Gales Stall Sub Effort

Gales in the Barents Sea forced divers in the Kursk nuclear submarine salvage operation to halt work Sunday, in the latest of the interruptions that have raised doubts about whether the vessel can be recovered before winter.

Tensions are mounting over the salvage effort, and top Russian naval officials were at odds this weekend over the target date to raise the Kursk.

Sunday’s bad weather also delayed the departure of two vessels crucial to the operation: a barge with equipment to cut off the bow, and one of two pontoons to float the Kursk into dry dock near Murmansk in northern Russia.

A Russian naval official conceded for the first time Saturday that the submarine is unlikely to be raised before Sept. 24; the target date had been Sept. 15.

In an interview with RTR television, Vice Adm. Mikhail Motsak, chief of staff of the Northern Fleet and head of the $130-million salvage operation, said the lifting might take place as late as Sept. 29. While acknowledging that the weather will worsen in September, Motsak said the Kursk should be delivered to dry dock by early October.

However, he was contradicted by naval press spokesman Dmitri Burmistrov, who denied any delay.

“It was planned to raise the Kursk in the middle of September, and we are still on schedule,” he insisted. “We’re not responsible for what Motsak chooses to say.”

Inclement weather hampered Russian efforts to rescue the crew after the submarine sank last August following a still-unexplained explosion; all 118 crew members perished. Likewise, weather can complicate the delicate and risky salvage operation. Bad weather means divers cannot cut into the hull, and some of the vessels required need relatively calm seas to leave port.

Russia took on the mighty engineering feat of raising the submarine after President Vladimir V. Putin met with enraged relatives of the Kursk crew last August and promised to recover the bodies. He had come under intense heat for continuing a vacation while the navy bungled the rescue operation after the sub went down Aug. 12.

Twelve of the 118 bodies were retrieved in October.

Several key parts of the salvage operation have repeatedly been delayed because of problems with equipment and weather.

The drilling of 26 holes along the side of the sub was scheduled to be completed over the weekend, but four holes still had not been drilled by Sunday. Cables, suspended from a 5,500-ton barge, will be attached through the holes to raise the Kursk. The barge is to leave port in the Netherlands in the coming days.

The sub’s damaged bow, housing the torpedo bay, will be cut off and left on the sea floor because of fears it could break off if raised. The navy may try to salvage it later.

Earlier this month, a naval spokesman said the removal of the bow would begin Aug. 18. A week later, the date was pushed to Aug. 20. But the barge with the cutting equipment still has not left the Norwegian port of Kirkenes.

Vyacheslav Zakharov, spokesman for the Dutch salvage firm Mammoet, which is involved in the operation, said last Monday that salvage organizers hoped the bow would be sawed off by Sept. 5.

Vladimir Kuznetsov, a nuclear safety analyst from the Russian Green Cross environmental organization, said in an interview over the weekend that Russian authorities seem to be gently preparing the public for news that the vessel will not be raised this year, if at all.

Igor Kudrik, an analyst with the Norwegian environmental group Bellona, concurred.

“Chances are high that the operation may fold quite soon and the sub will stay at the bottom of the sea till next year,” Kudrik said from his home in Oslo. “You must understand that this is a unique operation and there are many unpredictable and dangerous twists and turns in it.”

The Russian navy has repeatedly rejected the concerns of critics that torpedoes or missiles aboard the Kursk could explode during the salvage operation or that any kind of nuclear accident could occur in its two reactors.

Naval officials insist that there are no unexploded torpedoes on board, a claim Kudrik questioned.

“No one can actually predict what exactly will happen when they start sawing into the torpedo bay,” he said.

Even more worrying to Kudrik are the difficulties likely in maneuvering the sub to dock.

“It is huge: It has two nuclear reactors and 12 combat missiles with warheads on them,” he said. “And all this will be just [three miles] from the city of Murmansk.”

A Russian commission investigating the Kursk sinking has not released its findings on the cause, widely believed to have been a faulty torpedo. And this salvage operation might not shed much light, because the damaged bow, where the explosion occurred, will be left behind.

“In the end, I think the government will blame the bad weather and suspend the operation till next year, hoping that in the meantime some new and more reliable methods to raise the sub will be found,” Kuznetsov said.

Assuming the weather improves, the raising of the Kursk will take eight to 12 hours. Several days will then be required to tow it to the dry dock. But the dry dock is too shallow to accommodate the barge and suspended sub, so the coupled vessels must be raised by two enormous pontoons.

When the submarine sank, the Russian navy went into reflexive secrecy mode. For days, the navy shrugged off foreign offers to assist the rescue effort and released information that often turned out to be false.

While Russian authorities appear to be taking a more open approach to the salvage, skeptics remain unconvinced.

A little more than a year ago, said Kudrik, Russian submarine designers would never have believed that the Kursk could sink.

“We keep hearing optimistic statements from Russian officials that everything has been thought of and nothing dangerous can happen: The reactors will stay intact, the missiles will not fire, the torpedoes will not explode and the Kursk will not break in half and fall,” he said.

“Can we really believe them?”