Authors: Kenneth Sewell
Despite its ability to launch while submerged, K-129 surfaced in the darkness, where it rolled in the ocean swells at a near crawl, approximately 360 miles from Honolulu. It had been positioned at a location—probably near 24° N latitude and 163° W longitude—which enabled even a minimally trained crew to program the guidance and control system to perfectly match the computerized, programmed target coordinates.
They were just north and west of the Hawaiian Ridge and due north of a smaller escarpment called Necker Ridge, where these reefs and shoals cross the imaginary earth-girding line called the Tropic of Cancer. It was an area usually shunned by mariners because of its confused jumble of subsurface islets and atolls. Nautical charts of this region are clearly marked “area to be avoided.” The seabed drops sharply from these reefs to depths ranging from fourteen thousand to sixteen thousand feet.
In the final minutes of K-129’s voyage, a small number of men aboard the boat began a fateful series of actions. The commander gave orders. The others crisply confirmed when each separate task was done. Hearts pounding. This is not a drill. Compartments sealed. Coordinates confirmed. Prepare for launch.
The hatch covering missile tube one was opened. The young missile technician in the heavy coat, padded trousers, and sea boots climbed out into the night, against the whipping winds and sea spray lashing the fore-deck, and confirmed the launch tube was clear of debris. He huddled behind a protective shield in the conning tower, to await the launch.
Below, in the command center, the countdown was nearing conclusion:
“…shyest, pyat, chetyre…”
To the southwest, less than half the missile’s range away, a large part of the U.S. Navy Pacific Fleet was resting in historic Pearl Harbor. Key units of the fleet were always out to sea, in obedience to a doctrine that ensured there would never be another surprise like that of December 7, 1941.
“…tri…dva…odin…”
On the count of zero, the forty-two-foot-long missile with a one-megaton nuclear warhead should have stirred awake. The men in the control center had braced for the huge jolt of compressed air they expected would hurl the missile out of its tube before its liquid fuel ignited for a short, powerful run to the target. The target was easily within range of the Serb-type missile ready in tube number one.
At the instant of liftoff, every member of the crew, from one end of the boat to the other, heard a sound far louder and more terrifying than the roar of a missile leaving the launch tube.
The K-129 was wracked by a shock wave and then, almost as quickly, pushed downward from the force of a tremendous blast.
The conventional explosives in the warhead were packed tightly around the plutonium core in a spherical cover like a thick skin. It was segmented like a soccer ball, with detonators precisely placed in each segment of the explosives cover, to ignite in unison. This sphere of plastic explosives was designed in perfect balance for a powerful implosion, intended to compress the powdered plutonium core into a highly dense ball of fissionable material. The triggered compression was supposed to occur just as the warhead was delivered over its target.
A fail-safe device, hardwired beneath the warhead, had been designed as a last resort to prevent an unauthorized nuclear attack. The device was probably intended to render the warhead useless, not to create a major explosion. Mechanically disengaging the fail-safe device, even for a skilled technician, was practically impossible. In order to disarm it, the submarine had to be brought to the surface and the work done on the warhead from the top of the launch tube. Physically disconnecting the fail-safe device would then have been a task requiring several technical manuals and skills not readily available in the Soviet navy.
Thus, the launch crew must have had some confidence that it already possessed the proper disarming codes to override the fail-safe device. Unlocking the fail-safe mechanism was an essential first step for a missile launch. If the perfect balance required to trigger a nuclear warhead were interrupted by a partial detonation anywhere around the outer sphere, the force would blow outward. Within a millisecond, the plastic explosives would ignite, spreading out from the original point of detonation to create a directional blast that would destroy the warhead.
Apparently, this is what happened on board K-129.
The ignition series was set off by the operator at the control panel initiating the final launch signal. While it created a serious mishap, it was, in fact, no accident. Instead of waiting for the missile to arrive over its target, the warhead was blown apart at the instant the launch signal was sent. The explosion scattered powdered radioactive material throughout the area.
The exploding warhead rent the walls of the launch tube. The shock wave from the blast traveled along the axis of the launch tube and smashed the two fuel tanks of the missile together. The highly volatile fuels confined in the narrow tube exploded in a massive flash of energy that blew out both the top and bottom of the tube. It tore through the domed launch tube deck and the outer part of the submarine’s hull, blasting a ten-foot-wide gap through the rear of the conning tower. At the top of the open launch tube, the explosion erupted into the night in a spectacular fireball.
The plastic explosives and missile fuel turned tube number one into a huge bomb, planted in the middle of the submarine. When the bomb went off, the boat was doomed. The force of the explosion at the bottom of the tube had torn a hole through the protective pressure hull to the open seas, severing the submarine’s keel. K-129’s back had been broken.
The explosion in missile tube one slammed into the adjoining tube, rupturing the fuel tanks in the second rocket. The two fuels ignited, causing a rapid buildup of pressure. Within a fraction of a second, the pressure had exceeded the design limits of the launch tube. Stressed beyond capacity, the heavy steel hatch, the missile’s nuclear warhead, and shredded pieces of missile were blasted into the sky in a second fireball.
Tears in the two missile tubes spewed fire and hot gas into compartment four, compartment five, the inner conning tower, and the command center. Under tremendous pressure, the fiery gas filled the adjoining compartments.
All the crewman in the nearby compartments under the conning tower—including the command staff and the mystery men who had boarded the boat just before sailing—were most likely killed instantly, or died within a few seconds.
As crewmen in the outer forward and aft compartments rushed to seal connecting passage doors, the air supply throughout the submarine was quickly exhausted, feeding the raging inferno in the center of the boat. The hatch to the bridge was engulfed in flames from the first explosion and, thus, useless as an escape route. Some men in the engine rooms and aft torpedo room rushed to the only other exit, an escape hatch located on the back deck. A few may have tried to don their exposure suits, designed to protect them against the freezing elements of the open sea outside. It happened too fast. There was no time to seal off compartments, or even think of attacking the flames. Welds in the pressure hull, already weak from years of corrosion, split apart from the intense heat of burning, high-octane rocket fuel.
The sea outside the submarine, lighted for a moment by the two huge orange balls of flame from the explosions in the missile tubes, began immediately to pour into the ripped seams. High seas washed over the low deck and poured into the gaping hole in the conning tower and into the rear hatch, opened by a desperate sailor trying to escape or reach breathable air. Most of the flooding probably came from the huge breach in the bottom of the boat.
In less than five minutes the ocean was black again, with only a few fires from still-burning patches of radiated diesel fuel floating on the surface. The fires inside the now-dead ship were quickly hissed into steam, as cold ocean waters doused them.
Only a top-secret U.S. military satellite orbiting high above the Pacific Ocean was witness to the disaster. Its infrared heat sensors were designed to detect and distinguish heat patterns of burning Soviet rocket fuel from other heat sources, such as house fires. The fireballs from the exploding missile were recorded; then all else was dark, as the satellite swept over the night sea.
In minutes, K-129 took on enough water to lose its already precarious buoyancy. Still, a desperate few submariners in the aft torpedo compartment battled for survival in the eerie glow of the emergency lights. Unable to help those few men in compartments closer to the center who might have survived the heat and gas, these last submariners undoubtedly tried to work their way out against ice-cold seas, spilling into the after escape hatch opening. They tried to assist unconscious buddies who had been rendered helpless when their bodies were tossed into machinery by the violently heaving submarine. But the torrents surging into the submarine soon had them pinned down, too.
If any of the ninety-eight sailors aboard survived the initial blast, whirlwind hot fires, toxic fumes, and oxygen deprivation, they were quickly drowned while the submarine was still barely afloat on the angry surface of the Pacific Ocean. All the universal fears of the ways death may come that haunt the heart of every submariner were realized in those moments. They died from concussion, burns, asphyxiation, and drowning. The scene was every submariner’s worst nightmare; the destruction was methodically unstoppable and complete.
Even if a few men had managed to escape from the flooding hatches, they would have perished from hypothermia, treading in black seas covered in oil made radioactive by the disintegrated plutonium core of the missile warheads.
K-129 heaved for a few minutes in the angry sea before beginning its last journey—an uncontrolled, three-mile dive to the bottom of the Pacific, somewhere between the Musicians Seamount and the Hawaiian Ridge in the Leeward Islands.
The submarine gained speed as it turned bow downward in an almost vertical dive. Before it reached crush depth, it had filled completely with water, thus avoiding implosion from the great pressure. K-129 was traveling faster than sixty miles an hour before it reached the ocean floor. When the submarine hit the seabed at a thirty-five-degree angle, it was wrenched apart by the impact and broke at several of the weakest points in the superstructure where the compartments were joined together.
A cloud of primordial silt billowed for hundreds of yards around the wreck. The force of the impact tossed the lifeless, burned body of the young sailor in the raglan coat from his shelter in the conning tower. As the silt settled, the body came to final rest beside the submarine on the ocean floor.
T
HE CATASTROPHIC EVENT
that sank the missile submarine went unnoticed in the nearby Hawaiian Islands. Once it was discovered, the larger significance of the fiery explosions and sinking of Soviet submarine K-129 was deliberately hidden from the public by the United States government. Two American presidents, several heads of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency, National Security Council advisors, and a substantial number of admirals of the U.S. Navy participated in a massive cover-up to make sure the American people, and thus the world, remained unaware of the incident.
Among the several plausible reasons the public was denied access to the truth about what happened on March 7, 1968, in the Pacific, is the sheer panic that such a close brush with nuclear catastrophe would have evoked. The threat of a nuclear Armageddon at this stage in the Cold War was very real, and a jittery world had already begun to challenge the wisdom of continued Soviet-American brinkmanship.
The explosion and sinking of K-129 approximately 360 miles northwest of Pearl Harbor was recorded on the continuous printout at a Navy SOSUS listening post. The naval station monitoring the hydrophones actually picked up the sound of three blasts. Recordings from hydrophones arrayed along the Hawaiian Leeward Islands produced three blips, probably resulting from the discharge of the plastic explosives in the warhead trigger on the first missile, the ignition of its volatile rocket fuel, and the explosion of the second missile. These minor blips may have roused the curiosity of a petty officer at the SOSUS monitoring station, but when nothing suspicious followed, they were ignored at the time.
The sprawling U.S. Pacific base slept peacefully, unaware that a nuclear missile launch by a Soviet submarine had been attempted and failed, less than four hundred miles to the northwest.
Adjacent to Pearl Harbor, the half-million residents and visitors of Honolulu never knew how close they had come to the largest man-made catastrophe in history. Most would have been killed by the initial blast and fireball, or died within days from direct radiation fallout.
Instead of an unspeakable disaster, there was only a pattern of spikes in the rhythmic wavy lines printing out in continuous sheets from the Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS) monitor. The night watch between midnight and 6:00
A
.
M
. was the loneliest and least popular shift. But since these were the hours known for sneak attacks, the sailors assigned were the best. Had the expert technicians been aware of any aggressive behavior from the K-129 explosion, or suspected an accident involving a Soviet warship, they would have instantly alerted higher authorities. The warning would have set off alarms all around the Pacific Rim and in Washington. During this tense period, such an alarm would have put strategic forces on a high state of alert worldwide.
Every sailor and marine on Pearl Harbor would have been awake and running to stations in minutes. Antisubmarine warfare units, both at sea and in the air, would have immediately headed for the submarine, even before it entered the defensive zone surrounding Pearl Harbor and the Hawaiian Islands. Clearly, the incident did not attract any special attention at Pearl Harbor.
The little pops from explosions hundreds of miles away that were captured on the sensitive instruments were not menacing enough to cause a stir. The spikes on the monitoring tape could have been caused by any number of natural or man-made events. Since the missile did not leave the submarine’s launch tube, none of the other tracking equipment at the base sent out alerts, either.
The Pacific SOSUS system had been equipped with a modification that allowed it to filter out “nonsubmarine” noises, and conventional explosions at sea were not among the normal sounds made by submarines. In fact, the Pacific was a very noisy place, and the sounds of conventional explosions—legal and illegal—were quite common. Thus, this event went undetected at the time it happened. The Navy’s hydroacoustical equipment could not identify the source of the noise as a malfunction in a nuclear missile launch. There certainly was no way, with the limited amount of information the SOSUS provided, to tell that, only seconds before, a one-megaton warhead had been electronically targeted to launch.
Pearl Harbor, America’s fortress in the Pacific since the early 1900s, bristled with warships in that fourth year of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. The United States had other bases supporting the war effort and general defense of the Pacific Ocean. Major naval and air force bases were situated throughout the Japanese Islands and in the Philippines, as well as on the Asian mainland in Vietnam. None was as important to America’s forward defense structure as Pearl Harbor.
The base provided port and repair facilities for all northern, central, and southern Pacific naval operations. It was a working combat base for U.S. Navy operations in the entire Pacific Ocean. Several squadrons of nuclear submarines, a large contingent of the surface battle fleet assigned in the Pacific, and sophisticated spy operations of the Joint Intelligence Center Pacific and the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center were based there.
On March 7, marine sentries paced the perimeters of the giant base, guarding a huge cache of nuclear warheads to be deployed on naval warships. The base warehoused the nuclear weapons stockpile for the surface and submarine fleets of the entire Pacific, because other countries hosting American warships would not allow nuclear weapons on their territories. Nearby, additional nuclear bombs of the U.S. Air Force were stored for ready access. There was also a huge assembly of fissionable material other than weaponry in the armada of nuclear-reactor-powered submarines and surface warships that silently rode anchor in the militarized harbor.
The metropolitan area of Honolulu abuts the military complex. That night, half a million civilians went about their lives, secure in the knowledge they were under the watchful guard of their U.S. military neighbors. It was prime winter tourist season in Hawaii, and the luxury hotels were packed with snowbirds from all over the more frigid cities of North America.
Not one of the residents of Honolulu knew then, nor would they later be told, that their city, along with the military bases, was the target of the first attempted nuclear strike against America. It was only because Pearl Harbor was located there that the citizens of this American paradise were targets in the first place. Even though they would far outnumber the military personnel on the bases, the civilian casualties would be considered collateral damage by military strategists.
There is little doubt that had the rogue Soviet submarine successfully launched the Serb missile with its one-megaton warhead, Pearl Harbor, Hickam Field, and a large part of the Honolulu metropolitan area would have vanished in a mushroom cloud on March 7, 1968.
The casualty figures—including blast and radiation deaths and severe injuries—would have easily exceeded a half million people. The high degree of accuracy of Soviet rocketry, and the efficiency of Soviet nuclear warheads of the simple type carried by K-129, would have assured obliteration for that capital city and Oahu Island. The fallout would have blanketed the rest of the Hawaiian Islands with intolerable levels of radiation for at least the next two decades, rendering the fiftieth American state virtually uninhabitable.
The explosive yield of the one-megaton warhead, equivalent to one thousand tons of TNT, was nearly one hundred times greater than the 12.5-kiloton yield from the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945.
The initial burst would have been especially damaging, because Pearl Harbor sits in a natural bowl surrounded by the low mountains of the Koolau Range on the east and the Waianae Range on the west. The bowl shape tilts toward Honolulu, thus assuring that the initial nuclear blast would have been deflected outward along the coast and into the heart of the city.
A one-megaton explosion at ground level over Pearl Harbor would have vaporized everything within a radius of six-tenths of a mile from the center, and killed 90 percent of the military and civilian inhabitants within a radius of 1.7 miles. Nothing would have been recognizable in that initial area of destruction. The blast would have created a crater two hundred feet deep and one thousand feet in diameter.
Only a few buildings, constructed from reinforced steel and poured concrete, would have been left standing within a radius of 2.5 miles. Pearl Harbor, Hickam Field, Pearl City, and Waipahu would have all been totally destroyed. The shock waves extending over most of Honolulu would have destroyed most residential houses. Buildings in the north and western edges of the city would have been reduced to structural skeletons. More than 50 percent of the people caught in that area would have died instantly, with another 40 percent suffering serious injury.
In the center of Honolulu, the contents of the taller buildings, including people, would have been blown out, littering the streets with debris and bodies. Thirty percent of the residents in downtown Honolulu would have been killed and another 50 percent severely injured. In the eastern section of Honolulu, farthest from the blast, only 5 percent of the people would have been killed, and approximately 40 percent injured.
Within an eight-mile radius, the damage from this blast would have inflicted instant death on a quarter of the population. For a distance of thirty miles downwind of the blast, with the prevailing winds blowing out of the mountains toward the city, lethal radiation would have killed everyone after a few hours of exposure.
In a period of two days to two weeks, lethal radiation would have begun killing people as far as ninety miles from the blast site. This deadly radiation cloud would have covered much of the island of Oahu. Because the municipal airport and commercial ports were also located adjacent to the military complexes, there would have been no facilities for mass evacuation from the island.
Experts say it is unlikely the initial blast would have caused secondary nuclear explosions from the hundreds of bombs and missile warheads stored in depots at Pearl Harbor and Hickam Field. However, the plutonium in these weapons and the nuclear fuel in the reactors in ships and subs destroyed by the initial blast would have spread widely with the radiation cloud. The Hawaiian Islands and large swathes of the Pacific Ocean would have been contaminated for at least the next decade. There is no calculation of the permanent effects such a nuclear attack on Hawaii would have had on Pacific Ocean fisheries for generations to come.
But it did not happen.
On that day in 1968, this nuclear cataclysm was prevented, and only a submarine with ninety-eight men aboard was lost.
The sinking of K-129 would become the center of a raging, behind-the-scenes controversy between the American and Russian naval and diplomatic communities that was to last for more than three decades. Each side has its own official and unofficial versions of what caused the Soviet missile boat to sink. Yet, the intelligence communities and inner sanctums of the respective governments at the highest levels have never trusted their military leaders with enough information to settle the arguments. As a result, neither the American nor the Russian military leadership has ever publicly acknowledged the true cause of the sea disaster.
While propounding a half-dozen theories for why the submarine sank, no authority in either the American or Russian navy has ever dared to propose publicly that an explosion resulting from an attempted nuclear missile launch was the primary source of the submarine’s demise. But for years, there has been widespread, well-based speculation in both navies that an exploding warhead was the only possible explanation for the type of damage that sank K-129.
Ironically, the relatively simple fail-safe device that may have prevented doomsday was probably supplied by the Americans. In the 1960s, small groups of military science and technology specialists in the United States and the Soviet Union had secretly cooperated in a program to prevent an accidental or rogue nuclear war from breaking out. Even as the leadership of both states belligerently rattled their nuclear sabers in public, there was quiet cooperation to prevent the deliberate misuse of nuclear weapons. Of particular concern was the theft or unauthorized appropriation of one or more nuclear weapons by terrorists, a lone madman, or a rogue air force or naval crew.
In the case of the K-129 incident, a small group of American scientists—and a highly secret decision by President Lyndon Johnson to share classified, nuclear fail-safe technology with Soviet leaders—may well have prevented the obliteration of an American city and a potential third world war.
The United States had been sharing fail-safe technology with the Soviets as early as the Eisenhower administration. The sensitivity of giving technology to the enemy was referenced in an obscure, recently declassified memorandum from the hottest point of the Cold War era, when President Johnson was rapidly accelerating the war against the Communist forces in Vietnam. The memo was sent by then NSC staffer Spurgeon Keeny to President Johnson’s special national security advisor, Walt W. Rostow. Excerpts from that secret 1966 memo are revealing.
“I think you should be aware of the proposal discussed in the attached correspondence for reciprocal exchange with the Soviets of information on procedures for insuring control of nuclear weapons,” Keeny wrote. “This is a subject on which the President is very sensitive for obvious reasons, and about which the less said the better. At the same time, I think there may be merit in the idea of reassuring the Soviets about our control procedures and informing them of some of the specific equipment, such as Permissive Action Links (PALs), that we might wish to encourage them to incorporate in their own weapons. If we decide to go ahead with this project, I would recommend that we simply give the Soviets the specific information that we think they should have.”