Kirov Read Free Page B

the ship also bore
the name of the revolutionary hero Sergey Kirov. Sure enough, one by one, each
ship seemed to suffer some peculiar fate, an accident, a mishap at sea, then a
seemingly endless berthing at a lonesome port awaiting a promised overhaul that
never came. Kirov had suffered more than others. First launched in the
1980s, the shipbedeviled Western naval planners for decades. She was
renamed Admiral Ushakov much later in her history, but had long since
been retired after an accident with her nuclear reactor made the vessel
unserviceable.
    And
so went the fate of each ship in this unlucky class. The second ship, Frunze ,
had been renamed Admiral Lazarov , and it lasted no more than ten years
in active service before being decommissioned. Kalinin , the third of
ship, was renamed Admiral Nakhimov and fared little better, being
retired in 1999. As if to avoid the curse, the final ship began as Yuri
Andropov and then was renamed Pytor Velikiy , (Peter The Great) in
1992. It continued to serve until 2014 before it, too, was berthed in
Severomorsk alongside the aging hulks of its sister ships. This last ship had
run afoul of the curse during an exercise much like the one Leonid Volsky was
organizing today. The Pytor Velikiy was coordinating live fire exercises
with an Oscar II class submarine, when the undersea boat suffered a tragic
misfire with one of her torpedoes and exploded taking the lives of all hands on
board. And now it seemed the same situation was repeating itself again.
    The Kirov class languished for years, laid up and removed from active
service, the proud vessels wasting away in the cold northern harbors of
Murmansk while the Russians haggled over how to find the money to refit them.
But the money was never there. It was not until global circumstances forced the
Russians to finally modernize their Navy that the designers and architects
again began to draw up plans for an ocean going warship capable of standing
with any other ship in the world. One proposal after another was drafted, yet
each seemed too grandiose and far-reaching to ever be realized. In the end, the
Russians decided that, with four old Kirov class cruisers lying in
mothball, they would have enough raw material to refit at least one of these
ships by cannibalizing all of the others. And this they did.
    Built
from the bones of every ship and its class, the new vessel had been given top priority
in the shipyards to form the heart of a blue ocean task force that was still
under development. Rather than rebuilding the ship from scratch, laying down
the keel and working their way up, the ship had been gutted and redesigned from
the inside out. The hull was extended and re-metaled, the superstructure modified,
up-armored, and fitted out with all the very latest equipment in terms of
missiles and sensors in the year 2017. Three years later, after extensive and
still costly refitting, it was time to christen the new vessel and commission
her into the fleet.
    God
created the heavens and the earth in just six days, thought Volsky, and on the
seventh day he built Kirov . She was an awesome ship when finally completed.
Her designers thought it only fitting that she be given back her old name, and they
made her the flagship of the new Northern Fleet.
    For
years the Russian shipyards had turned out little more than a few insignificant
frigates and corvettes. But after closely observing modern naval engagements from
the Falkland Islands conflict to the wars in the Persian Gulf, Russian planners
had decided it was necessary to revitalize their aging fleet with something a
little more formidable. The new Kirov was everything they hoped for and
more, like a proud old armored knight coming out of retirement in an hour of
greatest need. At 32,000 tons when fully loaded, she was one of the largest
surface action ships in the world, exceeded in size only by the American
supercarriers and the aging Iowa class battleships that were now no more than
tourist