Ever since August 2000 when the Kursk languished on the bottom of the Barents Sea, with its 118 crewmembers suffocating inside it, the Russian submarine has come to be an formidable symbol of potential tragedy.  It has been a year of disasters across the transportation and aviation spectrum in Russia, so when the news came in today that the Delta IV class SSN Yekaterinburg nuclear submarine was engulfed in a huge blaze in an Arctic shipyard, it was scarcely a bolt from the blue.  Seven people have been hospitalized from smoke inhalation and, according to this report, an unidentified number of crew members were on board whilst the blaze was raging.  Fortunately the fire has, reportedly, now been entirely extinguished, with no fatalities reported, and no radiation leaked.  The habitual promises of investigations and renewed security measures will doubtless be made, with the habitually scant results (Streetwise Professor has a neat account of this year’s disaster impunity here).  The Guardian‘s John Vidal also highlights that the area in which this latest accident occurred, the Murmansk region, is seeping with potential nuclear catastrophe: