 747 superimposed on a schematic of the Kursk that dwarfs the airplane,-- the Kursk and her sister ship were the pride of the increasingly destitute show more Russian navy: the captain of the Kursk took home less than $1,000 per year and often a paymaster would be left behind a cruise to stand at the bank to make sure the crew's salaries were collected before the money disappeared from the bank. In fact, one of the officers on board was suing the government and Navy for pay for the sailors. The Kursk's final voyage was part of a very ambitious -- a word used advisedly because it was not sure that money would be available to pay for the fuel --war game intended to impress Putin who had suggested he wanted to restore the Russian military to its former glory. The plan was also to use the cover of the war games to sneak one of the Russian boomers under the summer ice of the Arctic past watching American submarines proving they could deploy a nuclear sub without the United State knowing about it. Things began to go wrong from the start. Several missile launches failed spectacularly and the pressure to send good news to the Defense Ministry was pushing crews to take risks. In the final phase of the war games four submarines were to elude discovery and fire a test torpedo at the Peter the Great a large cruiser.

I suspect most of us have some hydrogen peroxide lying around the house. Simple stuff, just water with an extra oxygen atom. But bring it into contact with copper and you have the recipe for a serious disaster as the peroxide tries to eject the extra oxygen atom creating immense heat. Once started, nothing will stop the process until all the combustible material is gone. The practice torpedo that blew up had never been used in practice and the HTP used in the propulsion system had leaked on to the casing, made of copper and brass. It exploded with immense heat and force. In the forward torpedo room of the Kursk, there were live torpedoes with real TNT in them. When they cooked off in a secondary explosion, it registered on the Richter scale as 3.5 magnitude. It blew a huge hole in the pressure hull of the sub. The blast was halted only by the nuclear vessel shielding. This prevented the controls rods from being knocked out of alignment and a potential runaway reactor. Instead of a submarine accident it might have been an ecological disaster.

The British had known of the dangers of HTP. The Sidon had a torpedo explode without warning while at the dock in 1955. Twelve men were killed and an investigation revealed the HTP (high-test peroxide) had leaked out of chamber in the torpedo on to some metal and combusted.
They never again carried HTP on a British submarine.

To make matters worse, the emergency buoy that was supposed to release and send emergency signals if any number of serious conditions arose, had been disabled while on a patrol in the Mediterranean the summer previous, because they were terrified it would deploy accidentally and alert American or British forces to the subs presence. By 1999, the fleet was suffering from neglect and lack of funds. Of seventy cranes at the home port, only twenty worked, meaning that torpedoes could only be loaded on a few of the boats. Sailors were paid only six months out of the year and some of the subs were reduced to hauling food. One commander connected his nuclear power plant to the town's electrical grid so at least some of the navy families could be warm and have light during the long winter.

By a quirk of fate, after the explosion, which blew an immense hole in the side, the sub settled to the floor of the sea in a rather even fashion. Had it sunk nose first, some 130 feet would have extended above the surface, since the depth of water where she sank was only 350 feet deep, much less than the length of the vessel. 23 sailors survived the sinking initially, but remained entombed in the stern of the sub. We have a pretty good idea of what happened to the men marooned in the rear of the sub. A twenty-eight-year-old officer, Lt. Kolesnikov, began writing a precise journal of who was there and events as long as he could. There must have had some makeshift light at the beginning and adequate oxygen for his writing is precise. There were 23 men, all doing reasonably well who could have been saved had the Russians acted with haste, understood what was happening accepted the aid of foreign experts. As the author notes, making this an international rescue should not have been embarrassing since no one nation could martial all the technology and forces needed. But the idea that Russians would let Americans or NATO forces anywhere near their premiere sub was anathema.

Russian communications failures being rather common coupled with a distinct desire not to be the bearer of bad tidings, the double explosion on a sub in the midst of the Russian fleet and during a simulated wartime exercise, went unmentioned if not unnoticed. There was no reward for being curious. Everyone else in the world was very curious as seismic registration needles around the globe measured something. They and the entire US intelligence apparatus were at complete loss to understand what had happened. Communication to the outside world was abysmal at best. The Russians, always eager to put the best foot forward made it seem like everything was great. World interest was accordingly peaked and now they had figurative floodlights on the Kursk. Problem was that Norwegian seismologists had registered the explosions on Saturday, not on Sunday as the Russians had claimed. So the world knew they were lying from the git-go. And they also uttered the word "collision." This was the worst possible scenario from a political standpoint. There had been several very embarrassing and potential deadly collisions in these waters and the new quieting technologies made them even more likely. In one instance a Russia sub surfaced right underneath and American spy sub. And the Cold War was supposed to be over! Both subs limped back to base. But it was a close thing.

Ironic, because the Russians had suffered the loss of the S-80 more than thirty years before in almost exactly the same location. It disappeared without a trace, but the Russians were determined to find it and discover what might have gone wrong as it was the first of its type. They never gave up and 8(!) years after it disappeared it was discovered and the cause of the sinking identified. During a storm, water began to slosh into the vessel through an open hatch. A sailor was ordered to shut it, but no matter how hard he tried he couldn't. The reason was simple. He had been trained on a different model of submarine in which the hatch handle was screwed shut in the opposite direction. He had tried so hard to close it the threads on the screw mechanism had been completely stripped. Another irony was that precisely the characteristics that made the sub so difficult to find, i.e. its design to suppress noise and not reflect sonar signals, worked against saving the sailors trapped in section nine.


I also intend to read .
[b:Cry from the Deep: The Sinking of the Kursk, the Submarine Disaster That Riveted the World and Put the New Russia to the Ultimate Test|377177|Cry from the Deep The Sinking of the Kursk, the Submarine Disaster That Riveted the World and Put the New Russia to the Ultimate Test|Ramsey Flynn|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348531305s/377177.jpg|367017] show less