At 10.30am on Saturday August 12, 2000, two massive explosions in rapid succession shook the icy Arctic waters of the Barents Sea. The Kursk, one of the largest and most technologically advanced nuclear subs in the world carrying a crew of 118 Russian sailors, had suffered a major, unexplained accident, and rapidly crashed to the ocean floor. Many can still remember how the news of this terrible accident was reported around the world, and the tension of the days when the doomed crew waited for rescue, while the Russians seemed to be turning away all international offers of help, until it was too late. Robert Moore, the former Moscow Correspondent of ITN, and now their Foreign Affairs editor, has written an authoritative investigative book on this tragedy. He interviewed families of the crew, Russian officals, the international rescue teams, and the US submarine crews who were monitoring the Kursk's movements to produce a book to not only recreate the final moments of the submarine and its crew, but also explore the events leading up to it, and the political, social and environmental issues raised by the catastrophe. This is a story of how the Kursk crew were doomed, how their surviving families fought to learn the truth about their fate and about the British civilian North Sea divers who tried to assist in the rescue mission.

ROBERT MOORE is an award-winning TV journalist, 38 years old. He was ITN's Moscow's Correspondent at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of Mikhael Gorbachev, and their Middle East Correspondent during the Palestinian uprising, the peace process and the assassination of Rabin. Since 1997, he has been their Foreign Affairs Editor, covering a wide range of international stories, including wars in Chechnya, Kosovo and Sierra Leone. A TIME TO DIE is his first book.