Sasha Kuzminykh was a torpedo specialist on board the nuclear submarine Bars, which had just returned from a long deep-ocean patrol. It was moored at a wharf in the garrison settlement of Skalisty, at the mouth of the fjord leading from the Arctic city of Murmansk to the Barents Sea.

In the early hours of September 11, Kuzminykh emergedfrom the submarine and walked onto the quayside carrying a heavy metal chisel. He hurled himself at the sailor on sentry duty, murdered him, and seized his fully-loaded Kalashnikov. He shot at a commander from another submarine who came to investigate, seriously wounding him. That night the Bars, which normally carries a crew of 70, had a skeleton watch. Clambering back inside the vessel, Kuzminykh entered the cabin where five of his crewmates lay asleep and shot them dead. He marched another two into the forward torpedo compartment, shot them, and sealed the bulkhead.

When negotiators began talking with him over the sub's intercom system, he made no demands. He simply threatened to detonate the vessel's torpedoes. His mother, his brother Ruslan, psychologists, a succession of admirals and a local Orthodox priest were unable to persuade him to give himself up.

After more than 24 hours, special forces were preparing to storm the torpedo room when they heard the sound of a single shot. Kuzminykh had takenhis own life.

The Bars was not carrying its usual complement of nuclear-tipped cruise missiles. But an explosion could have breached the vessel's nuclear reactor. ``For a day and a night, the country was on the brink of a nuclear catastrophe,'' a security service officer said. ``It would have been a second Chernobyl.'' The tragedy sent a fresh tremor through Norway, less than 100 miles west of Skalisty. The country has a gnawing fear of the Russian navy's half-secret atomic arms dumps, nuclear weapons and radioactive junkyards on the Kola peninsula.

As scores of officers commit suicide, mired in poverty and debt because of unpaid salaries, with monitoring of the mental health of servicemen primitive, and with a culture of beating, humiliation and degradation endemic among half-starved conscripts, there are reasons to fear that, while Russia's nuclear weapons are not going to blow up of their own accord, the men looking after them are. Violent bullying is chronic in the Russian armed forces. There is atradition of dyedovshchina, handed down with fists and boots from one group of conscripts to another, where the weakest recruits in a new intake are set upon by those who have already served out half of their two-year term. Preoccupied with problems of survival and increasingly contemptuous of conscripts, officers turn a blind eye, or join in.

On July 24 this year, a former Russian general, Alexander Lebed, now Governor of Krasnoyarsk, announced that he was considering taking control of a wing of intercontinental ballistic missiles in his region whose crews had not been paid for five months. The wives of officers had already staged a violent protest at the unit headquarters. ``Hungry officers are angry officers,'' Lebed warned.

The general, gunning for the presidency in 2000, was making a rhetorical point. But the anger was all too real. Russian specialists rubbish the notion that hungry, angry, suicidal officers might be able to detonate, launch or steal nuclear weapons. Rear-Admiral Alexei Ovchinnikovsays: ``A single person couldn't do anything with a ballistic missile on board a submarine. It's placed in a secure container, and can't be damaged, let alone launched.'' But as long as the armed forces remain in their present state, doubts will remain.

-- The Observer News Service