Word: vessel
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...Captain Gennadi Lyachin and nearly a score of others crowded into the control room of the nuclear submarine Kursk, Saturday, Aug. 12, was to be a day of pride and triumph. The vessel, one of the Russian navy's newest and most powerful cruise-missile submarines, was at periscope depth during the second day of a 30-ship exercise in the Barents Sea, about 90 miles northeast of Murmansk. These were the biggest Russian naval maneuvers in several years, and it was a rare opportunity for Lyachin to put his boat through its paces with a full-scale task force...
Evidence later obtained from underwater cameras shows that the blast tore open the entire double-hulled forward section of the 505-ft. vessel, an area the size of a school gymnasium. Seawater would have slammed into the torpedo and cruise-missile compartments, instantly killing the men on duty there. In the control room just aft of the shattered weapons compartments, Lyachin, the five staff officers and the dozen or so officers and petty officers manning the ship's controls would have had no time to react before the combined power of the blast and seawater tore through, destroying the gleaming...
...announcement for two days, then issued a bland statement that there had been a "technical fault" and the boat was on the sea bottom. After the seriousness of the accident became clearer, Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev declared that there was "incontrovertible evidence" that the sub had collided with another vessel. In past years Soviet and U.S. vessels have had near collisions while spying on each other, but the Pentagon firmly rejected any suggestion that U.S. submarines were involved. Later, Russian officials dropped the collision claim and blamed an explosion in the weapons area, a theory supported by Western experts...
...Information is sketchy about the fate of the Kursk: Although Moscow insists that the vessel's two nuclear reactors hadn't failed, they've clearly been shut off, leaving the vessel unable to generate the ballast to surface. The use of the world collision, of course, begs the question of what exactly the Kursk is supposed to have struck. The Barents Sea's strategic location makes it one of the world's most heavily trafficked submarine routes, but there's no indication thus far that the stricken vessel was hit by another...
...negative spin on the prospects of rescuing the crew suggests the Russian navy has learned the wiles of media management. To be sure, plenty can go wrong in a complex mission to establish an air link and an escape route from the vessel at a depth of 350 feet in Arctic waters. But diminishing the prospects for their survival means the news can't get any worse, only better...