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An intriguing new explanation for the loss of the Russian submarine Kursk has come to light. In the aftermath of the loss, the Russians explained that she had played the attacking unit in an exercise in which the large cruiser Pyotr Velikiy played a defending role. The submarine was about to fire a torpedo when she suffered the first of two explosions, equivalent to about 100 kg of TNT. A retired Russian admiral recently claimed that this was at just the time the cruiser was scheduled to fire a surface-to-surface missile (SS-N-19). He said that at such times radio silence is strictly observed. Unfortunately, it was at just this time that the submarine asked for permission to launch a torpedo as her part of the exercise (she was an hour later than she should have been). In the admiral's view, in some way the submarine's radio transmission caused the missile to lock onto her radio antenna. In his account, the missile seeking the submarine's radio antenna fell into the water and, though unarmed, damaged the submarine (which was at periscope depth) badly enough to flood her fore end. In trouble, the submarine commander tried to power his way to the surface. The admiral claimed that the weight of water in the fore end more than balanced out the effects of the submarine's planes, so that she dove into the bottom. When she struck, the shock caused the fatal mass detonation of her torpedoes' warheads.
This account is suggestive but somewhat implausible. It seems very unlikely that a short radio transmission from the Kursk could have captured a long-range surface-to-surface missile or, indeed, that strict radio silence would be observed during the test of such a weapon. Presumably there would have been considerable telemetry. The submarine might have been observing radio silence simply to avoid confusing attempts to monitor the exercise. It also seems unlikely that the SS-N-19 missile, which is designed to fly only through the air, would have survived crashing into the water at high supersonic speed, or that whatever remained after the crash could fatally damage a submarine.
The account does suggest something much more interesting. The Pyotr Velikiy is armed with a medium-range antisubmarine missile, Vodopod (NATO SS-N-15), similar to the old...