Soviet submarine K-219

K-219 was a Project 667A Navaga-class ballistic missile submarine (NATO reporting name "Yankee I") of the Soviet Navy. She carried 16 (later 15) SS-N-6 liquid-fuel missiles powered by UDMH with IRFNA, equipped with an estimated 34 nuclear warheads.

K-219 was involved in what has become one of the most controversial submarine incidents in the Cold War.

Preamble
On Friday 3 October 1986, while on an otherwise routine, Cold War nuclear deterrence patrol in the North Atlantic 680 mi northeast of Bermuda, the 15-year old K-219 suffered an explosion and fire in a missile tube. The seal in a missile hatch cover failed, allowing saltwater to leak into the missile tube and react with residue from the missile's liquid fuel. Though there was no official announcement, a published source said the Soviet Union claimed that the leak was caused by a collision with the submarine USS Augusta (SSN-710). Augusta was certainly operating in proximity, but both the United States Navy and the commander of K-219, Captain Second Rank Igor Britanov, deny that a collision took place. K-219 had previously experienced a similar casualty; one of her missile tubes was already disabled and welded shut, having been permanently sealed after an explosion caused by reaction between seawater leaking into the silo and missile fuel residue.

The authors of the book Hostile Waters reconstructed the incident from descriptions by the survivors, ships' logs, the official investigations, and participants both ashore and afloat from the Soviet and the American sides. The result was a novelized version of events.

Event
Shortly after 0530 Moscow time, seawater leaking into silo six of K-219 reacted with missile fuel, producing nitric acid. K-219 weapons officer Alexander Petrachkov attempted to cope with this by disengaging the hatch cover and venting the missile tube to the sea. Shortly after 0532, an explosion occurred in silo six. The remains of the RSM-25 rocket and its two warheads were ejected from silo six into the sea.

An article in Undersea warfare by Captain First Rank (Ret.) Igor Kurdin, Russian Navy - K-219's XO (executive officer) at the time of the incident - and Lieutenant Commander Wayne Grasdock, USN described the explosion occurrence as follows: At 0514, the BCh-2 officer and the hold machinist/engineer in compartment IV (the forward missile compartment) discovered water dripping from under the plug of missile tube No. 6 (the third tube from the bow on the port side). During precompression of the plug, the drips turned into a stream. The BCh-2 officer reported water in missile tube No. 6, and at 0525, the captain ordered an ascent to a safe depth (46 meters) while a pump was started in an attempt to dry out missile tube No. 6. At 0532, brown clouds of oxidant began issuing from under the missile-tube plug, and the BCh-2 officer declared an accident alert in the compartment and reported the situation to the GKP (main control post). Although personnel assigned to other compartments left the space, nine people remained in compartment IV. The captain declared an accident alert. It took the crew no more than one minute to carry out initial damage control measures, which included hermetically sealing all compartments. Five minutes later, at 0538, an explosion occurred in missile tube No. 6.

Three sailors were killed outright in the explosion. The vessel surfaced to permit its twin nuclear reactors to be shut down, which was only accomplished when a 20-year old enlisted seaman, Sergei Preminin, sacrificed his life to secure one of the onboard reactors. He had secured it and tried to reach his comrades on the other side of a door, but he couldn't open it and died in the reactor compartment. Captain Britanov was ordered to have the ship towed by a Soviet freighter back to Gadzhievo, her home port, some 7000 km away.

Although a towline was attached, towing attempts were unsuccessful, and after subsequent poison gas leaks into the final aft compartments and against orders, Britanov ordered the crew to evacuate onto the towing ship. Britanov remained aboard K-219.

Displeased with Britanov's inability to repair his submarine and continue his patrol, Moscow ordered Valery Pshenichny, K-219’s security officer, to assume command, transfer the surviving crew back to the submarine, and return to duty. Before those orders could be carried out, however, the flooding reached a point beyond recovery and on 6 October 1986 the K-219 sank to the bottom of the Hatteras Abyssal Plain, more than three miles down. in a depth of about 6,000 m (18,000 ft). While the proximate cause of the sinking is unknown, some evidence indicates Britanov may have scuttled her. K-219's full complement of nuclear weapons was lost along with the vessel.

In 1988, the Soviet hydrographic research ship Keldysh positioned itself over the wreck of K-219, and found the submarine sitting upright on the sandy bottom. It had broken in two aft of the conning tower. Several missile silo hatches had been forced open, and the missiles, along with the nuclear warheads they contained, were gone.

Preminin was posthumously awarded the Order of the Red Star for his bravery in securing the reactors. Britanov was charged with negligence, sabotage, and treason. He was never imprisoned, but waited for his trial in Sverdlovsk. On 30 May 1987, Defense Minister Sergey Sokolov was dismissed as a result of the Mathias Rust incident two days earlier, and replaced by Dmitry Yazov; the charges against Britanov were subsequently dismissed.

U.S. Navy reaction
The presence of the Yankee Class SSBN in the so-called Atlantic "Yankee Patrol Box" was already established by the U.S. Navy's undersea sound surveillance system prior to 3 October. However, there was no overt reaction by the U.S. Navy's East coast-based anti-submarine maritime patrol squadrons on Friday, something which would have been expected had USS Augusta been in active trail of K-219 that morning. The explosion of the missile inside the missile tube would likely have been detected by the North Atlantic SOSUS system had K-219 been at normal patrol depth. However, because the submarine came to periscope depth - above the sound layer - prior to detonation, no tell-tale sound "event" was recorded. A P-3 Orion maritime patrol aircraft was not launched to reconnoitor K-219 until Saturday morning 4 October, probably "alerted" by the highly unusual communications between the distressed submarine and Soviet Navy Northern Fleet headquarters in Murmansk.

Hostile Waters film
In 1997, the British BBC television film Hostile Waters, co-produced with HBO and starring Rutger Hauer, Martin Sheen, and Max von Sydow, was released in the United States by Warner Bros. It was based on the book by the same name mentioned above, which claimed to describe the loss of K-219. In 2001, Captain Britanov filed suit, claiming Warner Bros. did not seek or get his permission to use his story or his character, and that the film did not portray the events accurately and made him look incompetent. After three years of hearing, the court ruled in Britanov's favor. Russian media reported that the filmmaker paid a settlement totaling under a $100,000.

The former Soviet Union claimed that the damage to K-219 was caused by a collision with Augusta. The U.S. Government denied this and the U.S. Navy issued a statement about the book and film:

"The United States Navy normally does not comment on submarine operations, but in this case, because the scenario is so outrageous, the Navy is compelled to respond. The United States Navy categorically denies that any U.S. submarine collided with the Russian Yankee submarine (K-219) or that the Navy had anything to do with the cause of the casualty that resulted in the loss of the Russian Yankee submarine."

An article on the U.S. Navy's website posted by Captain 1st Rank (Ret.) Igor Kurdin (former XO of K-219) and Lieutenant Commander Wayne Grasdock denied any collision between K-219 and Augusta. Captain Britanov himself also denies a collision. He has stated that he was not asked to be a guest speaker at Russian functions because he refuses to follow the Russian government's interpretation of the K-219 incident.

In a BBC interview recorded in February 2013, with the Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Navy at the time, Vladimir Chernavin, Chernavin says the accident was caused by a malfunction in a missile tube and makes no mention of a collision with an American submarine. The interview was conducted for the BBC2 series "The Silent War".

Casualties
The following casualties were directly attributed to the incident: