dive onto the target. The torpedo tubes could be used to launch either torpedoes or anti-ship missiles with a range of . Her weapons included 18 SS-N-16 "Stallion" anti-submarine missiles. Kursk was part of Russia's Northern Fleet, which had suffered funding cutbacks throughout the 1990s. Many of its submarines were anchored and rusting in Zapadnaya Litsa Naval Base, from Murmansk. Little work to maintain all but the most essential front-line equipment, including search and rescue equipment, had occurred. Northern Fleet sailors had gone unpaid in the mid-1990s. Deployments During her five years of service, Kursk completed only one mission, a six-month deployment to the Mediterranean Sea during the summer of 1999 to monitor the United States Sixth Fleet responding to the Kosovo crisis. This was due to a lack of funds for fuel. As a result, many of her crew had spent little time at sea and were inexperienced. Naval exercise and disaster Kursk joined the "Summer-X" exercise, the first large-scale naval exercise planned by the Russian Navy in more than a decade, on 10 August 2000. It included 30 ships including the fleet's flagship Pyotr Velikiy ("Peter the Great"), four attack submarines, and a flotilla of smaller ships. The crew had recently won a citation for its excellent performance and had been recognized as the best submarine crew in the Northern Fleet. While it was on an exercise, Kursk loaded a full complement of combat weapons. It was one of the few vessels authorized to carry a combat load at all times. Explosion On the first day of the exercise, Kursk successfully launched a Granit missile armed with a dummy warhead. Two days later, on the morning of 12 August, Kursk prepared to fire dummy torpedoes at the Pyotr Velikiy. These practice torpedoes had no explosive warheads and were manufactured and tested at a much lower quality standard. On 12 August 2000, at 11:28 local time (07:28 UTC), there was an explosion while preparing to fire. The Russian Navy's final report on the disaster concluded the explosion was due to the failure of one of Kursk'''s hydrogen peroxide-fueled Type 65 torpedoes. A subsequent investigation concluded that high-test peroxide (HTP), a form of highly concentrated hydrogen peroxide used as propellant for the torpedo, seeped through a faulty weld in the torpedo casing. When HTP comes into contact with a catalyst, it rapidly expands by a factor of 5000, generating vast