Times The World Almost Ended

You might have seen the movie K-19: The Widowmaker starring Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson, but the real K-19 was never called that. It was nicknamed Hiroshima, and what happened on board was nothing short of hell on earth. Even before the sub almost ended the world, construction and early voyages were plagued by bad luck and death, prompting a naval historian to write, "[...] the launching ramp of the K-19 ran with human blood."

There was such a rush to launch it that workmanship was shoddy — so shoddy that the sub and its crew were on maneuvers in 1961 when a pipe in the reactor room burst. Radiation started leaking and temperatures rose. If the sub had exploded, it would have dumped nuclear material into the waters of the North Atlantic — and that would've been catastrophic.

The captain organized a series of teams, three men each, who would go into the reactor and try to build a new cooling system. Each team worked for mere minutes before the effects of the radiation got too bad and they needed to send in the next group. 

"Within two hours, we couldn't recognize them," said Captain Nikolai Zateyev, who survived the incident. "People died fully conscious, in terrible pain. [...] They begged us to kill them." All the men on the teams would die, buried in secret graves, too radioactive to be approached by friends and family. K-19 was cleaned up, put back into service, and decommissioned in 1972, after a fire killed another 28 men.

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