Glomar Explorer was used in a secret operation to retrieve part of the sunken Soviet nuclear submarine K-129. The Glomar Explorer, photographed in Long Beach harbor, 1975. “Second, the Soviet Union’s quick acknowledgement of what had happened, demonstrating that Soviet leaders had learned from their bungled attempt just five months earlier to deny both the occurrence and the region-wide consequences of the catastrophic reactor explosion at Chernobyl in Ukraine.” “Much like an earlier accident in 1961 involving the Soviet Union’s first ballistic missile submarine, the K-19, they prevented a far greater catastrophe.” “First, the heroic efforts of the crew under very dangerous conditions to shut down the two reactors and stabilize the submarine,” Schwartz tells Popular Mechanics. Stephen Schwartz, a nonresident senior fellow with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, says there are several notable things about the incident. Gorbachev and the Politburo were apparently aware of Project Azorian, the CIA’s secret operation to raise another sunken Soviet missile submarine, K-129, off the coast of Hawaii in 1974. Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, twice mentioned the possibility that Americans could raise the ship. But Soviet leadership was more worried about the possibility that the United States could raise the submarine and learn its secrets. government quickly became aware of K-219’s plight, sending P-3C Orion patrol aircraft to monitor efforts to save the submarine and even offering assistance. The Soviet Union sent the battlecruiser Kirov to the vicinity of K-219 ’s sinking, but even the Soviet Navy could not maintain vigil over the site indefinitely. Plutonium decays very slowly, with a half-life of 24,000 years, meaning that half of the material released into the ocean will still be around in 24 millennia, contaminating the environment. Releasing toxic plutonium into the ocean would cause an ecological disaster, threatening the surrounding environment, fish stocks, and possibly even nearby shipping lanes.
The Differences Between Nuclear Fission and Fusion.Tiny Nuclear Reactors Can Save American Energy.Meet the World’s Most Advanced and Dangerous Submarines.Chernavin also explained that the two reactors would corrode and spill radioactivity, but “that would happen very slowly, over decades.” The spheres would gradually corrode in the salt water, Chernavin explained, and “a corrosion process will begin, which will lead to the spread of radioactivity.” However, the radioactivity would be limited and would not reach the surface, he said. Admiral Vladimir Chernavin, then the head of the Soviet Navy, explained to Soviet leadership that the high explosive and plutonium aboard each nuclear warhead were contained in metal spheres. The accident resulted in the loss of at least 16 thermonuclear warheads, as well as two nuclear reactors. (North Korea’s nuclear submarines, for example, still carry their more primitive missiles in the sail.)Īn aerial starboard bow view of K-129, showing damage to the missile hatch on the starboard side. Unlike previous Soviet missile submarines, which stored their long missiles in the sail, the Yankee class stored shorter, more compact missiles in the hull behind the sail, in a raised hump, just like American submarines. K-219 was a “Yankee”-class submarine, a NATO intelligence designation likely referencing the submarine’s uncanny resemblance to early George Washington-class U.S. A month after departing the Soviet Northern Fleet’s Gadzhiyevo submarine base, K-219 was conducting launch drills, preparing for the day it might launch its nuclear-tipped missiles at the eastern seaboard of the United States. The ballistic missile submarine was designed to carry nuclear-tipped missiles within range of the United States as part of the USSR’s nuclear deterrence. On October 3, 1986, K-219 was cruising approximately 600 miles northeast of the island of Bermuda. Adding to the tragedy were the losses of the ship’s thermonuclear warheads and nuclear reactor, which threaten to unleash an environmental disaster if they are not someday recovered. The Soviet Navy submarine K-219 caught fire and ultimately sank, killing three of her crew.
One of the most dangerous incidents at sea during the Cold War took place on this day 36 years ago in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Although most of the warheads and reactors are still down there, some of the warheads-and the missiles containing them-were counted as missing two years later.The sub’s thermonuclear warheads and nuclear reactors went down with the ship.On this day in 1986, a Soviet nuclear submarine off the coast of Bermuda caught fire and sank.
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