A Ministry of Defence salvage team will examine the vessel’s two nuclear reactors before deciding whether it can be raised from a depth of more than 900ft.

The K-159, a November-class submarine commissioned in 1962, sank when it was hit by a storm while being towed to be scrapped in September 2003.

The Russian government was embarrassed by its loss, 40 miles off the coast of the Arctic Circle city of Murmansk. Its reactors are filled with three-quarters of a ton of spent uranium. The vessel is lying at more than twice the depth from which the Kursk — the nuclear submarine that sank in 2000, killing its 118-man crew — was raised.

“There’s an element of fear of the unknown here,” said Morgyn Davis, project team leader for salvage and marine at the Defence Logistics Organisation, whose team is consulting the Russian authorities about the K-159. We have towed nuclear submarines before and we have practical experience with nukes, which obviously very few nations have. ”

The Norwegian government, which was given responsibility by the Group of Eight (G8) leading industrial nations for overseeing the post-cold war clean-up of ageing military equipment in the Arctic, has come in for criticism over the sinking.

Norway largely financed the disastrous Russian towing operation in which four rusting pontoons, built in 1942, were used as a support structure for the submarine.

After the sinking, Britain stepped in and offered its services, playing a key role in towing two remaining November-class submarines safely across the Barents Sea. The British team will now work with Norwegian and Canadian diving experts and Dutch salvage engineers.

Currently engaged in keeping the oil tanks of the sunken battleship Royal Oak from leaking into Scapa Flow, Davis’s team last raised a submarine in 1985. It was also involved with a British company whose submersible rescued seven Russians in the mini-submarine Priz off Kamchatka in the Russian Far East in August 2005.

“We’ve worked closely with the Russian government and we think we understand what’s involved with the K-159,” said Davis. “The first thing to do is to get down to the wreck in remote-control submersibles, cut the pontoon wires around the submarine and put sensors on to check for radiation. We think it is flooded with water, so raising it like that, from that depth, would be very difficult.”

If the hull is intact the team may pump in compressed air to allow the K-159 to rise with the assistance of balloons. If the vessel is too badly damaged it may just be entombed in concrete and left on the seabed.

According to some reports the hatches were open at the time of the sinking — to allow the crew to get air.

Shortly after the accident, retired Admiral Eduard Baltin revealed that the K-159 had been taking water during its last mission in 1983. He said that placing men on the crumbling submarine “was like putting them in a barrel full of holes”.

The families of the submariners who died welcomed the news that Britain may help raise the K-159. They have fought to have the vessel brought back to the surface since 2003 and are now suing the Russian government for compensation.

“The defence ministry has been promising to raise the sub for three years now, so it’s high time it happened,” said Valentina Lappa, the widow of the K-159’s commander, Sergei Lappa.

“We’ve been treated with utter disregard. We have no place to mourn our loved ones. There may still be some remains in the submarine. Our men deserve a proper burial. I have no husband and no tombstone, only a terrible void.”

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