Russian Submarine K-141 Kursk - Background

Background

Work on building Kursk began in 1990 at Severodvinsk, near Arkhangelsk. Launched in 1994, it was commissioned in December of that year. It was the penultimate Oscar II class submarine designed and approved in the Soviet era. At 154 m (505 ft 3 in) long and four stories high, she was the largest attack submarine ever built. The outer hull, made of high-nickel, high-chrome content stainless steel 8.5 millimetres (0.33 in) thick, had exceptionally good resistance to corrosion and a weak magnetic signature which helped prevent detection by magnetic anomaly detector (MAD) systems. There was a 2 metres (6 ft 7 in) gap to the 50.8 millimetres (2.00 in)-thick steel pressure hull.

Kursk was part of Russia's Northern Fleet, which had suffered funding cutbacks throughout the 1990s. Many of its submarines were anchored and rusting in Andreyeva Bay, 100 kilometres (62 mi) from Murmansk. Little work to maintain all but the most essential front-line equipment, including search and rescue equipment, had occurred. Northern Fleet sailors had gone unpaid in the mid-1990s. The end of the decade saw something of a renaissance for the fleet; in 1999, Kursk carried out a successful reconnaissance mission in the Mediterranean, tracking the United States Sixth Fleet during the Kosovo War. August 2000's training exercise was to have been the largest summer drill — nine years after the Soviet Union's collapse — involving four attack submarines, the fleet's flagship Pyotr Velikiy ("Peter the Great") and a flotilla of smaller ships.