The collision of American and Russian nuclear submarines off the Russian Arctic coast won't alter the U.S. Navy's policy of operating its subs in international waters, the Navy's top officer said.
"The seas are free for everybody to operate in - ours, theirs, everybody else's," Adm. Frank B. Kelso II, the chief of naval operations, said in an interview Tuesday. "I don't see anything from this" incident that would change that.Kelso declined to discuss the collision, which occurred Feb. 11 in the Barents Sea, apparently not far from Murmansk, the strategic naval port on the Kola Peninsula. That is the location of the headquarters of the Northern Fleet, the largest in the Russian Navy.
A brief U.S. Navy statement said the USS Baton Rouge, a Los Angeles-class nuclear attack submarine, was at periscope depth when it was hit by a surfacing Russian sub. The Baton Rouge watched the other sub surface and head toward port, then the Baton Rouge began a return journey to its home port at Norfolk, Va.
There were no reports of radiation contamination.
The Navy said the Baton Rouge suffered no apparent damage and no injuries and was due back at Norfolk on Feb. 25.
But Interfax, an independent news agency in Russia, said fragments of the U.S. sub's protective covering were found between the rails of the deck house barrier on the Russian vessel.
And the commander of the Russian submarine said in an interview published Wednesday that he thinks the American submarine suffered serious damage.
Cmdr. Igor Lokot told the military newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star) that his submarine's titanium command tower was slightly damaged in the collision but said the nuclear reactor was unharmed.