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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Monday, November 10, 2003

Failings, secrets of Soviets recalled

By William Cole
Advertiser Military Writer

Retired Navy captain and author Peter Huchthausen, who wrote the companion book to the movie "K-19, The Widowmaker," remembers the first time he got a close-up look at some of the ships of the vaunted Soviet navy.

Among Russia's more recent submarine losses was the Kursk, which sank in 2000 and was raised in 2001. All 118 on board were killed. As a naval attache in Moscow in the 1980s, Peter Huchthausen learned about "naval tragedies that had been swept under the rug," by the Soviet Union.

Advertiser library photo • Feb. 18, 2002

It was the mid-1980s, Russia was still a superpower, and Huchthausen was senior U.S. naval attache to Yugoslavia and Romania.

"I always thought in the back of my mind, something's wrong here," Huchthausen said. "They have all these snazzy weapons systems, the high-technology equipment."

But when he looked close, he saw rust around gun mounts, and painted-over radar reflectors.

"You began to wonder if really they were capable of what we thought they were, and in those years, we were painting them as 10 feet tall," said Huchthausen, who worked for U.S. Pacific Command in Hawai'i from 1972 to 1976.

Although long on technology, the Soviets were short on testing, training and safety, and more than 10 years after the superpower's collapse, the nuclear fallout literally is scattered across the world's ocean floors.

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union lost eight submarines, Huchthausen recently told members of the Hawai'i chapter of the Military Officers Association of America.

More than 2,000 Soviet submariners were fatally irradiated and buried in secret graves throughout the Soviet Union, and 4,000 more were seriously injured, Huchthausen said.

It was illegal at the time for Soviet doctors to list radiation as a cause of death, he said. Instead, they were listed as having died from severe trauma caused by stress.

Radioactive waste

Environmentalists say the Soviet Union regularly dumped radioactive waste and nuclear reactors from decommissioned submarines into Arctic waters off the Novaya Zemlya archipelago.

The K-27 was dumped in the Kara Sea in 1981, 13 years after one of its reactors released radiation, according to Bellona, a Norway-based environmental group.

Huchthausen worked for the U.S. 3rd Fleet and then Pacific Command in the 1970s with retired Navy Cmdr. Jack Miller, president of the Hawai'i Military Officers Association of America chapter.

At the time, Huchthausen also was studying Russian and Japanese history at the University of Hawai'i.

Huchthausen recalled when Miller introduced him to author Tom Clancy just before Huchthausen left for Moscow as senior naval attache.

"Jack said c'mon over and meet a friend of mine," Huchthausen recalled.

Clancy was still working as an insurance representative in Maryland but had finished two books, was working on "The Cardinal of the Kremlin," and asked Huchthausen if he could help.

"He didn't travel well. He was afraid to go to Russia to do research, and he thought they were going to kill him after 'The Hunt for Red October,' so he asked if I would take a lot of tourist pictures while I was in Moscow," Huchthausen said. "I did ... and he used these in his descriptions as he wrote 'The Cardinal of the Kremlin.' "

Huchthausen said during his 28 years of service, "stories fell in my lap in almost every position I was in."

As a Navy destroyerman, he took part in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis chasing Soviet subs, the story he told in his book "October Fury."

Spy stories

Huchthausen commanded a unit of river patrol boats in Vietnam, and his first book was "Echoes of the Mekong" in 1996.

Huchthausen's encounters with Soviets as a naval attache were spy novel material.

In 1988 he got a call at the American Embassy from a "determined Russian" who wanted to talk.

His interest was in the Golf-class sub K-129 that disappeared in 1968 off Hawai'i, and portions of which the United States secretly recovered in 1974 in "Project Jennifer" using Howard Hughes' ship Glomar Explorer.

Under a bridge in Moscow, he met the man, a retired Soviet naval officer who had been in a fire on the Echo 2-class K-131, and was now blind.

"He told me that day in the park that his father had been the chief engineer on the K-129," Huchthausen said.

The man wanted to know if his father's remains had been properly disposed of.

"I assured him I didn't know but I would certainly try to find out, and then he said, 'I want to give you something,' and he handed me a package which turned out to be a hand-written record of accidents they had starting in 1955 throughout the Cold War — naval tragedies that had been swept under the rug," Huchthausen said.

Huchthausen did more research and met survivors of the sub K-219, which had an explosion in 1986 and sank in three miles of water northeast of Bermuda. That led to his screenplay work for the HBO movie "Hostile Waters," about a Soviet submarine accident in the Atlantic, and was the material for the movie of the same name with Rutger Hauer, Martin Sheen and Max Von Sydow. He also wrote a book by the same name.

Four men died, most of the crew abandoned ship, and 44 nuclear weapons aboard still lie on the ocean floor, Huchthausen said. The warheads broke up, and the Navy's position is "the deeper, the better" for lost reactors, but deadly plutonium remains, he said.

"Smart people will tell you that at three miles deep, we don't know enough about underwater currents to tell whether or not that stuff is staying there," he said.

Nuclear program

The K-19, meanwhile, was the Soviet Union's answer to Polaris missile subs, and was its first nuclear submarine accident in 1961 when a leak developed in its cooling system in the North Atlantic.

"They launched it without testing it — she didn't run full sea trials," Huchthausen said.

An emergency fix was made and the submarine was towed home — but all of the crew was exposed to substantial radiation, according to the group Bellona.

The sub's captain died in 1998, and his widow gave National Geographic — the creator of the film starring Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson — his memoirs, "which was the largest indictment against the Soviet navy nuclear power program," Huchthausen said.

"They were going to sea with poorly trained crews, equipment that didn't work," he said.

A multinational effort is being made to counter some of the radioactive threats.

The United States, Britain and Norway helped the Russians sink a sarcophagus of sorts over two nuclear-tipped torpedoes "that are virtually hanging out of the torpedo doors" of a Mike-class Soviet sub that was lost in the Norwegian Sea in 1989, Huchthausen said.

But losses continue, like the Kursk, K-141, which sank in 2000 killing all 118 on board (and was raised in 2001) and more recently, the Aug. 30 accidental sinking of the decommissioned K-159 in the Barents Sea as it was being towed in bad seas. Its reactors contain spent fuel.

By comparison, the Thresher and Scorpion are the only U.S. nuclear submarines lost at sea.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Reach William Cole at wcole@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-5459.