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WE-ll........ it's not a great surprise.
Remember the November boat on the way to the scrappers that sank a few years back? Took all but one of the caretaker crew to the bottom with it.
It was in the same kind of perdicament that you are describing here. Old boat, out of service, but still with the fuel on board.
But that was the Cold War. Give confusing numbers to how many boats one had by leaving them in such a state.
Besides, it gets a little bit darker than that. Those ships may just be the tip of the iceberg. The Soviet Union was rather known, afterwards anyhow, for dumping reactors, radioactive material, whole submarines at sea. The Kara Sea around Novaya Zemlya was a popular dumping ground.
Of course, the US isn't innocent, either. The first reactor for the USS Seawolf, SSN 575, was dumped at sea. One can find lots of dumping zones on the off shore charts though they are supposedly deactivated. We had the USS Triton, SSN 586, in mothballs decades before the end of the Cold War (although I assume it was defueled for that mothball period).
And those are just the nuclear ships (ie, USS Bennington, a carrier scrapped overseas, has its own interesting history).
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("Highness, it will take them centuries to get to our level of technology. May you live a long live, Sir, but not that long!"--Planet Salesman, (w,stte), Dr. Who "The Ribos Operation")
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