Maurice Stradling never trusted the official thesis explaining that a torpedo launched from the Russian submarine had gone off inside its compartment. As a matter of fact, you do not need to be an expert in order to know that modern missiles or torpedoes can not explode without electronic activation. The former Royal Navy engineer and torpedo expert who had already expressed this viewpoint at the Le Koursk, un sous-marin en eaux troubles [The Kursk, a submarine in misty waters] documentary film by Jean-Michel, continues to affirm that the catastrophe, which claimed the lives of the 118 crew members of the Russian Navy’s insignia boat in August 2000, was caused by a MK-48 US torpedo that would have been launched from the Memphis submarine following the crash of another US submarine, Toledo, into the Russian ship, which was ready to retaliate. The catastrophe would have led up to intense diplomatic exchange between Bill Clinton and Vladimir Putin, while the press denounced the old age of the Russian nuclear fleet and the incompetence of local authorities.
Since the first Cold War, the best Russian and US submarines have play cat and mouse in order to test their detection and camouflage capabilities, since they can not test them in any other ways.