Nuclear submarine fire ‘was nearly another Chernobyl’

A FIRE at a dry-docked Russian nuclear submarine in December could have sparked a radiation disaster because it was carrying nuclear-armed ballistic missiles, despite official statements to the contrary, a Russian news magazine has claimed.

The respected Kommersant Vlast yesterday said the fire aboard the Delta IV class submarine Yekaterinburg could have triggered powerful explosions that would have destroyed the submarine and scattered radioactive material around a large area.

When the fire erupted on 29 December, Russia’s defence ministry said all weapons had been unloaded before the submarine was moved to a dry-dock for repairs at the Roslyakovo shipyard in the Murmansk region.

It took hundreds of emergency workers more than 20 hours to extinguish the massive blaze. The defence ministry said an unspecified number of crew members remained inside the sub during the fire and that seven crewmen were hospitalised after inhaling carbon monoxide fumes from the blaze.

The fire erupted at wooden scaffolding around the sub and quickly engulfed the vessel’s rubber-coated outer hull.

With the sub’s hydraulic systems incapacitated, the crew had to manually remove heavy torpedoes from tubes in the bow to prevent them from exploding as temperatures rose.

The magazine said that an explosion of torpedoes, each carrying 660lbs of TNT, would have probably destroyed the bow and could have triggered a blast of nuclear missiles and the vessel’s two nuclear reactors.

“Russia was a step away from the largest catastrophe since Chernobyl,” Komersant Vlast commented.

The magazine said that weapons are normally removed from submarines before repairs, but the navy wanted to save time on a lengthy procedure to unload the missiles and torpedoes.