On October 3, 1986, K-219 was cruising approximately 600 miles northeast of the island of Bermuda. The ballistic missile submarine was designed to carry nuclear-tipped missiles within range of the United States as part of the USSR’s nuclear deterrent. A month after leaving the Soviet Northern Fleet’s Gadzhiyevo submarine base, the K-219 was conducting launch exercises, preparing for the day it could launch its nuclear-tipped missiles off the East Coast of the United States.
The K-219 was a “Yankee” class submarine, a NATO intelligence designation likely referring to the submarine’s uncanny resemblance to early US Navy George Washington-class ballistic missile submarines. Unlike previous Soviet missile submarines, which stored their long missiles in the sail, the Yankee class stored shorter, more compact missiles in the hull behind the sail, in a raised hump, just like American submarines. (North Korea’s nuclear submarines, for example, still carry their more primitive missiles under sail.)
At 420 feet long and 38 feet beam, the Russian submarine was a long and lean nuclear-armed predator. The K-219 had a maximum submersible depth of 1,029 feet and a crew of approximately 120. Powered by two 90-megawatt OK-700 nuclear reactors, she could travel underwater at a speed of 27 knots and had a range limited only by her food and water supply.
The K-219 also bristled with armament: in addition to six 533-millimeter torpedo tubes and 18 torpedoes, the submarine carried 16 R-27U submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBM). Each R-27U had a range of 1,900 miles. Its accuracy—measured as circular error probable (CEP), or the maximum distance from the target at which half of the warheads hit—was 1.2 miles. This relatively poor accuracy required a large, civilization-choking warhead to balance it; as a result, each missile carried one megaton thermonuclear warhead or three separate 200-kiloton warheads. To illustrate the destructive firepower of K-219, one megaton is equal to 1,000 kilotons, while the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan is only 16 to 17 kilotons.
On that day in 1986, K-219 was sailing submerged in the Sargasso Sea when a rocket fuel leak caused an explosion. After battling the explosion and fire, the crew was also forced to manually shut down the reactors, a standard procedure aboard a nuclear-powered ship to prevent fire from breaking through the reactors. The accident killed four crew members (one of whom died when the reactors were shut down) and injured an unknown number of others.
After three days of fighting to save the ship, it was taken under tow by the Soviet merchant ship Krasnogvardejsk. The towline suddenly snapped and K-219 sank in 18,000 feet of water. In high-level interviews, Soviet officials said they believed the fuselage was imploding at 2,296 feet.
Aerial view of the starboard bow of the K-129, showing damage to the starboard missile hatch. This photo was probably taken by a US Navy P-3C Orion patrol aircraft.
The accident resulted in the loss of at least 16 thermonuclear warheads as well as two nuclear reactors. Admiral Vladimir Chernavin, then head of the Soviet Navy, explained to the Soviet leadership that the high explosive and plutonium aboard each nuclear warhead were contained in metal spheres. The spheres would gradually corrode in the salt water, Chernavin explained, and “a corrosion process will begin that will lead to the spread of radioactivity.” However, the radioactivity would be contained and not reach the surface, he said. Chernavin also explained that both reactors would corrode and spill radioactivity, but “that would happen very slowly, over decades.”
