The salvage operation began in September 2001, and it was a delicate one. Vyacheslav Popov, who was the commander of Russia’s Northern Fleet when the Kursk exploded. Such claims were made again in the fall of 2021 by Retired Adm. The Russians had quickly used the old Cold War Soviet-era playbook to attempt to pass blame on the accident, and that included suggesting the Kursk had collided with a NATO submarine that was spying on the exercise. The exercise involved four attack submarines, the Northern Fleet flagship Pyotr Velikiy, and numerous smaller craft. In August 2000, Kursk was operating in the northern waters of the Barents Sea and was set to take part in a major exercise – the first since the dissolution of the Soviet Union nine years earlier. The other six were assigned to the Pacific Fleet, and while three more were planned, construction was eventually halted. The Kursk, which had been named after the July 1943 Battle of Kursk, the largest tank engagement in history, was one of eleven nuclear-powered Project 949A Antey ( Oscar II) boats built at Seveorvinsk, and was one of the five assigned to the Russian Navy’s Northern Fleet. The crew had not been adequately trained to handle those weapons. Though the weapon is powerful enough to destroy an aircraft carrier with a single hit, the Soviet Union inexplicably designed the torpedo to run on hydrogen peroxide fuel, which is highly volatile and requires careful handling. The Kursk‘s wreckage was recovered and the accident was ultimately traced to the Type-65-76A torpedo. The first one was also the worst when in August 2000 the nuclear-powered Kursk sank in the Barents Sea due to an explosion in its torpedo room, which killed all 118 of its crew. However, since 2000, the Russian Navy has had its own share of submarine disasters. What motivated its development was Russia’s ambition to display a range of weapons that can evade the US missile defence system, said Pavel Podvig, an expert on Russian nuclear forces and senior researcher at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR).Throughout the Cold War, there had been a number of tragic accidents involving Soviet submarines due to lax safety measures. "It's a torpedo which has an extremely long-range, can travel at high speed and then packs that nuclear punch," said David Hambling, a technology journalist specialising in defence who has authored a book about drones. Much of its actual capabilities remain shrouded in mystery, but its key strengths are thought to be its ability to operate very deep and very fast underwater, making it hard to intercept. The torpedo, which Russia named Poseidon, is about 20 m long, can go 1,000 m deep and has a range of at least 10,000 km, Sidharth Kaushal, a research fellow for seapower and missile defence at the UK defence and security think tank RUSI, told Euronews Next. Original artwork courtesy of submarine expert HI Sutton / Covert Shores An illustration of what the Poseidon nuclear torpedo may look like.
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