K-19: The Widowmaker: The Secret Story of the Soviet Nuclear Submarine

by Peter A. Huchthausen

Release Date: 01 July, 2002

Edition: Paperback

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K-19 - Another Appalling Soviet Naval Disaster

On 4 July 1961, the K-19, the Soviet Union's first nuclear powered ballistic missile submarine, suffered a nuclear reactor cooling malfunction 1,500 miles from home and 150 feet below the ocean's surface. Only the commander's quick reaction and the sacrifices of the submarine's crew prevented that failure from turning into a nuclear catastrophe. "An explosion on the surface," writes author Peter Huchthausen, a retired U.S. Navy Captain, "would have released a massive cloud of nuclear contamination, dwarfing the released radiation of the Chernobyl explosion." Although the bulk of the crew were saved, nine died from severe radiation poisoning. A violation of safety procedures during the installation of the primary cooling system was the cause of the accident.

K-19 The Widowmaker is a well-researched, well-written, and highly informative book. The author served as the senior U.S. Naval attach� in Moscow from 1987 to 1990 and visited Russia between 1991 and 1996 collecting material for this book. The story, based on the memoirs of its commander, Captain Nikolai Zateyev, is a compelling one of extreme courage and heroism in the face of an unseen and terrifying adversary. Yet, the book is more than just the account of a single submarine and its crew. Only six of the its eleven chapters are devoted to the K-19. The rest of the book covers the history of the Soviet nuclear submarine force (which numbered almost 200 boats at its peak in 1989), the Navy's horrendously bad safety record, and its legacy of nuclear dumping and contamination. A final "Afterward" focuses on the inspiration for the movie.

Soviet naval history is replete with a long series of appalling disasters. In 1955 the Novorossysk, the 24,000-ton battleship and flagship of the Black Sea Fleet, exploded, capsized, and sank in the Black Sea port of Sevastopol with a loss of 608 seaman. Revealed for the first time to the Soviet public and the world in 1988, it was the largest peacetime naval calamity of the 20th century. Huchthausen lists fifty-five major Soviet and Russian naval accidents between 1952 and 2000 in an appendix at the end of the book. The first listed is the loss on 15 December 1952 of the Whiskey-class diesel attack submarine S-117, which sank in the Pacific Ocean with all 47 crewmembers. The most recent was the loss on 12 August 2000 of the Oscar II class K-141 Kursk, which sank in the Kola Gulf with all 118 crewmembers. The Kursk was salvaged in October 2001. Between 1958 and 1968 alone, the Soviet Navy lost seven submarines and 200 men, with another 400 men gravely irradiated. The author shows that these mishaps were the result of a Soviet leadership obsessed with the production of large numbers of nuclear submarines and other naval vessels at the cost of basic quality control, safety, and the lives of their own sailors. Recent newspapers stories of the cash-strapped and accident prone Russian Navy indicate this obsession continues to haunt Moscow.

Huchthausen also highlights the grave problem of nuclear dumping. Between the 1950s and 1993 the Russian Navy dumped liquid and solid radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel at sea in designated sites throughout the Barents Sea and Pacific Ocean. In the Karen Sea dumping area alone, the largest of the Soviet nuclear graveyards, there were more than 3.5 million curies of nuclear waste recorded in 1992. This is the equivalent of one-tenth of the radiological contamination leaked to the atmosphere during the 1985 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. The contamination in the Karen Sea exists in the form of eight scuttled submarine hulls, sixteen discarded reactors (six with nuclear fuel still inside), and 9,000 additional tons of discarded fuel assemblies and liquid nuclear waste, all in water no deeper than 150 feet. Additionally, some 46 nuclear warheads are scattered throughout the world's seabeds, 44 of them in 18,000 feet of water 450 miles northeast of Bermuda, where they were lost inside the hull of the world's first nuclear powered submarine to sink at sea with ballistic missiles. The Yankee I class K-219 sank on 3 October 1986 with 32 nuclear missile warheads and eight nuclear-tipped torpedoes. According to Huchthausen, only a dramatic emergency manual shutdown by a young Soviet seaman prevented a nuclear disaster. The accident occurred just five days prior to the celebrated Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Reykjavik, Iceland. The threat posed by nuclear weapons lost at sea is a serious one. Plutonium from atomic warheads, although heavy enough to sink into the seabed, has the potential for remaining a threat to sea life and the food chain for its entire half life, or decay period, which is estimated as 200,000 years, a very grim prospect indeed.

The problem does not end there. Russia's Pacific Fleet currently stores 10,000 atomic fuel rods from dismantled nuclear submarines aboard two rusting ships in the Sea of Japan and at a storage facility southeast of Vladivostok. According to Huchthausen, the condition of the two storage ships is so bad that they are in danger of sinking alongside their piers. The combined level of radiation aboard the two ships is four million curies. The two ships and the Pacific Fleet land storage facility are already filled to capacity. And a plan to build a proper barge to treat nuclear waste is also more than five and a half years behind schedule, despite assistance from the United States and Japan. One hopes that America's and NATO's new War on Terrorism, with its imperative on keeping nuclear weapons and material out of the hands of extremists, will give much needed international momentum to cleaning up this mess.

Peter Huchthausen has not only chronicled the history of a brave group of Soviet submariners and the government that betrayed them, but has also highlighted the threat still posed to all by nuclear reactors and weapons littering our oceans and seas. Cleaning up this legacy of the Cold War will be a long-term international endeavor if we are to avoid a lethal inheritance of nuclear contamination for generations to come.

Well Researched companion to the movie

A forgotten piece of history (and one that was covered up for quite some time), the heroic story of the K-19 crew and the prevention of a nuclear disaster at sea is a classic story well told in this book. Author Huchthausen is a former US Navy Captain which allows the author to provide unique insight into the portions of Captain Zateyev's memoirs published here for the first time.

This voulume is more for military history (and history)buffs than the casual movie fan. Be warned that there is a large amount of the big dedicated to presenting why subs were built the way they were and what misfortunes the Soviets (and the US) had with their nuclear class submarines. There's a large section devoted to pictures of the crew as well as scenes from the movie starring Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson.

Well written and researched K19 is an outstanding book that presents a difficult period in world history from a very different perspective. We've all seen or heard the political side of what occurred during the cold war but rarely has there been a first hand account of what it was like on the front lines.

K19 manages to presents a difficult time in history with a well balanced view.