| Dying Young
During the cold war we lived under a threat, our leaders created and sustained a myth of a destructive power dwelling under our earth and in the steel bellies of our submarines, we listened to stories in the playground of how many times we could destroy Hiroshima, how many times we could destroy our planet and we lived with images of how those of us who survived would scavenge in a post nuclear wasteland. This threat of destruction became more powerful than destruction itself, as weapons became faster and deadlier, the time it would take us to react became of paramount importance, our capacity for an automated response replaced our capacity for dialogue. This detante, this stand off, was fuelled by the continuing reduction of warning time; in 1962 the two superpowers had 15 minutes warning time for war, the installation of Russian rockets on Cuba threatened to reduce the Americans' warning time to 30 seconds. The invasion of the instant succeeded the invasion of territory, the countdown became the scene of battle, the final frontier.* In 1986, as Reagan and Gorbachev prepared to meet in Reykjavik for a summit that would end the cold war, a Russian submarine, the K219, then part of the largest Soviet naval fleet ever assembled, was on permanent station off the US coast. On October 3rd it was 300 miles off the coast of Bermuda being shadowed by an American hunter-killer sub, the USS Augusta, in a frighteningly routine game of cat and mouse in the Atlantic waters - an unofficial territorial war game played out regularly between opposing submarines. During a 360 degree turn, the K219 struck the bow of the American ship and blew a hole in one of its own missile tubes, causing a missile to explode out of its casing and into the sea. The submarine sank, filling with deadly gas from the mixture of seawater and missile fuel from a fire that had erupted in the missile chamber, three seamen were killed instantly. The Russian captain surfaced the sub for the first time in western waters as the crew of the Augusta and the Naval HQ controllers looked on, not realising that the open missile hatch was the result of the collision. All American eastern military bases were placed on the highest alert short of all out war, watching for the opening of the other missile hatches which would indicate their launch and initiate immediate massive retaliation. Fourteen hours after the collision, the Russian crew had doused the fires, but the heat had disabled the safety systems and in the submarine's atomic heart, a chain fission reaction had begun in the nuclear reactors which would lead to meltdown and the possibility of triggering the launch of the remaining missiles. The fallout 'footprint' would cover all the major cities on the eastern seaboard, and with the remote reactor shut-down disabled, the only way to halt meltdown was to lower the reactor rods by hand. At that point everybody was blind, the White House didn't know what was going on in Moscow, and Moscow didn't know what was going on in K219, it was a microcosm of the cold war and where it had led us. The only two crew members who could reach the reactor chamber were Apprentice Seaman Premnin, and Senior Lieutenant Belikov, and they were ordered over the intercom by the sub's captain to enter the chamber with 80 minutes of oxygen canisters. Premnin and Belikov entered the 65C reactor chamber and began manually lowering the raised reactor rods back into their casings with a crude ratchet. Over half an hour, they hand cranked three of the four rods back into position, but with the last rod still raised, Premnin collapsed and Belikov carried him to the adjacent compartment before returning to the reactor. Belikov collapsed soon after. Facing a cataclysmic disaster, the sub's captain guided his ship away from the American coast instead of heading for the official safe haven of Cuba, so breaking a cardinal rule in an attempt to limit the damage to the American coastline. Astonishingly, Premin regained consciousness. returned to the reactor compartment and hauled Belikov out before re-entering with only minutes of oxygen left. On the point of complete exhaustion, he lowered the last rod and reported the reactors shut down to his captain. But as more lethal gas escaped, the pressure in the compartment sealed the escape hatch shut. All that could be heard over the intercom was the sound of sobbing breaths before Sergei Premnin died. The crew were ordered to abandon ship and were picked up by Russian trawlers. On Oct 6th at 22.30 hours, the captain of K219 left his ship in a dinghy before it sank. Five days later the Reykjavik talks went ahead which initiated the end of the cold war. Not one word had been exchanged between the Russian and American ships. On return to St Petersburg, the captain of the sub was officially dismissed and so disgraced, although video tapes show he was cheered by his peers at the submariners' club. He left public life to run a small import export business in Yekaterinberg. Archive material on the incident in the Kremlin is highly classified, and after minimal initial reporting, the US refuses to comment on the crisis, even to confirm the involvement of its submarine. Seaman Premnin was a young conscript, two weeks away from his 21st birthday, he was doing his national service and was known as being very bright and a good worker. He was from a peasant family, and loved his village. He often talked of returning there after he finished his national service. There is a small unofficial monument to Sergei Premnin at the school in his home village of Skorniakovo. Although he was awarded the Red Star posthumously, there are no official statues or plaques to celebrate the apprentice submariner, whose final actions along with Britanov's, saved several American cities from catastrophe and avoided a confrontation that would almost certainly have reversed the peace process. References: This story was reported in the Guardian newspaper, 22 November 1996. * 'Speed and Politics', Paul Virilio IMPLICATIONS:
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