Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew (53 page)

Pintado (SSN-672) collided with a Soviet sub inside Soviet waters in the approaches to Petropavlovsk, according to a story in the San Diego Evening Tribune in July 1975. Both subs were about two hundred feet deep at impact. Crewmen said the collision smashed much of Pintado's detection sonar, jammed a torpedo tube hatch, and damaged a diving control fin. The Soviet sub, a Yankee-class ballistic missile boat, surfaced soon after the crash. The crewmen said that they believed Pintado had gone close to the Soviet harbor to check Soviet undersea defense systems. After the collision, Pintado raced from the scene.

November 3, 1974: USS James Madison

The Madison (SSBN-627) was leaving the U.S. submarine base at Holy Loch, Scotland, when she collided with a Soviet attack sub in the North Sea, according to reports by the columnist Jack Anderson and the Norwich (Connecticut) Bulletin in 1975. Madison dove onto the Soviet boat, which was shrouded by the noise of her baffles. One former Madison crew member noted that the Soviet sub was probably one of the Victor class.

Late 1981: HMS Sceptre of Great Britain's Royal Navy

This nuclear-powered British attack submarine collided with a Soviet nuclear sub that she was trailing in northern waters close to the Arctic, according to reports a decade later in the British media. One officer said the Sceptre had lost contact with the Soviet boat for as long as thirty minutes before his boat shook. "There was a huge noise," he said, adding, "Everybody went white."

October 1986: USS Augusta

In an especially embarrassing moment, the Augusta (SSN-710) bumped into a Soviet missile sub in the Atlantic while testing a new, highly computerized sonar system that had promised to make it easier to detect other vessels. The accident happened a few days after a Soviet Yankeeclass missile sub caught fire and sank off Bermuda, owing to problems with one of its missile tubes. But contrary to the story told in Hostile Waters, a 1997 Home Box Office movie, Augusta crew members and Naval Intelligence officials say Augusta did not hit the Yankee. Instead, the Augusta collided with a Delta I-class sub. The lingering confusion is the ultimate irony for Augusta's captain, who had once been so confident of his own abilities that he tacked a plaque on his stateroom door endowing himself with the lofty title "Augusta Caesar."

December 24, 1986: HMS Splendid of Great Britain's Royal Navy

According to Russian Navy officials, the Splendid was surveying a Soviet sub in the Northern Fleet's training range in the Barents Sea when the Soviets noticed and tried to get away. The Russians say that at that point commanders of both subs made maneuvering mistakes, and the Soviet submarine brushed against the Splendid, snagging its towed sonar array. The Soviet sub, possibly one of the huge Typhoon missile boats, made her way back to base, still entwined in the array.

February 11, 1992: USS Baton Rouge

Baton Rouge (SSN-689) collided with a Russian Sierra-class sub near Murmansk. In an unprecedented move, and in response to Yeltsin's complaints, the Pentagon publicly announced that the collision had occurred (see chapter 12).

March 20, 1993: USS Grayling

Grayling (SSN-646) collided with a Russian Delta III missile sub in the Barents Sea. Nobody was hurt, but Clinton was furious that the Navy was still taking such risks (see chapter 12).

FROM THE SOVIET SIDE

The U.S. Navy spent decades spying on Soviet submarines but never really knew much about what went on inside those boats, who their men were, or what they were going through. Periodically, word would come of horrible radiation accidents. The Pentagon was willing enough to share those incidents with the American public, along with constant and seemingly contradictory warnings about how big and dangerous the Soviet sub fleet was becoming. Now, with the end of the cold war, the Russian Navy has opened up and has been willing to offer some of the details about the tense days back when the Soviet Navy scrambled to catch up to the Americans. Former Soviet submariners feel free to say what they never could before-that their commands put more emphasis on numbers and deadlines than on submarine safety. As a result, the Soviets suffered some of the most horrific accidents of the cold war.

A Lethal Beginning

In the early stages of the arms race in the mid-1950s, Khrushchev called for the Soviet Union "to catch up with and pass America." And so a fleet of nuclear submarines was designed and constructed, all in a hurry, all haphazardly. The work was so bad that in 1959 Commander Vladimir N. Chernavin (who would ultimately succeed Admiral Gorshkov as commander in chief of the Soviet Navy) refused to take one of the first Soviet nuclear attack submarines out of the yard for her first sea trials. He stood firm when his command was threatened, and he stood firm until his sub was repaired.

While Chernavin stood his ground, another submarine, the K-19, had already been sent to sea with the swing of a champagne bottle. That the bottle failed to break was one of those omens that every submariner, no matter what his rank, rate, or nationality, knew to be omi nous. It was an inauspicious beginning for the first Soviet nuclearpowered submarine to carry ballistic missiles.

In the summer of 1961, K-19 was setting out for exercises in the North Atlantic, exercises code-named "Arctic Circle." She was to play the role of an American sub, hide beneath the surface, and make her way through Soviet antisubmarine forces. After that she was going to leave the rest of the fleet and find a polyi va, a break in the ice. She would surface at the edge of the Arctic and conduct a practice launch of a ballistic missile.

The rest of the fleet stayed behind to continue their exercises as K-19 broke away to make a submerged transit through the Norwegian Sea. The waters were calm. There were no storms. Her crew was already counting down to the end of this cruise and their homecoming.

On July 4, at 4:15 in the morning, just as the sub reached a point about one hundred miles off of Jan Mayen, the small Norwegian island above Iceland, K-19's radiation detection equipment came to life. A reactor scrammed, shutting down. The fuel rods in her nuclear core continued to heat. The primary cooling circuit had failed. A pipe had burst, pumps had broken, leaving nothing to control the chain reaction, nothing to stop the rods from heating up, nothing to prevent them from getting so hot that they would melt through the reactor itself. As the fuel rods climbed past one thousand degrees, the paint began burning on the reactor's outer plating. There should have been a backup cooling system, something to stop catastrophe. But K-19 was an early design, a first attempt.

Captain Yuri Posetiev gave the order to surface. He tried to radio for help, but communications had failed. Meanwhile, engineers on board began desperately trying to improvise a new cooling system from the sub's drinking water reserves. They came up with a desperate plan. Several men were going to have to walk into the now highly radioactive reactor compartment and climb inside "the Boa's Mouth."