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Construction of the Kursk began in Severodvinsk, near Archangelsk, in 1992. It was launched for the first time in 1994 and formally commissioned in December of that year. The ship was "baptized" by an Orthodox priest in 1995. The Kursk was the last of the large Oscar-II class submarines to be designed and approved in the Soviet era. At 155 metres in length, and four storeys high, it was the largest attack submarine ever built. The class had also been described as "unsinkable" on account of its double hull. The outer hull was made of high-nickel high-chrome content steel just one-third of an inch thick, that had exceptionally good resistance to corrosion and a weak magnetic signature to aid in evasive maneuvers. There was a two metre gap to the two inch thick steel inner hull.
Kursk formed part of the Russian Northern Fleet . The Fleet had suffered tremendous cutbacks through lack of funding throughout the 1990s. Many submarines had been brought into docks along the Barents Sea and left to rust. All but the most essential frontline equipment was inadequately serviced, including search and rescue equipment. Sailors of the Northern Fleet had gone unpaid in the mid-1990s due to money being re-appropriated before reaching the Arctic North. However the end of the decade represented something of a renaissance for the fleet. In 1999 Kursk had carried out a successful reconnaissance mission in the Mediterranean, spying on the United States Navy's Sixth Fleet during the civil war in Yugoslavia. The ship's captain, Captain Gennady Lyachin, was made a Hero of Russia on return to Russia. The training exercise of August 2000 were to be the largest summer drill since the collapse of the Soviet Union ten years before, involving four attack submarines and the Fleet's flagship Peter the Great amongst a flotilla of smaller ships.
The mission began in earnest on the morning of August 12, 2000. As part of the exercise Kursk was to fire two dummy torpedoes with the battleship as its target. At 1128 hours local time (0728 UTC), high-test peroxide (HTP), a form of highly concentrated hydrogen peroxide used to provide the explosive propulsion required to fire a torpedo, seeped through rust in the torpedo casing The HTP reacted with copper and brass in the tube from which the torpedo was fired, causing an unstoppable chemical explosion. The explosion blasted with the force of 100 kg of TNT and registered 1.5 on the Richter scale.
The watertight door isolating the torpedo room from the rest of the sub was left open prior to firing. This was apparently common practise, on account of excess compressed air being released into the torpedo room when a weapon was fired. The open door allowed the blast to rip back through the first two of nine compartments on the huge sub, certainly killing the seven men in the first compartment, and at least injuring or disorientating the thirty-six men in the second compartment.
Although no-one can be sure of the events of the next two minutes, it is known that captain of the ship, in the third compartment, did not have time to send a distress signal. An emergency buoy designed to release from a submarine automatically when emergency conditions such as rapidly changing pressure or fire are detected, intended to help rescuers locate the stricken vessel, also failed to deploy. In the Mediterranean mission, the previous summer, fears of the buoy deploying accidentally thereby giving away the sub's position to the US fleet, had led to the buoy being disabled.
Two minutes and fifteen seconds later a much larger explosion ripped through the sub. Seismic reports show that the explosion occurred at the same depth as the sea bed, suggesting the collision with the sea floor, combined with rising temperatures due to the initial explosion, had caused further torpedoes to blow up. The second explosion measured 3.5 on the Richter scale.
The explosion ripped a 2 metre square hole in the hull of the craft, designed to withstand depths of 1000 m. The explosion also ripped open the third and fourth compartments. Water poured into these compartments at 90,000 litres per second - killing all those in the compartments, including five officers from 7th SSGNSSGN is the United States Navy hull classification symbol for a cruise missile submarine. The SS denotes a submarine, the G denotes " guided missile" as B denotes " ballistic missile," and the N denotes nuclear power. The US Navy is modifiying surplus Ohi Division Headquarters. The fifth compartment contained the ships nuclear reactors, encased in five further inches of steel. The bulkheads of the five compartment withstood the explosion, causing the nuclear control rods to stay in place and prevent nuclear disaster. Western experts have expressed strong admiration for the Soviet/Russian engineering skill to create a submarine that withstood so much.
Twenty-three men, working in the sixth through to ninth compartments survived the two blasts. They gathered in the ninth compartment, which contained the secondary escape tunnel (the primary tunnel was in the destroyed second compartment). Captain-lieutenant Dmitri Kolesnikov (one of three officers of that rank surviving) appears to have taken charge, writing down the names of those who were in the ninth compartment. The pressure in the compartment at the time of the explosion was the same as that of the surface. Thus it would be possible from a physiological point of view to use the escape hatch to leave the submarine one man at a time, swimming up through 100 metres of Arctic water in a survival suit, to await help floating at the surface. It is not known if the escape hatch was workable from the inside - opinions still differ about how badly the hatch was damaged. However it is likely that the men rejected using the perilous escape hatch even it were operable. They may have preferred instead to take their chances waiting for a rescue vessel to clamp itself onto the escape hatch.
It is not known with certainty how long the remaining men survived in the compartment. As the nuclear reactors had automatically shut down, emergency power soon ran out, plunging the crew into complete blackness and falling temperatures. Kolesnikov wrote two further messages, much less tidily than before. In the last, he wrote
There has been much debate over how long the sailors might have survived. Some, particularly on the Russian side, say that they would've died very quickly. Water leaks into a stationary Oscar-II craft through propeller shafts. At 100 m depth, it would've been impossible to plug these. Others point out that the many superoxide chemical cartridges, used to convert carbon dioxide back to oxygen to enable survival, were found used when the craft was recovered, suggesting that they had survived for several days. Ironically, the cartridges appear to have been the cause of death. A sailor appears to have accidentally brought a cartridge in contact with the sea water, causing a chemical reaction and a flash fire. The official investigation into disaster showed that some men appear to have survived the fire by plunging under the water (the fire marks on the walls indicate the water was at waist level in the lower area at this time). However the fire rapidly used up the remaining oxygen in the air, causing death by asphyxiation.