Why The Soviets Called K-19 The Widowmaker — 22 Dead Crewmen Sealing A Reactor
Why The Soviets Called K-19 The Widowmaker — Twenty-Two Dead Crewmen Sealing A Reactor In July of 1961, the Soviet Union's first nuclear missile submarine suffered the accident its own designers had made inevitable. A coolant pipe cracked two hundred feet beneath the North Atlantic, the starboard reactor began climbing toward meltdown, and the boat had no backup cooling system and no working long-range radio. What happened next has been called the moment the Cold War came within minutes of turning hot. When I started pulling the records on K-19, the detail that stopped me was the equipment. Against a radiation field strong enough to kill in minutes, the crew that went into the reactor compartment to weld a new cooling system by hand were given raincoats and gas masks. Captain Nikolai Zateyev sent his men in three at a time, five to ten minutes each. The first through the door was a twenty-three-year-old engineer named Boris Korchilov. He was dead within six days. He would not be the last. This is the full story the Soviet state hid for thirty years, including the secret radioactive burials, the falsified death certificates, and the nickname the sailors gave a submarine that killed her own crew before she ever fired a shot. It is also the story of why Mikhail Gorbachev later argued these men deserved a Nobel Peace Prize. Sources and further reading: Captain Nikolai Zateyev's firsthand testimony (Associated Press, 1993); Peter Huchthausen, "K-19: The Widowmaker" (National Geographic, 2002); Rear Admiral Nikolai Mormul's account of the reactor's commissioning; Stanford University course archives on the K-19 incident; contemporary reporting confirmed by Pravda in 1991. If forgotten Cold War disasters and the human cost behind them are the kind of history you were never taught, subscribe. We bring these stories back into the light, one at a time. #ColdWar #SubmarineDisaster #K19 #SovietNavy #NuclearSubmarine #Widowmaker #ColdWarHistory #MilitaryHistory #NuclearAccident #SovietUnion #ReactorMeltdown #NavalHistory #BorisKorchilov #Zateyev #DeclassifiedHistory
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