A Small Consolation For All > IDEAS & IDEALS

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"Full fathom five thy father lies,
                   Of his bones are coral made,
                 Those are pearls that were his eyes."
                         - from The Tempest by William Shakespeare


      On Wednesday two weeks ago, I observed the weekly ritual of coffee-hour with several of my colleagues at my office. All the participants arrived one by one without notice and invitation. They knew I was free in the afternoon on the day, and also knew where to go to enjoy the absolute freedom of speech in the campus over a cup of real good coffee after lunch. As I always did, I made coffee for them with pleasure, and pretended to be greatly flattered by the praises bestowed upon it.  

      The quality of our conversation was always lower than that of my coffee. It hardly went beyond or over the level of idle gossip. But, quite unexpectedly, the topic of the day happened to fall on the Kursk, the Russian nuclear-powered submarine that was reported to have sunk near Scandinavian peninsula about a month ago. The question was first raised over the controversial causes of the accident, and over the deplorably inefficient rescue works that had ensued, and then over the tragic fate of 118 officers and crew in it. None of us were much knowledgeable about submarines, and the information we had exchanged was mostly garnered from reading newspapers and listening to radio and watching TV news.  

      After the seminar (a euphemism for our weekly gossip-mongering gathering), being left alone by myself, I suddenly got curious about the absence of the following news about the doomed sailors. So far, not a sailor was reported to have been rescued, nor a body recovered. Now more than a month had already passed, and it was most probable that all of them had perished. But what about the dead bodies? It seemed that they had stopped the rescue work entirely by now, and abandoned the ship at the bottom of the sea for reasons unknown to me. Was the depth of the sea too deep for man to do anything about the ship? Did the rescue work cost too much for the Russians? Were there any military secrets involved? Then, what about the bereaved families? How could they go to sleep at night, when one of their dearest persons on the earth were down there within an iron cabin? The accident took place during a naval exercise, not in the time of war, and there was no reason for anyone to cancel the rescue work so hastily, I thought.

      I fell into some conjecture about the last of the Kursk. Something goes wrong with the sub cruising underwater, and gets grounded. At first, sailors in it are not much worried. They are optimistic. They think somebody will find out the cause of trouble and fix it. But the ship won't move. Time passes. A day passes. They become slowly anxious. Another day passes. They become panicky. They know they have oxygen to last them only for a few days. Desperately they send radio messages and signals out for help. They think of the possibility of abandoning the ship, but they realize, to their great despair, they have no means of escape from it. They know the escape by swimming is not an option: their lungs would rupture under the water pressure. They hunker down and wait. They begin to feel difficulty in breathing. Still no help from outside. No more oxygen. Shivering in the frigid dark of their sealed compartment, hoping not to die but powerless to do anything about it, they meet a long, slow and agonizing death.

      But, a few days later, to my great relief, I realized that I was greatly mistaken in my conjecture. Rummaging through the pile of Newsweek magazines to which I subscribe, I came across a back number (August 28) that has dealt the accident as a feature story. I wondered how I had missed reading it. In it there was an article about the accident by Tom Clancy, the American bestseller author of many thrillers including The Hunt for Red October(1984), the very story of a Russian nuclear-powered submarine whose captain secretly wish to surrender the ship to the United States during the cold-war days.

      According to his authoritative speculation based on a large and jagged hole starboard-side forward on the hull of the Kursk, where the torpedoes are stockpiled, the cause of the accident must be the serial explosion of the torpedoes, and he concluded as follows: "Within a steel pipe - that's what a submarine hull is - the shock wave from the explosion had nowhere to go except within the hull, killing many (perhaps all) of the crew in the briefest of instants. Under such circumstances, not only the force of the explosion itself would have snuffed their lives, but also the rapid influx of water into the hull can cause such a rapid change in atmospheric pressure that the air within the submarine itself becomes incandescent, incinerating any human body in seconds."

      I could not but believe what Mr. Tom Clancy said, and felt relieved of my heavy mind. That their end would have been very rapid, not a prolonged and agonizing one as I supposed, could be a consolation, although very small, for all involved in this tragic accident. But a question arose. How could the cold sea-water raise the temperature so high so quickly? Is it possible? My common sense and my ignorance of physics would not accept Mr. Clancy's opinion so enthusiastically.

      I dialed Dr. Kwak Ho-Young, professor of thermodynamics in the Mechanical Engineering Department, who is also a regular member of our seminar, and asked him to come over at my office immediately. He is a physicist and a world authority on the  sonoluminescence phenomenon. Mr. Tom Clancy is to submarine what Dr. Kwak is to water and heat. Hearing what Mr. Clancy said, Dr. Kwak seemed stunned into silence for a moment at first. He said he could not believe what came from the mouth of a mere novelist. He said what Mr. Clancy said about was what he had been doing all his life as a physicist. He left my office saying that he could come up with exact answer by doing some simple mathematical calculations with the depth of the sea and length of the sunken submarine.

      This morning Dr. Kwak dropped in my office and produced some papers full of drawings, graphs, and equations, all unfamiliar to me. But the result he arrived at simply proved Tom Clancy's speculation right, he said. Under the given conditions, according to Dr. Kwak's calculation, the temperature within the hull can rise up suddenly to 2,000c  within the last 2 seconds before the sea-water fills up the hull, consuming all the combustibles in it. And then, before allowing the water to fill it up the heated combustion gas can raise the air pressure within the sub up to 1,300, and the power of which repulses water and all from the hull with mighty force, once and for all, scattering the sacred ashes in the sea.
        (September 30, 2000)