Like the vessel that gave the new film its name, the Kursk was a nuclear-powered submarine. And, like the K-19, there were (and remain) doubts about the safety-measures taken to protect the crew - and the world - from nuclear contamination if anything should go wrong. Which, in the case of both, it undoubtedly did (at time of writing, the Russian inquiry team is reportedly leaning towards the explanation that one of the Kursk’s torpedoes exploded in its tube).

Although it is a fictionalised action movie focusing on the confrontation between two top stars, Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson, and the heroism of the other crew members, K-19: The Widowmaker is based on an actual incident that happened in July 1961, at the height of the Cold War and in the build-up to the Cuban missile crisis.

It was an era in which the policy of nuclear deterrence - a deadly hall of mirrors which relied on one side having enough weapons to prevent the other side from ever using theirs - had reached its zenith. The Soviet Union had weapons to destroy the world twice over. Not to be outdone, the USA had an armoury of nuclear weapons sufficient to destroy the world 10 times over. As Cuba would demonstrate a few months later, one small flashpoint was all it took to launch the world into nuclear war - which would, of course, be the last war ever fought on the planet. The K-19 incident was only prevented from providing that flashpoint by the heroic self-sacrifice of members of its crew.

What made the K-19 different from the Kursk was that, in 1961, the Soviet Union (unlike Russia in 2000) was immensely powerful and rich, with the ability and the manpower to produce - and maintain - state-of-the-art weapons. The K-19 was just such a weapon: a long-range, missile-carrying nuclear submarine capable of operating at depths of almost 1,000 feet.

Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson (below) play two Soviet naval officers whose differences are buried when the sub’s reactor cooling system goes critical.

But, as so often happens at times of crisis, the vessel was put into service before all the necessary tests and sea trials had been carried out. And the result was a catastrophe that brought the world to the brink of disaster. It also cost the lives of 20 men who sacrificed themselves for the good of their country - and the world.

“The story has all the elements for a dramatic movie,” says producer/director Kathryn Bigelow, who had been planning the film for some five years before production started and who, during that time, had made several trips to Russia to talk with the real K-19’s survivors and their families. “It has a built-in ‘ticking clock’ suspense factor: that is, a nuclear submarine with an impending reactor meltdown that could cause catastrophic global repercussions. It has, at its centre, a ferociously dedicated and charismatic captain, whose bold decisions under pressure saved the boat and its crew. And above all it has the courageous young submariners themselves, who knowingly subjected themselves to a lethal dose of radiation to repair the damage and fend off disaster.”

Liam Neeson

The story of the K-19 is, nuclear element apart, the familiar tale of a military establishment pushing its field officers to take risks and do things which their training instilled in them they shouldn’t. The background to the story is this: in November 1960, the United States sent its first Polaris-carrying submarine, the USS George Washington, on patrol. This changed the rules of the nuclear arms race, since having a launch-pad lurking underwater just off the Soviet coast gave the US the chance of hitting the USSR before it had a chance to launch its own missiles - the nearest thing to a ‘win’ scenario in a nuclear war.

Of course, the Soviets had been developing their own nuclear submarine, too, of which the 4,000-ton, 400-foot-long K-19 was a prototype. It’s just that it wasn’t ready to put to sea yet.