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Submarines played a crucial role in the Cold War carrying the ballistic missiles that help to
maintain that terrifying balance called Mutually Assured Destruction. Missile submarines and attack
submarines played a risky game of cat-and-mouse in the world's oceans, and still do today. And it was
a very dangerous game for everybody involved, and one good example of that, that proves that danger
today lies some 18,000 feet below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean. The 1986 explosion aboard
the Soviet ballistic missile submarine K-219 is history that deserves to be remembered.
The Cold War expansion of the Soviet Navy into a global sea power is largely attributed to the
efforts of Admiral Sergey Gorshkov, who was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet
Navy in 1956, a position he would hold for nearly three decades. In the midst of a Soviet military
mindset focused on land power, Gorshkov managed to create a vision of a Soviet fleet that could
advance Soviet strategic objectives, and challenged the United States as a global
sea power. He was quoted in Time magazine in 1968 boasting, “That the flag of the Soviet Navy
now proudly flies over the oceans of the world.” Submarines were central to Soviet naval strategy,
owing largely to Soviet geography. While Gorshkov advocated a more balanced fleet,
he nonetheless oversaw the largest submarine construction program in history,
including significant advances in Soviet submarine technology.
More important to strategy was Gorshkov’s emphasis on numbers. He famously adhered to a philosophy
that said that, “Better is the enemy of good enough.”, which meant that he wanted to have more
boats at sea, even if they were only good enough. In practice this meant that the Soviet Union kept
older submarines at sea longer than their Western counterparts, and this did impact the safety of
the Soviet submarine Navy. The submarine Navy suffered from a number of issues of design,
of maintenance, of crew quality and training, that contributed to a number of cold war accidents.
The 1980s saw a particularly tense period of the Cold War. Ronald Reagan had been elected
in 1980 arguing for a strategy of peace through strength, that was intended to bankrupt the Soviet
Union through military competition. Between 1980 and 1985, the number of dollars devoted
each year to defense more than doubled, from one hundred and forty two point six billion,
to two hundred and eighty six point eight billion. The Reagan administration spent more
than one-and-a-half trillion dollars on defense, forcing the Soviet Union to compete in a way that
hastened the eventual downfall of the Soviet Union, although historians disagree over the
degree to which the build-up was responsible. One response to the US build-up was to increase
the Soviet ballistic missile submarine presence by rushing deployment. Now Soviet submarines,
many already using outdated technology, were sent on more deployments with less down time,
increasing the risk of accidents due to a reduced maintenance and training schedule.
One submarine impacted by the faster deployment schedule was the Soviet Navaga
class ballistic missile submarine K-219. The Navaga class which NATO designated,
The Yankee 1, began service in 1967. They were the first Soviet ballistic missile submarines
to carry missiles with thermonuclear warheads with a yield comparable to the Polaris missiles
used by American and British ballistic missile submarines. With the length of 420 feet, and the
displacement of eleven and a half thousand tons submerged, the Yankee 1 carried sixteen ballistic
missiles in the hole, as well as mounting six torpedo tubes. With a standard crew of 114,
the submarine's two nuclear pressurized water reactors provided the boat with light, heat,
water, fresh air and of course, propulsion that allowed a top speed of 28 knots. Commissioned
December 31st 1971, the K-219 was old technology by the time she put to sea in September of 1986.
One of Gorshkov’s Good Enough submarines, sent to man the so-called Patrol Box east of Bermuda. The
decade and a half old K-219 had already been the victim of an accident that underlined the
risks of submarine warfare. The R-27 submarine launched ballistic missiles that the Navaga
class submarines carried was unlike their Polaris counterparts, liquid fueled. They used what is
called a hypergolic combination, where a fuel, in this case unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine,
is combined with an oxidizer, nitrogen tetroxide to produce ignition. Hypergolic fuels have the
advantage of being easily and reliably ignited without requiring an outside source like
a spark plug. But the downside is that the chemicals involved are extremely dangerous,
being both poisonous and corrosive, and of course explosive if they come in contact with each other.
Even more terrifying, aboard a submarine, nitrogen tetroxide is highly reactive with seawater
when combined, that can produce poison gas and corrosive nitric acid. Allow enough oxidizer and
water to mix, and you get a powerful, poisonous acid that can eat through nearly everything.
That in fact had already happened to the K-219 in 1976 just a few years after the
ship had been commissioned. A small leak in the seal in the vessel's number 16 silo
had allowed sea water to drip, where it combined with residual nitrogen tetroxide
to form powerful nitric acid that had melted through a hydrazine line causing an explosion,
and killing a sailor. The silo had been too damaged to repair, and silo number 16 of
the K-219 was permanently welded shut, reducing her missile complement to 15.
The demands of the more rapid deployment schedule had a large effect on K-219 that
fall. The boat was to be captained by Captain Second-Ranked Igor Britanov, and while Britanov
was an experienced commander, the K-219 was not his normal boat. As the K-219 for this patrol
was gonna be crewed by what was normally the first crew for a different submarine, the K-241.
Not only was he on an unfamiliar boat, but the crew had been shuffled. 11 of the vessel's 31
staff officers, including the executive officer and 16 of 38 noncommissioned officers had been
replaced, and were not operating with their normal crew. On an unfamiliar,
aging boat whose maintenance time had been shortened, Britanov was sailing with a crew
not used to working with each other. After 30 days at sea on October 3rd, K-219 moved into
its designated patrol area in the Sargasso Sea in the North Atlantic when an engineer in the forward
missile compartment discovered water dripping from under the plug of missile tube number 6,
the third tube from the bow on the portside. The dripping soon turned into a stream of
seawater. The captain had the boat taken to a shallower depth while an attempt was made
to pump the water out, but a cloud of brown corrosive oxidants started coming from under
the missile. The captain declared an Accident Alert, that included damage control measures
like hermetically sealing all compartments. The crew's quick work likely saved the boat,
as five minutes later the submarine was rocked by an explosion in missile tube number 6.
Seawater had mixed with oxidizer, and the resulting nitric acid had eaten through
something critical. Inside the missile silo, oxidizer mixed with fuel, and the resulting
chemical explosion was so powerful that it ejected the destroyed RSM-25 missile and its
two thermonuclear warheads out of the submarine. Some of the high explosive around the warheads
also exploded, which meant that radioactive debris was being sent both into the ocean,
and into the submarine. The explosion was so powerful that it tore apart the thick
missile tube, and more than four and a half tons of seawater went into the bilge causing
the submarine to lose buoyancy, and sink over 800 feet in moments. Two crewmen were killed
in the initial blast, and the missile officer died shortly thereafter from the toxic fumes.
Black smoke was pouring through the aft missile compartment where 25 crewmen were trapped,
and the boat lost status information on the remaining missile tubes.
The boat had lost its loudspeaker system and its radio transmitter.
Captain Britanov had ordered the crew to blow all tanks in an effort to stop the
sinking and surface the boat. It is a desperate last-ditch attempt that
would use up all the submarine's compressed air, and if it failed,
the submarine would sink to the bottom of the ocean and be crushed by the ocean's pressure.
Blowing the tanks worked! The boat began to rise. Just two minutes after the explosion
it breached the ocean surface, uncontrolled like a missile exiting the water. The bow
shooting up before settling back, smoke pouring out of the ruptured
silo. They were able to contact command which diverted the closest Soviet merchant vessels.
Inside the submarine the corrosive gas was slowly eating away at the vitals of the submarine. Seals
work eroding away, pipes were exploding, gauges were going blank. Radioactivity in the missile
room, which is abaft of the conning tower, essentially cut the crew off in the middle,
so that the crew of the bow and the stern could not reach each other in order to help
control the damage. Poison gas was seeping from compartment to compartment making ever
more of the submarine uninhabitable. And there was a fire burning somewhere in the missile
compartment that was raising the heat, to the extent that there was a fear that the remaining
missiles could cook off, and release masses of radioactive debris into the Gulf Stream.
Then suddenly a new crisis! The heat alarm started going off in the reactor room! The
fires and corrosion had eaten through the systems that powered the cooling systems.
If the reactor is overheated, the rods would melt straight through the bow to
release a cloud of radioactive steam, worse than the accident at Chernobyl,
that would blow for the British overseas territory of Bermuda.
The reactors had to be shut down. A process called SCRAM. The system was designed to drop
heat baffles that would essentially drown the nuclear fires, and they worked as they should
on one of the two reactors. But on the second reactor the heat had warped the springs, and
the baffles did not drop. They could be cranked down by hand, but only from inside the reactor.
Two members of the crew, Lieutenant Nikolay Belikov and Seaman Sergei Preminin volunteered
for the assignment. The radiation suits they had were completely insufficient,
and the compartment was over a hundred eighty degrees. They managed to manually lower two of
the baffles in two trips the Belikov collapsed from heat exhaustion. 20 year-old sailor Sergei
Preminin made the third trip alone, lowering the baffle that prevented, perhaps, the worst
nuclear disaster in the history of the world. By the time he was done, the pressure between
the two compartments had become so different that the door could not be opened, despite desperate
attempts to force it. Preminin died of heat exhaustion and asphyxiation inside the reactor.
Because of the poison gas and radiation, the crew of the K-219 had to be evacuated to the
merchant vessels that arrived although Captain Britanov remained on the bridge. There was an
attempt to tow the K-219 to get repairs, but the towline broke, and eventually the flooding was
just unrecoverable. On October 8th, the K-219 rolled and slipped beneath the waves. Captain
Britanov was the last crew member to evacuate. Today the soviet submarine K-219 lies at the
bottom of the Hatteras Abyssal Plain. The Soviet government blamed Captain Britanov
because he was unable to save his boat and he was charged with negligence, sabotage, and treason,
although the charges were all eventually dropped. Some have maintained, including at times, at least
unofficially the Soviet government, that the K-219 was the victim of an accidental collision with an
American attack submarine that was trailing the K-219, and that's what caused the water to get
in that caused the explosion. And that event was portrayed in the 1997, made-for-tv movie,
Hostile Waters. However, both Captain Britanov and the United States Navy strongly denied that
there was ever any collision, and they blamed the accident on a faulty seal on the missile cover,
which is of course, exactly what happened in the earlier accident of RK-219 in 1976.
Four crewmen aboard the K-219 were killed in the accident. Crewman Sergei Preminin
was posthumously awarded the Order of the Red Star for his heroism. In the end it was rather
amazing that Captain Britanov was able to save his crew, and that his crew was able to avert
nuclear disaster. When he was interviewed in 1998 and asked what the biggest lesson of the explosion
aboard the K-219 was, he said, “Take care of your people. And they will take care of you.”
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