Kursk was shot down by US torpedo.

[vanesch]

I saw (part of a) interesting TV program.
The claim (apparently substantially documented) was the following:
The Russian submarine Kursk, who sank somewhere in Arctic waters,
and had more than 100 marines dead by it (they survived the initial incident,
but the Russians didn't want a Norwegian vessel who could have helped, intervene, and kept away any other foreign help, until everybody was dead), was actually shot down by a US submarine, on purpose.
The story goes as follows:

apparently the Kursk had a revolutionary weapon system, namely a non-explosive torpedo which - hold your breath - hurls at its target at 500 km/h under water, and hence destroys it, without any possible warning before impact, and was on its way to the Chinese for a demonstration. The Chinese were apparently takers to buy the system. US intelligence got word of it, and hence the mission to sink the Kursk, as a strong signal that they opposed to the bargain.
The Russians didn't want this system to fall in western hands, and hence preferred to let everybody die down under. They now floated part of the submarine (and probably destroyed the part containing the new weapon system). The impact apparently fits a typical US torpedo impact.
The story also goes that Putin needed all his power to stop some russian generals from a retalliatory action against the US - but that we'll never know of course. It was said that 2 migs with small nuclear bombs were already on their way over the atlantic but were called back in extremis.
Clinton wavered away a Russian debt of several million dollars as a way to forget about the incident.

Is this story known ?

 

[Polly]

Can I give a meaningless input? Whaaaaaooooo.

 

[PerennialII]

Haven't there been attempts to develop rocket propelled torpedoes or something like that ? [other than that ]

 

[russ_watters]

I saw (part of a) interesting TV program.
The claim (apparently substantially documented)...

Could you provide some of that documentation? Otherwise, this is just an interesting story...

Re: rocket-propelled torpedos, I think they already have them in service (though I don't think they go 500mph. That would be unlikely).

edit: http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/missile/row/shkval.htm is the torpedo:

Apparently fired from standard 533mm torpedo tubes, Shkval has a range of about 7,500 yards. The weapon clears the tube at fifty knots, upon which its rocket fires, propelling the missile through the water at 360 kph [about 100 m/sec / 230 mph / 200-knots], three or four times as fast as conventional torpedoes. The solid-rocket propelled "torpedo" achieves high speeds by producing a high-pressure stream of bubbles from its nose and skin, which coats the torpedo in a thin layer of gas and forms a local "envelope" of supercavitating bubbles.

 

[PerennialII]

Googling and taking pretty much the first source came up with about 360 km/h underwater missile / rocket ... didn't know that sort of things are already in use.

 

[Gokul43201]

Googling and taking pretty much the first source came up with about 360 km/h underwater missile / rocket ... didn't know that sort of things are already in use.

Holy moly ! I thought the fastest fish were the low payload Mk48/Mk50 torpedoes that could do about 40-50 knots.

 

[fourier jr]

i can believe that the US would do that

re: torpedo i think they might have one that can go 500mph also. they (& china) have supersonic missiles that fly ~10m above the surface of the ocean. russia calls them 'onyx' & china calls them 'sunburn' missiles.

 

[selfAdjoint]

i can believe that the US would do that

re: torpedo i think they might have one that can go 500mph also. they (& china) have supersonic missiles that fly ~10m above the surface of the ocean. russia calls them 'onyx' & china calls them 'sunburn' missiles.

And that of course is the point of the program vanesch saw. These days EVERYBODY would believe the US would do that. We have made ourselves into the world's default villain.

 

[Gokul43201]

On the other hand, there will always be support for any theory, no matter how ridiculous it is. I'd like to see some real substantiation for this one. Wouldn't remains of a US made torpedo be cause for an unimaginable backlash from the rest of the world ?

 

[russ_watters]

re: torpedo i think they might have one that can go 500mph also. they (& china) have supersonic missiles that fly ~10m above the surface of the ocean. russia calls them 'onyx' & china calls them 'sunburn' missiles.

Going supersonic 10m above the surface and going 500mph 10m below it are two entirely different things. The drag on a torpedo is enormous.

On the other hand, there will always be support for any theory, no matter how ridiculous it is. I'd like to see some real substantiation for this one. Wouldn't remains of a US made torpedo be cause for an unimaginable backlash from the rest of the world ?

And that's what's so sad about things like this: if people already want to believe the most absurd things a crackpot can can dream up, substantiation is irrelevant.

 

[fourier jr]

And that of course is the point of the program vanesch saw. These days EVERYBODY would believe the US would do that. We have made ourselves into the world's default villain.

i don't think that the US is the default villian, look at what winston churchill said about the US invasion of the USSR during WWI, which was supposed to stop the russian revolution ("strangle it at its birth"):

"Were they [the Allies] at war with Soviet Russia? Certainly not; but they shot Soviet Russians at sight. They stood as invaders on Russian soil. They armed the enemies of the Soviet Government. They blockaded its ports, and sunk its battleships. They earnestly desired and schemed its downfall. But war -- shocking! Interference -- shame! It was, they repeated, a matter of indifference to them how Russians settled their own internal affairs. They were impartial -- Bang!"

or DF Fleming, cold war historian @ vanderbilt U:

"For the American people the cosmic tragedy of the interventions in Russia does not exist, or it was an unimportant incident long forgotten. But for the Soviet peoples and their leaders the period was a time of endless killing, of looting and rapine, of plague and famine, of measureless suffering for scores of millions -- an experience burned into the very soul of a nation, not to be forgotten for many generations, if ever. Also for many years the harsh Soviet regimentations could all be justified by fear that the capitalist powers would be back to finish the job. It is not strange that in his address in New York, September 17, 1959, Premier Khrushchev should remind us of the interventions, "the time you sent your troops to quell the revolution", as he put it."

re: 10m above vs. below yyeah i still want to see something more concrete than some rumor on an internet forum but given the stuff the US is working on @ area 51 i think 500mph below water is still >0% plausible, somehow

 

[Dayle Record]

Well, it is obvious that something terrible happened there. What about that sub that got "grounded" off of Guam? Yeah, like that happens all the time.

 

[Gokul43201]

There was a 1-hr show on Discovery Channel, about a year or two back, that described in reasonable detail (enough that it lasted an hour) the events that lead to the sinking of the Kursk.

I recall there was something about a leak in the hydrogen peroxide line feeding oxidizer to the motor in the torpedoes. The peroxide reacted with something outside and decomposed rapidly (everyone knows how unstable peroxide is) blowing apart the torpedo casing. This lead to a series of further explosions - probably all the other torpedoes in the torpedo room blew up too - which killed the Kursk. There was also something about a British seimological/sonar station that picked up the signature of the multiple explosions on its sensors.

Anyway, there's going to be another show coming to Discovery, called Raising the Kursk.

 

[vanesch]

And that of course is the point of the program vanesch saw. These days EVERYBODY would believe the US would do that. We have made ourselves into the world's default villain.

Some points:
- I just saw part of a TV show - it looked serious, but I don't know - so that's why I posted this here, just to find out whether this was a "known" story or not. I didn't take note of any sources or so, and I'm not sure that I believe it. It just "looked credible".
- I don't think that, if it were true, the US was the "bad bad boy". The russians, after all, let their crew die slowly, too. It would only illustrate that a few hundred meter below the sea surface, the cold war still goes on. In fact, it looks terribly like "the hunt for red october" with Sean Connery !

 

[russ_watters]

Well, it is obvious that something terrible happened there. What about that sub that got "grounded" off of Guam? Yeah, like that happens all the time.

As a matter of fact, it does happen quite often. Once a year or so.

It would only illustrate that a few hundred meter below the sea surface, the cold war still goes on. In fact, it looks terribly like "the hunt for red october" with Sean Connery !

Don't get me wrong - The Hunt for Red October was fiction, but it wasn't far off the mark (read: "Blind-Man's Bluff" - great book about Cold War sub exploits). Its just that nothing like that has happened for about 2 decades. These days, its a major event when a Russian navy ship is able to leave port! A couple of years ago I spent about 3 months tooling around the Baltic and North seas and saw precisely two Russian ships.

 

[tavarisha]

A little late (kursk)

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/KURSK/kursk.html

They just showed a documentary on swedish television that was in line with the above link...

 

[russ_watters]

a quick comment:

True to form, "whatreallyhappened.org" tells a colorful story that is pretty much just a figment of the author's imagination (a la the 9/11 conspiracy bit they do). The only evidence presented (besides the usual photos-that-don't-show-what-they-say-they-show) is seismographs-that-don't-show-what-they-say-they-show. The rest is just storytelling. The author bets that the target audience either doesn't remember or doesn't care about what actually happened and prefers their story:

What actually happened is that the Russians (Vlad, mostly) covered it as a collision and didn't attempt to rescue the crew for few days while the survivors (there were survivors) suffocated. The reason what actually happened came to light at all is those very seismographs-that-don't-show-what-they-say-they-show. Scientists analyzed the seismographs, found the explosions, and the story broke that it was explosions, not a collision, that sunk the Kursk. Vlad has since admitted that the explosion explanation is correct (don't forget, the Kursk itself has since been recovered). And what of the collision signature on the seismographs-that-don't-show-what-they-say-they-show? Figments of the author's imagination. There is a good reason the experts didn't say anything about a collision: the seismographs don't show one. What is that little rumble on the seismograph? Dunno - a truck (ship?) driving by the seismograph, maybe? Whatever it is, its not a collision. Why can I say that with confidence? Because if it were, the experts who broke the story would have said it was.

http://geology.about.com/library/weekly/aa012801a.htm

http://edition.cnn.com/interactive/world/0008/kursk.timeline/frameset.exclude.html

 

[ACrowley]

The Kursk was sunk by USS Menphis and USS Toledo using a mark 48 torpedo.
Enjoy.

[crackpot link deleted]

 

[russ_watters]

3 year old conspiracy theory necropost? C'mon. It's not even a good conspiracy theory. It is just pure fantasy.