Struggling upward, the Komsomolets managed to send its first encoded SOS to headquarters by 11:14.īut surfacing did not save the vessel. In order to surface from the depths, the captain was forced to blow the main ballast tanks.

The expanding blaze tripped the reactor’s emergency shutdown and caused a loss of power in the submarine’s hydraulic system – leaving the sub immobile and powerless. The hoses, driven by a frenzy of spraying air, damaged an oil containment and sparked a flash fire in the submarine’s oxygen rich air. The disaster began at 11:03 on that April 7, while the Komsomolets was sailing at a depth of 386 meters, when, suddenly, high-pressure air hoses connected to the submarine’s ballast tank burst their seal. The minute-by-minute details of the wreck, as related in a public account by the CIA, were harrowing. At the time of the sinking, Glasnost reforms under Mikhail Gorbachev had taken firm root – and a catastrophe the Soviet Navy might earlier have hushed up was front-page fare in popular Russian newspapers like Komsmolskaya Pravda and Sovietskaya Rossiya. Yet while the Komsomolets began as a clear a symbol of the Soviet Union’s military might, it came to be one of the first signs of its undoing. Designed to go deeper than any other submarine in the world, the Komsomolets’ titanium hull could largely evade American detection – spurring a frenzy of submarine development in the US. Advanced automated systems allowed for the sub to be operated by a relatively small crew of 69.īut what the sub lacked in crew members it made up for in firepower and stealth. The Komsomolets put to sea in 1984, at a time when the Cold War had grown especially chilly. The mission is expected to return on June 5. The current expedition will take more water samples and pluck up seabed sediments that the scientists will analyze once back in port, the Barents Observer reported, citing Rosgidromet. In 2019, a joint expedition launched by the two countries discovered the leakage directly around the submarine’s hull had increased slightly over levels measured in 19.

Leakage from the wreck – though deeply submerged and unlikely to contaminate fish stocks – has been detected on previous missions Russia and Norway have undertaken since the Komsomolets went down. The submarine’s reactor, loaded with nuclear fuel, produces other radioactive isotopes like cesium 137 and strontium 90. Those now lie at a depth of 1,680 meters with the rest of the sub’s wreckage and pose ongoing worries about radioactive leakage at the bottom of the Norwegian Sea.īut plutonium isn’t the only concern. The Komsomolets – once the most advanced nuclear submarine in the Soviet Navy – was carrying two plutonium warheads when it went down on April 7, 1989. On Sunday, according to the Barents Observer, Russia’s foreign ministry issued an invitation to its Arctic Council counterparts to a conference scheduled for June 2022, where experts are expected to hash out next steps in retrieving that waste. Bellona has urged the eight-country Arctic Council, now convening under Russia’s two-year chairmanship, to address raising those subs, as well as dozens of other pieces of highly radioactive debris abandoned by the Soviet Navy at sea. The voyage comes at a time of heightened concern over Soviet-era submarines that sank by accident, or were intentionally scuttled, in Arctic waters during the Cold War. The scientists, from Rosgidromet, Russia’s state weather agency which also measures radiation, set sail from Arkhangelsk last week aboard the Professor Molchanov research vessel, reaching the accident site over the weekend, Russian media reported. Russian scientists have embarked on a mission to the Komsomolets, a Soviet nuclear submarine that sank 32 years ago during an onboard fire off Norway’s northern coast, killing 41, in a bid to determine whether the wreck presents threats to the undersea environment.

Russian submarine