Almost all of the 14 sailors who perished in last week's incident were high-ranking officers, which largely speaks to the nature of the Russian navy but also points to the advanced technicality of the vessel and the submarine's likely intelligence-gathering mission.
Russia remains cagey with the details surrounding the incident that claimed the lives of a number of high-ranking Russian officers aboard a yet-to-be-identified vessel declared a "state secret" by the Russian government.
We’ll probably never know exactly what happened and a single sub wouldn’t have had as much fissionable material on board as a power plant like Chernobyl or Fukushima had. But as bad as those two disasters were, most of the radioactive fuel was (so far at least) contained. A disaster at sea might have released all of the fuel.
