The Storm over the Squall
It has all the elements of a Tom Clancy thriller: a sunken Russian submarine with all hands lost, sophisticated Western naval surveillance, spies versus counterspies, high-level Kremlin intrigue, and a revolutionary secret-weapons technology that could turn battles. Although the story of the Russian VA-111 Shkval (Squall) supercavitating torpedo had been percolating in the West for years, it was really only last August 12 when the high-speed undersea missile splashed into the news. On that day the K-141Kursk, an Oscar II-class nuclear-powered submarine, sank mysteriously with 118 people on board in 354 feet of the icy waters of the Barents Sea.
UNDERWATER MISSLE. The VA-111 Shkval (Squall) supercavitating torpedo, shown here being launched from a Russian Navy Oscar II-class submarine, rockets to a speed over 200 mph, which would give a targeted vessel little chance to evade it.
More than twice the length of a jumbo jet, the undersea behemoth was one of the most modern subs in the Russian navy. It had been built with a single primary mission in mind--to attack NATO aircraft carrier groups. The Kursk's double-hull titanium construction and internal compartmentation made it extremely resistant to damage; only a very serious mishap could have sent it to the bottom.
The Kursk had been taking part in the largest Russian Northern Fleet exercise in a decade. Western naval intelligence assets were out in force to monitor the maneuvers. Not only were two U.S. Los Angeles-class attack subs on the scene to eavesdrop, but so was the USNS Loyal, a surface spy ship that tows a sensitive sonar array of listening devices. At least one British submarine was cruising nearby as well.
It soon became clear that the Kursk's tragic end was causing East-West political friction when word came that the U.S. had presented the Russian government with detailed surveillance data collected on the day of the incident. Such an exchange was unusual, to say the least, given that it would provide the Russians with the dimensions of the American secret monitoring effort. Whatever the case, it's clear that the U.S. Department of Defense believed the Kursk's mission to be highly significant. The question was why?
Although the Russian government claimed at first that the calamity had been caused by a collision with one of the foreign subs in the vicinity, this assertion was dismissed as disinformation in the West. The scuttlebutt in Pentagon circles was that the sinking was precipitated by an explosion during a test of an improved version of the Shkval torpedo, a unique device that manages to defeat hydrodynamic drag and achieve extremely high subsea speeds by traveling inside a cavity of water vapor. America and the European powers have been seeking information on this novel weapons technology ever since news of it arrived after the fall of the Soviet Union.
[Some Western observers subscribe to entirely different theories regarding the cause of the sinking. One involves the accidental launching of a antisubmarine missile from a Russian cruiser taking part in the naval exercises. Yet another proposed scenario has the tragic mishap occurring when the Kursk had trouble test-firing the top-secret torpedo/supersonic missile, 100-RU Veder (NATO designation: SS-N-16A Stallion), which features a 200-mile range and a 220-pound warhead].
Several months prior to the accident, in April, the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) in Moscow had arrested an American businessman, Edmond Pope, and a Russian associate, on charges of stealing state secrets. Pope was allegedly caught red-handed trying to buy the design details of the Shkval from a Russian scientist who had helped develop it.
Pope is a former U.S. Navy captain who had worked in naval intelligence and had founded the navy's Foreign Science and Technologies Program, which promoted the exchange of scientific information between former Soviet nations and the U.S. When he retired from military service, Pope started two companies that specialized in bringing foreign maritime technology to the West. Observers now believe that Pope was actually an American intelligence officer posing as a businessman. The speculation is that Pope was tasked to obtain certain technical details about the high-velocity torpedo prior to the scheduled tests in the Barents Sea.
Coinciding with Pope's seizure was the arrest of Daniel Howard Kiely, a researcher in advanced power systems technology at the Applied Research Laboratory at Pennsylvania State University, which develops torpedoes for the U.S. Navy. The 68-year-old professor is said to have been in Moscow to provide Pope with technical advice. Kiely was interrogated and his belongings impounded. Soon afterward, he was freed from custody and returned home.
The FSB charged Pope with paying $30,000 to Anatoliy Babkin, head of the rocket engineering department at the Bauman Moscow State Technical University, for information on the Shkval. According to Russian media reports, Babkin was in fact a double agent who set Pope up, a belief supported by Babkin's relatively rapid release by the FSB.
Pope, who faced a 20-year prison sentence at hard labor, was tried and subsequently convicted of espionage. Soon afterward, however, Russian president Vladimir Putin unexpectedly set aside the conviction and the American was quickly repatriated.
Pope's ordeal was only the latest manifestation of NATO's interest in the Shkval. The first public mention of the weapon in the West emerged in a Russian handbook of Soviet warships published in 1991. Following persistent rumors about its startling capabilities, an April 1995 article by David Miller in Jane's Intelligence Review ("Supercavitation: Going to War in a Bubble") stated that Russia had developed an ultrafast underwater missile for which the West had no equivalent. With a speed of 230 miles per hour--several times that of conventional torpedoes--the rocket-powered Shkval is sufficiently swift that it would give a targeted vessel little chance to evade it. The weapon, which was deployed in the early 1970s, is said to be a "straight-shooter" that follows a linear trajectory. Its maximum range is listed at about six nautical miles with a running depth of about 400 yards.
Though the concept for a high-speed underwater missile was first proposed to the Russian Navy in the late 1950s, an order was finally issued several years later as a way to counter the U.S. Navy's newly introduced Polaris missile submarines, says Norman Friedman, a naval weapons expert attached to the U.S. Naval Institute. The idea was to have the capability during nuclear war to strike the American sub quickly before it could launch all of its intercontinental ballistic missiles, he explains. An extended period of R&D followed thereafter.
The still-unrivaled undersea vehicle was developed by a team of designers from the Research Institute of Applied Hydromechanics in Moscow led by Yevgeny Rakov and Georgy Logvinovich, together with industry partners. The Shkval was first deployed around 1977, according to Friedman. During the Pope trial, it emerged that factories which assemble the torpedo are located in Kazakhstan, Kirgizia, and Ukraine. A Ukrainian facility--probably the Institute of Hydromechanics in Kiev--was said to possess a "complete volume of data" on the torpedo, save for the warhead.
Earlier this year, Patrick E. Tyler, a reporter for The New York Times, quoted retired Russian rear admiral and former sub commander Valery I. Aleksin as saying: "This was a complete new-stage breakthrough in the development of underwater weapons. And as far as I know, it is impossible to protect yourself against this kind of torpedo, and the Americans are behind in the development of this kind of technology."
Some Western intelligence sources say that the Shkval was designed to give diesel-powered Soviet subs of the era a chance against stealthy American submarines. On hearing the screws of an incoming conventional torpedo, the Shkval would be launched in a "snap-shot," with the aim of forcing the attacker to evade and hopefully cut the attacking torpedo's guidance wire.
RUSSIAN SQUALL. The Russian Shkval torpedo (in cutaway) is thought to feature a flat disk cavitator at the nose to create a partial cavity that is expanded into a supercavity by gases injected from forward-mounted vents. Small starter rockets get the weapon moving until the cavity is formed, whereupon the large central rocket kicks in.
In effect, the Shkval is a sub-killer, they say, particularly if it's fitted with a tactical nuclear warhead. If true, some in the West consider the torpedo a "revenge weapon" because any Russian ship that launched a nuclear-tipped Shkval against a target only a few miles away would likely also succumb to the shock wave. Admiral Aleksin is reported in the Times article, however, to have said that Russian submarines are sufficiently robust to withstand such a blast. Some experts, including Friedman, dispute the weapon's ultimate utility in an anti-submarine role: "The Shkval turned out to be more impressive in theory than in practice."
Other informed sources claim that the missile is in fact an offensive weapon designed to destroy entire aircraft carrier battle groups with a higher-yield nuclear warhead. During a nuclear war, it could even be directed at a port or coastal land target.
"As there are no known countermeasures to such a weapon," states Miller's 1995 Jane's article, "its deployment could have a significant effect on future maritime operations, both surface and subsurface, and could put Western naval forces at a considerable disadvantage."
Russia has openly offered the Shkval for sale at international arms shows in recent years. Though few in the West have witnessed the Russian Shkval missile in action, several expert sources have seen a marketing video distributed to potential buyers. As one described the scene: "First of all, you only see the Shkval from the rear; you don't get to view the front of the torpedo where all the interesting stuff is--the cavitator, the ventilation ports, and so forth. The scene opens with the Shkval being launched off a patrol boat. After it drops below the surface there's an extended pause, when without warning, there's a bright flash in the water and you sense some commotion underneath the waves. After a short time, a triangular trail of bubbles starts to appear at the surface and moves off into the distance at a good pace. Meanwhile, not much else happens until all of a sudden, you see a little explosion way off on the horizon, followed by the delayed report. It's pretty amazing to see how far the thing has gone in such a short time."
U.S. intelligence has received several indications that the Russians were working on an advanced, much longer-range Shkval. Russia's Itar-Tass news agency reported in February 1998, for instance, that tests of a "modernized" Shkval were scheduled by Russia's Pacific Fleet for that spring.
Soon after the Kursk accident, Russian submarine specialist, Vladimir Gundarov, reported in Red Star (the official daily newspaper of the Russian military) that despite high-level resistance from the navy, the Shkval's original solid rocket propulsion system was replaced several years ago with a liquid fuel-based system. This system burns "a monopropellant containing a nitrate ester-based energetic ingredient" that can be very unstable and easy to ignite unless it's mixed with chemical stabilizers. Although the liquid-fuel torpedoes are difficult to store and dangerous to handle, they are significantly cheaper to manufacture.
Gundarov also wrote that the Kursk was retrofitted during the same period with a potentially problematic torpedo-launching system against the wishes of many high-ranking Russian navy officials who considered it to be "complicated and dangerous." The existing high-cost silver-zinc battery and propeller system used for years to send the Shkval out to a safe distance and orient it toward its target before its rocket engine ignites was replaced. The new system employs a higher-risk technology that uses a gas stream to propel the torpedo out the tube. When the weapon is triggered, liquid fuel is burned generating pressurized gas that shoots the Shkval out the launch tube.
It is perhaps suggestive that Gundarov's reporting on this topic was removed abruptly from the Red Star Web site only hours after it was posted.
Guidance at speed had been unavailable on the original model of the torpedo due to the difficulty sonar has in penetrating the surrounding gas envelope and what experts call "self-noise," but the Russians are said to have now added a homing capability to the deadly device. Reportedly, the improved homing version runs out at very high speed, then slows to search for its target. If this is true, the new version troubles top U.S. Navy brass, who would like to know as much as possible about the advanced Shkval before it finds its way to places such as China and Iran.
After the Kursk disaster, several Russian media reports said that the sub was indeed testing a new weapons system, though few details were provided. The sources also stated that civilian torpedo design and engineering experts from the Dagdiesel defense company were on board the sunken sub. Moreover, the Kursk reportedly was at periscope depth (with periscope extended) when the catastrophe occurred. That is precisely the position from which a submarine fires its torpedoes.
Based on their examination of the sonar and seismic data, the final moments of the doomed craft have been pieced together by Western military experts, who believe a test firing went disastrously wrong, igniting highly flammable propellant. The resulting initial explosion blew a hole in the right-hand side of the Kursk's nose, where the torpedo room is located. Water flooded in, causing the pride of the Russian submarine fleet to sink to the bottom in seconds. There soon followed another larger explosion--actually several nearly simultaneous detonations, which together amounted to about 5 tons of TNT. This scenario seems to be supported by reports from Norwegian rescue divers who said they saw extensive oxidative scarring on the inside of the sub's forward hull.
Seven months after the sinking of the Kursk, Russian vice-admiral Valery Dorogin confirmed that a small explosion was followed by a large one in the torpedo area of the stricken submarine. He added that the cause of the first blast had not been established, however, leaving open the possibility that the Oscar-class sub struck another vessel or a mine on August 12. "It is evident that we will never know what the cause of the first explosion was," he told a news conference. Several weeks after Dorogin's statement, reports emerged from Moscow that a note left by Lieut. Rashid Aryapov, one of the sailors who survived the explosions and then later succumbed to exposure and lack of oxygen, said that the Kursk was sunk by the misfiring of a practice torpedo.
Perhaps recently announced efforts to salvage the doomed submarine from the sea floor will eventually bring the truth to light--S.A.
Images: PHILIP HOWE
