Posted on 05/22/2005 2:27:06 PM PDT by demlosers
A FORMER British military official has backed a sensational claim that the Russian nuclear submarine, the Kursk, was torpedoed by US forces in August 2000.
An official inquest concluded that the disaster – in which all 118 crew drowned in the Barents Sea, 135km off the Russian coast – was caused by an accidental explosion of an onboard torpedo.
But Maurice Stradling, a former torpedo engineer and a key figure in the original investigation, believes a new French documentary, The Kursk: A Submarine in Troubled Waters, should change world opinion on the sinking.
"On the balance of probabilities, the Kursk was sunk by an American MK-48 torpedo," said Mr Stradling, formerly a senior member of the British Defence Ministry.
BBC editor Nick Fraser called the claim a "pack of lies" and has refused to air the documentary, which attracted a record audience of more than 4 million when it screened on French TV.
he BBC used Mr Stradling as its main authority for a documentary it made in 2001 – What Sank the Kursk?, in which Mr Stradling theorised that the sinking was caused by the malfunctioning of an old-fashioned HTP torpedo.
Mr Stradling, who also appears in the new French documentary, said: "At the time (2001), that was a perfectly reasonable film, given the facts as we knew them then, when there seemed to be no third-party involvement,"
The new explanation for the Kursk's downing is based on film footage of a hole in the side of the vessel, and evidence placing US submarines in the area at the time it was sunk.
The French film shows stills of the Kursk raised above the water after being salvaged, with a precise circular hole in its right side. The hole clearly bends inwards, consistent with an attack from outside the submarine.
A US military source in the documentary declares the hole to be the trademark evidence of an American MK-48 torpedo, which is made to melt cleanly through steel sheet due to a mechanism at its tip that combusts copper.
The film suggests the attack happened while two US submarines, the Toledo and Memphis, were shadowing the Kursk in a routine military exercise.
The documentary says the Toledo accidentally collided with the Kursk, at which point the Russian submarine opened its torpedo tubes, leading to an attack from the Memphis, which was protecting the damaged Toledo while it retreated.
The cause of the sinking was covered up at the time in an act of diplomacy between then US presidents Bill Clinton and Russian President Vladimir Putin – a deal that included the cancellation of $US10 billion ($12.5 billion) of Russian debt, the film states.
After the documentary received its only public broadcast in Britain, some claimed the Russian navy had drilled the hole and fed doctored footage to the film-makers to create a false impression.
damn... nicely done.
Heck, I didn't even know about Klinton cancelling $10B of Russian debt and I know everything, LOL.
Am I the only one who didn't know this?
Leni
Ummmmmmmmm........you drink too much coffee today?
I am chasing no such thing and really wonder why you assume so.
Calm down.....take deep breath's.....please read my post again.....it actually did not have much to do with a US sub sinking the Kursk.
LVM
Thank you! A "nicely done" on FR is something to treasure!
I hadn't thought of that but looking at the bending to the left of the hole, that would make sense.
In any event, I don't know anything about navel explosives or submarines but I have to assume that a torpedo couldn't enter a hull, explode to the right and leave it's entry hole and everything to the left intact.
/shrug I know how they work....
fun to see facts have no relevance :)
LVM, I just re-read your #66 & 68. You are correct, and I apologize. I just "harvested" your name by mistake while I was making up my addressee list. Sorry 'bout that!
It's twue! It's twue! The Fwench said it, so it's twue!
Please consider my #107 to be to you, too. No offense intended; my apologies! I'll make a conscious effort to be more discriminating when toggling between windows and copying names in the future...
"Candygram for Mongo"? LOL!
Yeah, right. I can see that.
After the Russian cover-up was hatched, then the military conspirators in on the deal were killed in a deliberate explosion that was made to look like a plane hit the Pentagon on 911. Of course, the CIA covered the Pentagon hit through mind control tactics used on innocent arabs like Mohammud Atta in order to get them to destroy the WTC as a larger cover for the primary target which was the Pentagon explosion. The arabs like Atta, of course, were recruited from Israeli prisons under the guise of entering a secret program like the witness protection program. Atta and the others thought they were getting out of Jewish prisons and getting to go to America for a life of lust with real live virgins, forbidden alcohol and big automobiles with tailfins - all for free. Little did they know they would be reduced to mind-numbed robots doing the bidding of the Zionists and CIA puppet masters and losing their lives as the last links to one of the deepest covert operations this nation has ever run. Someday, perhaps, the full truth will be told.
Yeah, all of this makes perfect sense to me.
Yep,the Kursk had a twin hull & could in theory atleast take greater damage than an LA class boat.
The kursk was involved in war games and we were in the area observing. Something happened on the kursk and no one knows what. She blew from the inside. Did a fenderbender help that? I dont know.
I'm still waiting for the French to finally expose KAL 007 as a Mossad operation.
About how the Jews used captured MIGs lauched off an Israeli aircraft carrier to down KAL 007 over Sakhalin and then paid-off high ranking Soviet PVO officers to cover their crime.
Those ruthless b@st@rds! Will their evil mayhem and cunning deception never end? Frankly, I quit taking my medications when I saw that they had infiltrated the pharmaceutical industry and were putting things into my prescriptions like tiny transmitters.
Damn them! I wondered what that wavy line pattern dancing across my computer screen was caused by!
Absolute non-sense. It was on exercise with other vessels including Peter the Great. Closure areas for the scheduled missile launches were broadcast to all maritime users in the region.
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