MURMANSK, Russia — Russian investigators released dramatic pictures of the wreck of the nuclear submarine Kursk on Saturday which appear to show that explosions that sank the boat 14 months ago also spread a ferocious fire and destruction through much of its interior.
Vladimir Ustinov, Russia's prosecutor general and the head of a criminal inquiry into the disaster, said the ruin of twisted metal and scorched equipment extended well into the 490-foot-long submarine. It was apparent, he said, that none of the 116 crew and two civilians aboard lived for more than eight hours after the boat fell to the floor of the Barents Sea, 356 feet below the surface.
"What happened here was hell, the worst kind of hell," Ustinov said in a seven-minute videotape of the wreckage that was released to Russian television networks on Saturday.
Since a Dutch salvage firm towed the Kursk into drydock the week before last — minus 65 feet of its bow left behind on the sea floor — officials had limited pictures of the submarine to views of its intact hull and conning tower, emblazoned with a huge double-headed Russian eagle. They offered no explanation for their change of heart.
But at a news conference Saturday, Ustinov and other officials used the release of the video to defend once more the government's initial response to the accident, which was savaged at the time as bumbling and xenophobic.
The navy waited much of a day before announcing that the submarine was missing and waited days more before summoning help from British and Norwegian rescue experts.
Ustinov said Saturday that in the end, no rescue was possible.
"I want to tell those who say there was a chance to save them, there wasn't," he said. "There was such an explosion here that nothing could survive."
Officials said they had so far found 19 bodies in the submarine, removed 17 and identified seven. Eleven of the dead were found in the rear of the boat, in compartment nine, where deep-sea divers removed 12 bodies almost exactly one year ago in a risky recovery operation.
The remaining eight were found in the sub's third compartment, not far from the bow-area torpedo room where the fatal explosions took place.
Ustinov had predicted earlier that workers would find as few as 40 of the crewmen. On Saturday he pledged, "There will not be a single unexamined spot where a body or a part of a body might remain." But the prospects for locating many more of the dead, he said, were problematic.
Two days after they first entered the wreck, clad in gas masks and protective clothing, investigators said Saturday that the Kursk's two nuclear reactors and its 22 supersonic cruise missiles had weathered the devastation and presented no hazard. The missiles could be deactivated and removed starting this week; the reactors will not be dismantled and their fuel removed for weeks.
But although they have ordered new tests based on unspecified evidence found in the wreck, the investigators said they were little closer to answering the question of what caused the catastrophe.
The Kursk was cruising at periscope depth, its 116 sailors and officers and two civilian weapons experts engaged in a Northern Fleet military exercise, when a first small explosion rippled across its bow on Aug. 12 last year. Two minutes and 15 seconds later, a blast said by seismologists to carry the power of 1 ton to 2 tons of TNT blew out the bow, and the boat plunged to the bottom of the Barents Sea.
The navy's top officials insisted immediately after the accident that the boat almost certainly had hit a World War II-era mine or a foreign ship, most likely a NATO submarine. For months afterward officials pointed to evidence — from grooves purportedly dug into the ship's side to a mysterious sonar image of a second boat supposedly lying near the Kursk — to support the theory that the sailors were innocent victims of a collision.
But many experts continue to believe that the disaster occurred after an experimental torpedo using a powerful new propulsion system triggered an explosion, perhaps as it lodged in a tube during firing. The boat was launching torpedoes as part of a naval exercise when it sank.
On Saturday the commander of the Russian navy, Adm. Vladimir Kuroyedov, joined Ustinov in pledging that the cause of the disaster would be found and made public, even if the military was at fault.
"We have to find the cause and element of it," Kuroyedov said. "Not to find the reason, and not to do anything about it, would be a crime."
Investigators said on Saturday — and the video appeared to confirm — that the explosions caused such havoc that sailors probably had no time even to begin emergency procedures or don rescue suits. Ustinov claimed that tests had shown that the center of the fire aboard the boat was measured in the thousands of degrees.
The commander of the navy's Northern Fleet, Adm. Vyacheslav Popov, said that those crewmen who survived the blasts were soon drowned or asphyxiated by toxic gases from the subsequent fire. "There was fire throughout the submarine," he said. "We expect confirmation that the boat was completely flooded within six, seven, eight hours."
The latest explanation, however, appears at odds with much of what navy officials were saying in the hours and days after the Kursk went down.
Initially, there were reports that the navy was in radio contact with the boat. For two days afterward, officials said they detected increasingly faint tapping from inside the sub's hull, which had been interpreted as a desperate request for fresh air.
In contrast to the national outpouring of grief that followed the disaster 14 months ago, Popov said Saturday, the names of those sailors whose bodies were being removed from the Kursk would not be released until the entire submarine had been examined, all bodies identified and the burials completed.
The few who have been identified are already being released to relatives, who have been given the choice of coming to Murmansk to receive them or having them flown home in military jets for burial. Two jets landed at the Murmansk airport Saturday.
Popov said he wished to avoid the chaos surrounding the Kursk's sinking last year, when the crew roster was posted on the Internet and both survivors and government officials were besieged by television cameras.
On Saturday, at least one survivor politely differed.
"What is the secret? I am against it being hidden," said Vladimir Ruzlyov.
"People should know where and when sailors will be buried. They have known pain, and now there will be even more pain."
Ruzlyov's 25-year-old son, Alexander, was a boatswain on the Kursk.
Ruzlyov himself has served on nuclear submarines since 1971, and serves today on the submarine Novgorod Velikiy. Almost all relatives of the Kursk victims have left Vidyayevo, a navy town some 50 miles from here, where they lived when their husbands or sons were sailors.
Ruzlyov, a navy man, has stayed. He says he wants to go to the drydock, to look inside the Kursk, to see what happened. And then, if his son is found, he wants to bury him in Ryazan, a city about 150 miles south of Moscow that is Ruzlyov's hometown.
But Alexander served in the submarine's second compartment, almost directly above the site of the blasts. Ruzlyov said he did not believe that his son's body would be found.