The true disaster is coming, book warns
Peter Huchthausen's
book is the "official companion volume" to the movie of the same name, a
submarine drama starring Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson that opens this week.
Huchthausen, a retired U.S. Navy Captain who served as naval attache in
Moscow in the late '80s, was the technical advisor to the movie.
His account of the K-19 accident, however, is no Blackhawk Down-style,
multi-dimensional narrative that will keep you turning pages into the night.
The details of the 1961 accident that formed the basis for the movie are
recounted in a chapter of 36 pages, with most of the narrative told in long
passages from the translated memoirs of the sub's commander, Capt. Nikolai
Zateyev, now deceased.
Huchthausen leaves the minute-by-minute, human drama to the moviemakers
who employed him. His purpose is to offer historical and technical context
to the movie.
We do learn from the book that the character played by Liam Neeson in the movie is fictional.
In the movie, Neeson plays a deposed captain who challenges the decision
of the new commander, Zateyev (played by Ford). In real life there was no
one on board going head-to-head with the sub commander, though some officers
did urge Zateyev to beach the boat on a Norwegian island.
Zateyev eventually saved his boat and most of his crew by by making contact
with another nearby Soviet sub. The K-19 was eventually decontaminated and
relaunched, but it was forever regarded as a bad-luck boat with a fateful
nickmame: "Hiroshima."
The real danger
The K-19 was the first Soviet nuclear-powered submarine built to carry
ballistic nuclear missiles -- the Kremlin's answer to the American Polaris-class
subs. Its three missiles were equipped with 1.4-megaton warheads intended
for American strategic targets.
The most chilling aspect of the near-disaster on the Soviet submarine
K-19 is not the drama that played out when a pressurized coolant pipe ruptured
on the submerged boat on July 4, 1961, causing the reactor to dangerously
overheat.
The really scary story is that the environmental danger posed by K-19
and other former Soviet nuclear subs is not passed, though the Cold War has
ended and most of these warships have now been decommissioned.
Though many of the retired subs have also been dismantled, the nuclear
material that once powered their engines remains a major potential hazard,
Huchthausen reports.
According to Huchthausen, 10,000 atomic fuel rods from dismantled submarines
are currently stored aboard two rusting ships in Russian naval ports. A program
to build a proper barge to store the rods is more than five years behind
schedule.
Even worse, other nuclear reactors, including the one that once powered
the star-crossed K-19, were merely dumped or scuttled at sea in water no
deeper than 150 feet -- some with fuel still inside.
This is the radioactive legacy of a massive, hurry-up Soviet submarine
building program during the Cold War that produced warships that were technologically
advanced, but shoddily built with inadequate safeguards, Huchthausen asserts.
The K-19 accident, for example, was later traced to faulty welding procedures
which caused the reactor's primary coolant pipeline to reputure, spilling
highly radioactive coolant into the ship.
The K-19 had no backup cooling system, so eight heroic crewmen sacrificed
their lives to repair the damage and avert a reactor meltdown.
What happened to the K-19 was one of many accidents that occured aboard Soviet submarines during the Cold War.
From 1958 to 1968, the Soviet Navy lost more than seven submarines and
hundreds of men; many more suffered radiation poisoning, Huchthausen reports.
"What happened in the afternmath of the K-19 accident would be repeated time
and again, leading to the disaster at Cherynobyl."
The real K-19, now decommissioned, is moored in a Russian shipyard; the
diesel-powered Soviet submarine that served as its movie double is now moored
in Providence and about to be opened as a museum.
K-19 THE WIDOWMAKER: THE SECRET STORY OF THE SOVIET NUCLEAR SUBMARINE,
by Peter Huchthausen, Capt. USN (ret.). National Geographic Books. 243 pages.
$16 (paperback)
