Haunting Photos Show the Aftermath of the Kursk Submarine Disaster in 2000 | Hacker News Reader

Haunting Photos Show the Aftermath of the Kursk Submarine Disaster in 2000

rarehistoricalphotos.com

165 pointsmooreds59 comments

Before clicking on this link, I hopped over to the Wikipedia page and read the intro section to get some quick context. Turns out that was unnecessary because this "article" is literally just the Wikipedia intro, almost sentence for sentence, with some minor rephrasing here and there. It's pretty blatant. Wikipedia is mentioned in the photo credits, but there's no attribution for the text, which I think is a violation of the Creative Commons license and counts as plagiarism?

Pictures were interesting, though.

Also in the movie about these events, rescuers have finally located the wreck and the crew are still alive and banging on the hull with a wrench, but the movie-Russians at that point make needless further delays which cost the crew their chance at survival.

There is no evidence anywhere that anyone was alive in the vessel by the time it was reached by rescuers. Nobody heard a wrench banging. Hollywood made that up to paint a picture of the Russians.

> Hollywood made that up to paint a picture of the Russians.

I don't think the true version of the events is necessarily any kinder to Russians than this dramatization.

That movie is powerful and well worth watching.

One of the most interest facts about this disaster is that if the submarine was standing on its tail straight up, its nose would be sticking 150ft OUT of the water it sunk in.

And yet even in that shallow of water the pressure would have been around 10 atm. It's amazing how dangerous something as mundane as water can be.

nothing but respect for water

Definitely a strong contender for favorite 3-atom molecule

Sangamon's Principle

Which sounds good, but isn't Nitrous Oxide actually pretty fucking bad for you if you use it continuously?

This is the first time I see someone refer to 100m deep as shallow.

it's all relative!

It only takes a little over a minute to walk 100m. And if I stand at point A and look at point B, 100m away, it doesn’t feel far away either.

That’s why I think even though I am only able to swim what 4 meters or something down, maybe less, 100m under the water sounds really little for a submarine. Also probably because I have no experience with submarines so I was imagining that for the most part they would be many hundred meters under the sea level.

It was 155m long and the ocean was 108m deep, in case anyone else was wondering.

I didn't realize how big the submarine actually was

- Ohio class - US' largest: 18,750 tonnes displaced submerged, 170m long, 13m beam

- Typohoon-class - USSR's biggest: 48,000 tonnes displaced, 175m long, 23m beam

- Oscar II-class (Kursk) - 19,400 tonnes submerged, 154m long, 18.2m beam

I think I read something similar about the Edmund Fitzgerald i.e. it sank in water that was less deep than the length of the ship.

Similarly, a human can drown in only a few inches of water, not even enough to fully submerge you while lying face first in it, let alone while standing.

Water is not to be trifled with.

High Test Peroxide is incredibly dangerous. Even a slight contaminant can catalyze a runaway decomposition. This is the main reason HTP has been abandoned as a storable propellant.

That is an absolute unit. The photos at the end with people inside the wreck put it in perspective.

> Dutch company Mammoet was awarded a contract in May 2001 and, within three months, designed, fabricated, and deployed over 3,000 tonnes of custom equipment aboard a specially modified barge.

Impressive, particularly by today's standards.

The description of the survivors last hours is horrifying.

Compound that with knowing that your military doesn’t give a damn about it and whether you have any chance of being alive - brutal

The statement is a bit too strong. It's not malice, it's just plain old stupidity. In the same way as soviet nuclear reactors don't explode, nuclear submarines don't either. Nobody have thought it might happen, nobody was aware, and no special "on call" service for recovering people from sunk submarine ever existed. _Of course_, it would never happen in just 6 hours.

In the same way, if you don't have anyone on-call to recover the backend along with backups and recovery plans, the chance to have production up and running in 6 hours will be zero.

In case of a way more physical thing of "submarine sunk in polar cold waters", it'd take a good 4 hours just to get _something_ there. Not to mention extracting a person from 300ft involves a good plan on avoiding decompression sickness, and you can't really bring a 50-ton decompression bell on a helicopter and hover for half a day. I can hardly imagine what would such a disaster recovery plan even be.

It would be unfair to form such a generalized opinion from a single incident, even it that incident was quite brutal.

However, 4 years of following RU military attempts to take over Ukraine have reinforced my belief that RU army doesn’t give two shits about its personnel. They got plenty of people, and their value seems to exclusively correlate with the person’s usefulness towards the Tsar, which at an individual level is generally zero.

The story depresses me a little. One of the greatest engineering marvels in history, destroyed by stereotypical Russian negligence, incompetence and corruption and more then 100 lives lost in the process. The Soviets for all their many sins were at least capable of building incredible things, the protections on the nuclear reactor held up, for example, preventing a massive environmental catastrophe.

It's stereotypical now but I remember at the time this was taken as a kind of confirmation that russia had been coasting on and also neglecting a lot of the soviet-era infrastructure. It's hard to reflect back now but in 2000 the soviet collapse was recent memory and the role and effectiveness of its successor was an open question, internationally.

I do remember that in the 90s the "russia understanders" were split into two camps: now that russia is free of the shackles of communism it will step into its destiny as supreme global superpower vs the soviet system was actually quite effective at large scale mundane infrastructure & logistics in a way the russian federation isn't.

By 2000 the weight of evidence was already fairly strong for the second view but this disaster, and especially their response to it, really settled the matter. This is how I remember feeling about it all anyway.

Russia had roughly half the population as compared to the Soviet Union. There’s just no way they could have ever competed on the global stage the same way.

If one took the view that communism was holding back roughly half of their their potential, then it would have been a reasonable prediction.

No, it wouldn’t have. Only with cetera peribus would that make any sense. And losing half your population is not “all other things being equal.”

It’s a major difference that has a huge impact on output and relative standing globally.

I don't understand your comment. Over the long term, communism (or any sort of economic central planning) will obviously cripple any country's economy. The absolute number of people is meaningless if they're only pretending to work.

Look at the war between Russia and Ukraine today. Every day Russia sends hundreds of men to their deaths in human wave attacks with nothing to show for it. They have a large population but but they're not doing anything useful. If they had double the population it wouldn't change anything.

> Over the long term, communism (or any sort of economic central planning) will obviously cripple any country's economy. The absolute number of people is meaningless if they're only pretending to work.

I’m as anti-communist as can be, but saying population is meaningless when it comes to national output is ridiculous. There are many capitalist nations around the world, but the United States is the most populous, and therefore has the most output… because population plays a major role in national output. The socioeconomics of a nation certainly play a role too, but not enough to overcome population being cut in half.

Ceteris peribus, a capitalist country will beat a communist one long term in output and influence. But that’s not the only thing that can influence output and influence.

> Look at the war between Russia and Ukraine today. Every day Russia sends hundreds of men to their deaths in human wave attacks with nothing to show for it. They have a large population but but they're not doing anything useful.

The entire nation is not devoted to Ukraine, they still need to maintain defenses against NATO and China simultaneously. The Ukraine war is just what they can spare on top of those other goals.

Nah, they're not maintaining defenses against NATO and China. Most of those have already been stripped bare due to a mix of corruption and sending everything that still works to Ukraine. Except the nuclear weapons, and most of those probably no longer work reliably anyway due to lack of competent maintenance.

Sweden's population is tiny, but by working with "the west" they gain from everything everyone else does. Russia has isolated themselves (both directly and in doing things that made others want to isolate them), and thus cannot benefit from what others do near as much.

I also remember how frustrating and depressing it was that they wouldn’t allow foreign teams to help with the rescue effort. At the time it was clear that the Russians lacked the capabilities to do it. I also think in hindsight it was a sign how little interest Russia had in being part of the West.

You should look into the history of the 90s again.

Russia opened up to the West in a big way in the first half of the decade, and worked with NATO and the UN in the first half of the Bosnian war.

The result was... A complete collapse of the domestic economy, and a second half of the Bosnian war where NATO no longer felt like it needed to get Russia on board to do whatever it wanted in the region.

The degradation of this relationship was not the fault of a single party. Clinton and Yeltsin (an utter turd of a man) worked hard to have a productive relationship, but then Bush gets elected and takes a more... Unipolar view of the world. As does Putin.

Early in the Bush administration, at least, there was continuing approchement. Bush was mocked for saying something like "I looked into his [Putin's] eyes, and I trust him". I don't remember enough about the early GWOT days to pinpoint the particulars of the falling out, but I do remember thinking that there were areas of cooperation not being pursued. Like, could Russia have been brought along into Afghanistan? I thought that at the time, though I'm not sure how it looks 25 years later. Like you, however, I doubt that Russia's eventual (and justified, mind you!) current stance and status was written into stone.

> Like, could Russia have been brought along into Afghanistan?

It pretty much was. Afghanistan was a UN-sanctioned war, and Russia did not object to it from its position on the UNSC - and provided support for the invasion.

Iraq (Three permanent UNSC members voted against it), on the other hand, was a clear indication that the rules-based world is a sham and a scam... And that the only rule that matters is 'Fuck you, make me.'

You know how Trump is criticized for pursuing idiotic short-term gains that torpedo long-term trust and legitimacy? That was also the real, lasting legacy of Bush II's first term. Anyone playing by the rules is a fool.

I looked into the history of the 90s again. The collapse of the domestic Russian economy was 100% their own fault. If they had simply accepted their place as a second-rate power under US hegemony (something like France) then everything would have been fine and they would be far more secure and prosperous today.

> The collapse of the domestic Russian economy was 100% their own fault.

It was.

But that doesn't matter - the result was incredible misery and ruin for the country, and it drove reactionary, anti-western sentiment, kind of like how reactionary sentiment over $3 eggs drove Americans to flip the table and rally behind Trump II.

The soviet-era protections on a certain infamous RBMK reactor didn't hold up quite so well.

Soundtrack for this post: https://youtu.be/3qF95ANVHSg

Kursk, by The Vad Vuc

I'm surprised 5-7 torpedo warheads detonating didn't do more damage to it. About 2750kg-4000kg of high explosive.

nuclear submarines are first and foremost built as a protective sarcophagus for the powerplant, and that's on top of submarines being designed to compartmentalize damage, anyway.

i.e. if it could totally destroy itself with a full payload that'd be a very bad design choice, not that there wasn't plenty of bad choices wrt the kursk.

They are designed for war. They have to assume that it will be hit at some point - you still want it to return as many of the highly trained people on board back home as possible. If you can repair it so much the better. They can't always meet this goal (the enemy goal is to make that impossible), but it is a design goal of any reasonable navy.

Damn that's crazy seeing Putin back in 2000

He had the same dead look as he does today.

“He wouldn’t lie to me.” - American President

[removed]

I found several photos haunting.

I found the story and photos entirely haunting. Those sailers had no chance.

The survivors possibly had a change if Russia had accepted the offer for help from the Norwegian rescue divers right away.

From the article

> Analysts concluded that 23 sailors survived the initial blasts and took refuge in the small ninth compartment at the rear of the submarine.

> Evidence suggests they remained alive for more than six hours. When oxygen grew scarce, they attempted to replace a potassium superoxide chemical oxygen cartridge, but it fell into the oily seawater pooling on the floor and exploded on contact.

> The resulting fire killed several crew members and triggered a flash fire that consumed what remained of the oxygen, asphyxiating the last survivors.

That does not suggest a possibility of a foreign rescue vessel making it there in time.

Also:

"No search was launched for more than six hours."

"It ultimately took over 16 hours to locate the stricken vessel, which lay on the seabed at a depth of 108 meters (354 feet)."

Hindsight. They should have tried given they didn't know. I remember it unfolding at the time and astonished at the lack of Russian response.

Found it pretty haunting myself. You could pick a different descriptive word but haunting fits.

Being able to look at a full actual likeness of a person who is dead is incomprehensibly novel to human experience. It has never stopped giving me chills.

Reading a note written by a sailor, in the dark, by feel, estimating his changes to be 10%, certainly felt haunting to me.

Chomsky wrote that Western media publishes only what is "useful" for certain ends, usually political. So you think the article is useful, don't you?

Why would anyone care what a "useful idiot" like Chomsky thinks?

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