High Seas Danger!

By Daniel Benjamin

Early on Monday, June 26, word reached Bodo, Norway's military and civilian surveillance and rescue center 50 miles north of the Arctic Circle, that a nuclear-powered Soviet submarine was dead in the water and billowing smoke 65 miles off the northern coast. There was an immediate sense of deja vu: in April another Soviet nuclear sub sank in the Norwegian Sea, with the loss of 42 lives. Following standard procedure, the center telexed its counterpart in the Soviet port of Murmansk to inquire if help was needed.

Not until 80 minutes later did an answer arrive at Bodo: the Soviets declined help, obviously not eager to have foreigners, especially military men from a NATO country, clambering on their sub or plucking their sailors from the sea. Later in the day, Soviet officials revealed that an air seal in the cooling unit of one of the vessel's nuclear reactors had ruptured. By that time, the stricken sub, an Echo II-class vessel with a crew of about 90 and believed to be carrying eight nuclear missiles, had begun crawling eastward under auxiliary diesel power, escorted by a Soviet freighter.

This time, it appeared, the worst had been averted. The vessel's two reactors were shut down, and no fatalities were reported. Soviet officials insisted there had been no venting of radiation, thus no threat to people or the environment; Norwegian tests showed no unusual radiation in the area. Nonetheless, the accident dealt another blow to the prestige of the world's largest undersea fleet.

Of all modern engineering achievements, few are as complex as the nuclear submarine; only manned space vehicles come close. And as is the case in space flight, accidents are bound to happen in a global armada of about 367 N-subs -- 195 Soviet, 133 U.S., 19 British, nine French and at least one Chinese. In the 1980s alone, according to a recent report by Greenpeace and Washington's Institute for Policy Studies, about 60 -- the number is a minimum due to spotty disclosure records -- nuclear sub accidents have been logged, including fires, collisions and leaks of radioactivity.

During the 1960s, both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. lost two subs. Neither side is known to have lost a sub during the '70s, though the Soviets had several fatal accidents, some of the deaths caused by radiation poisoning from reactor malfunctions. Then the Soviet navy ran into a streak of bad luck. In 1983 a Charlie I class with a crew of 100 went down in the Pacific off the Kamchatka peninsula. In 1986 a Yankee I-class boat was lost east of Bermuda. With the sinking of the Mike-class vessel in April, a prototype that is believed to be the most advanced vessel built in the Soviet Union, the death toll for the decade took another leap.

Experts say the environmental threat posed by the nuclear reactors and atomic weapons lost at sea is small. Reactors are contained in casings so strong that they remain intact even under the tremendous pressure of very deep water; missiles crumple at great depth but will not detonate unless they are electronically "armed" -- something that would only happen in wartime. NATO intelligence has confirmed that nine reactors and 50 nuclear weapons of various sizes are resting on ocean floors. Said one Danish official: "Nuclear things don't just go off, but the idea of these weapons and reactors rusting away on the seabed does not seem to be a safe thought."

Soviet secretiveness over accidents has been a cause of upset in the West, where high standards are observed regarding disclosure of nuclear accidents. In Norway patience is wearing particularly thin. Anger was plainly evident last week when Foreign Minister Thorvald Stoltenberg denounced Soviet reluctance to divulge information as "unacceptable."

No one expects sub mishaps to occur at a rate of one every three months, but naval experts predict the troubles will continue. "The incidents were coincidental," says James McCoy of London's International Institute for Strategic Studies, "but the problem is that the frequency of this sort of incident is higher in the Soviet navy per reactor than anywhere else." Admiral Sir James Eberle, a former NATO commander, agrees: "There are indications that their engineering is not of the standards needed in the nuclear business, that their attitudes to safety means their training standards are not adequate. Soviet subs are more dangerous because they are more liable to accidents."

Western experts have long had reservations about Soviet reactor design, but deficiencies may be even worse in the areas of fire prevention, systems monitoring and damage control. The most recent accident indicates that the Soviet navy may be facing another problem common to all sub fleets: long-term stress in aging vessels. The Echo IIs were built in the early and mid-'60s; last week's accident could point to insufficient maintenance.

Another explanation -- that the problems extend beyond engineering and involve crew training -- came from an unexpected corner. In the current issue of the Soviet publication Smena, which went to press well before the Echo II accident, a Captain V. Ovchinnikov criticized in the letters column the training of submarine crews: "It will probably surprise you if I say that the nuclear installations on our submarines are operated by people who are not sufficiently trained, and some of them not trained at all. But we still set sail. The operators know and can do only 30% to 50% of what they should know and be able to do."

With reporting by Lisa Distelheim/London and Julian Isherwood/Copenhagen