Kursk Submarine Disaster

“실종된 타이타닉호 관광 잠수정” 뉴스를 보고 이 사건이 생각났다.

Transcript

In August 2000, some old battle lines have not gone away.
An explosion in the icy Barents Sea above northern Russia threatens to reignite the Cold War.
It registers as 3.5 on the Richter scale.
Seismologists all across the region are able to detect it because the explosion is so massive.
It sourced a Russian submarine, the Kursk.
The Russian Navy fears the Kursk has been hit by an American or British submarine spying on maneuvers.
It’s the first major crisis for Russia’s new leader.
This is a time of just enormous transition for Russia.
They had a new president in the Kremlin, President Putin. He was finding his feet.
It was an ongoing live drama with people who are at the bottom of the ocean, who are literally suffocating to death while the whole world watch.
A hundred Russian sailors are facing a slow death trapped in a nuclear submarine.
A knocking sound is reported to be heard coming from the Kursk.
The families of the 118 sailors aboard want action and answers.
Despite offers, President Putin refuses to accept help from the West.
The Russians send in their own men.
The heroic rescue submersible pilots that day who were trying to do their best, but their equipment was fatally flawed.
Five days after the blast, the Russian government asks Norway and Britain to help.
A combined rescue team reaches the Kursk. Conditions look promising.
I was really quite amazed that you could actually see the submarine.
And you could just see a big white circle, which was the luminous paint around the escape hatch.
It was so much bigger than I expected. So, so much bigger.
You just hammered on the edges of the structure to see if there’s any response.
A rescue tapping code, we call it. The main thing was to see if there’s any response.
There was none. There was no response at all.
Next, they tried to open the valve to the hatch to see if the submarine is flooded.
Survivors may yet be unconscious.
Gas did escape from the hatch.
Was there a last gasp of breathable air left in the sub?
It was analyzed on the surface and it was a very nice smell of a bone fiber.
As the rotten air drains from the Kursk. All hope of finding survivors is lost.
And the truth of what went wrong finally floats to the surface.
The West loves stories about Russian incompetence, and this, of course, was a classic screwup by the Russian military.
The Kursk is destroyed by its own faulty weapons.
One single torpedo was the cause of the Kursk tragedy.
It detonates the entire war load of the Kursk submarine.
The key players in the Russian government at that time were much more concerned with pride and nationalism, much less concerned with the opportunity of saving the sailors who were surviving aboard the Kursk.
In the end, all secrets become obsolete. But human life is the one thing that is priceless.