Head-on ramming by a foreign submarine is being aired anew as a convincing theory of how Kursk died. And the finger points this week to whether a British or U.S. boat crashed into the Russian vessel’s forward combat compartment, detonating its torpedo arsenal.

        “Only an exceptionally powerful and sharp outside impact, such as underwater ramming,” could have caused the explosion that doomed the 25,000-tonne submarine, says the author of a book soon to appear about the accident.

        The words are those of Captain Vladimir Shigin, whose researches into the disaster will be published when his moving documentary,“Empty Moorage,” reaches the bookshops in October.

        In continuing, riveting manuscript again made available exclusively to this website, Shigin says this is the most plausible of three theories about Kursk’s destruction. This is the proposition most focused on by specialists who “have already theoretically calculated that the possible collision was a head-one one and occured while the Russian submarine was moving up to the surface and the foreign submarine, if any, was submerging.”

        Shigin acknowledges that no material proof exists “up to date” of British or U.S. involvement. Not one single fragment of the boat brought to the surface by divers bore any trace of a second submarine and conclusions would be possible only when the hull was salvaged, the author says.

        But “murder will out,” he observes. “The truth about the collision, if there was a collision, will sooner or later become known to everybody.”

        Shigin’s manuscript reveals as “fact” that three foreign submarines were patrolling Barents Sea waters where Russia’s Northern Fleet was holding exercises when Kursk went down. These were Britain’s HMS Splendid and U.S. boats Memphis and Toledo.

        First investigation of the wrecking revealed “two metallic anomalies on the seabed within close distance from each other,” the author writes. One of those “anomalies” was making international SOS signals, analysed on a tape recording as being transmitted automatically – equipment not carried on any Russian submarine.

        After the collision, Russian antisubmarine aviation spotted a foreign nuclear submarine “heading for Norway at a suspiciously low speed of five knots,” he goes on.

        Down with “serious damage and with Russia’s entire Northern Fleet on the surface above it,” even more than the crew’s own security was at stake, he writes.

        “They were just afraid to surface after the collision. Why? Because they had been spying near the Russian coast. Surfacing would have furnished the documentary confirmation of spying and caused an international scandal.”

        Given no proof that this boat had struck Kursk, “it limped all the way up to Norway and upon regaining its breath there, dissolved in the Atlantic.”

        The full text of Shigin’s manuscript is published today in the Dossier section of this website, chronicling 21 collisions between Russian and U.S. submarines near the Russian coast in the last 33 years. Most of the blame went to the U.S. At least two of the incidents ended in tragedy, he says.

        Captain Vladimir Shigin is a staff writer for the Russian-language Marine Journal.

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