Remembering the Kursk Submarine Sinking
Claudio Paschoa
October 3, 2013
On August 12 2000, K-141, a Russian Navy Oscar-II class nuclear-powered cruise missile submarine, known to the world as Kursk, was lost with all hands when it sank in the Barents Sea. Kursk, was a Project 949A (known by its NATO reporting name as Oscar II). It was named after the Russian city Kursk, where the largest tank battle in military history, the Battle of Kursk, took place in 1943 during WWII. One of the first vessels completed after the end of the Soviet Union, it was commissioned into the Russian Navy's Northern Fleet. At 154 m (505.03 ft) long and four stories high, she was the largest attack submarine ever built. The Kursk sortied on an exercise to fire dummy torpedoes at the Kirov-class battle cruiser, Pyotr Velikiy, flag ship of the Northern Fleet.