I turned on the TV tonight and the first thing that caught my eye was a Russian atomic missile-carrying submarine getting scrapped. It turned out to be K-19, the one in that movie with Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson. A former electrician from K-19 spoke about that incident; about the repairmen who had gone into the reactor area to fix the problem and got a deadly dose of radiation in the ten minutes they spent there. He said the movie reconstructed that episode, which he had witnessed, quite realistically.
They even showed a few seconds from the film – the return of the hopelessly sick repair crew – t was all part of an extended news program. When a military ship is sent down for scrapping (“utilization”), there is something of a burial about it, with a proper ceremony with flags and (for K-19, at least) throwing flowers into the sea. The camera closed up on them, floating in the ever cold Arctic water.
A few years after the reactor incident, K-19 collided with a US submarine; three years later, there was a fire aboard the ship. For this trail of tragic incidents, sailors nicknamed K-19 “Hiroshima”. The “Widowmaker” is a good coin but has no Russian equivalent, and not a drop of black humor.
In a scene from Thornton Wilder’s Theophilus North: the protagonist leans over his old, old car he has just sold to a spare parts dealer, and whispers:
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest du auch.