A Time to Die: The Untold Story of the Kursk

Tragedy by Robert Moore

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Original Title: A Time to Die

ISBN: 0609610007
ISBN13: 9780609610008
Autor: Robert Moore
Rating: 4.6 of 5 stars (4264) counts
Original Format: Hardcover, 288 pages
Download Format: PDF, FB2, DJVU, iBook.
Published: January 14th 2003 / by Crown / (first published August 5th 2002)
Language: English
Genre(s):
Nonfiction- 19 users
History- 11 users
Cultural >Russia- 5 users
War >Military- 4 users

Description:

A At 11: 28 a.m. on Saturday, August 12, 2000, high in the Arctic Circle under the roiling surface of
the unforgiving Barents Sea, Captain Gennady Lyachin was taking the Kursk, the pride of Russia's
elite Northern Fleet, through the last steps of firing a practice torpedo, part of an elaborate naval
exercise. Suddenly, the torpedo exploded in a massive ?reball, instantly incinerating all seven men
in the submarine's forward compartment. The horror, however, was just beginning. The full,
gripping story of the remarkable drama inside the Kursk and of the desperate rescue efforts has
never been told--until now.
In A Time to Die, a critically acclaimed best-seller in the United Kingdom, international reporter
Robert Moore--who covered the Kursk tragedy from Russia as it happened--draws on exclusive
access he obtained to top Russian military figures in telling the inside story of the disaster with the
factual depth of the best journalism and the compelling moment-by-moment tension of a thriller.
He takes us right down inside the Kursk as two massive explosions--the second measuring 3.5 on
the Richter scale--rip through compartment after compartment. Bringing the horror of the
explosions vividly to life, he details the agonizing drama of the twenty-three men who survived as
they fight against time to be rescued.
In a journalistic coup, Moore obtained secret access to the Kursk's highly restricted Arctic
submarine base, and he makes the desolation of that forbidden world palpable on the page. As
word of the tragedy breaks, he portrays the fear and growing rage of the families of the crew as
they clamor for news of their loved ones and confront Vladimir Putin, Russia's newly
electedpresident.
Moore also vividly re-creates the nail-biting tension of the heroic but deeply flawed Russian rescue
efforts as men are sent down again and again, aboard antiquated mini-subs, in perilous attempts
to get to the survivors. As Western rescuers are at last called in, Moore richly describes the
fascinating world of the offshore divers who drop everything to make one last, desperate attempt
to reach the trapped submariners.
A Time to Die is a riveting, brilliantly researched account of the deadliest submarine disaster in
history and its devastating human cost.
About Author:

Other Editions:

- A Time to Die: The Untold Story of the Kursk Tragedy (Paperback)

- Time To Die: The Kursk Disaster (Paperback)

- A Time to Die: The Untold Story of the Kursk Tragedy (Kindle Edition)

- A Time To Die: The Kursk Disaster (Paperback)

- A Time to Die: The Untold Story of the Kursk Tragedy (Hardcover)

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Rewiews:

Apr 14, 2013

Eric_W
Rated it: really liked it
Shelves: nautical-non-fiction
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
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 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 .
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
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