Do you know what happens to explosives on sunk ships generally? Are they usually left at the bottom of the ocean, and could they have the potential to detonate?
Typically they would just be left there and (very) slowly degrade. As an example, the Dutch navy still clears hundreds of mines and unexploded bombs every year, left over from the 2nd world war. The explosives still work and are usually triggered with a small clearing charge so that they won't pose any danger to fishermen and the like.
So yes there is potential to detonate, but in general that does not matter a lot unless you are the unluckiest person in the world and happen to be right above it at the time. The explosive wave front expands in a sphere and so decreases in amplitude with the square of the distance to the origin. It loses lethal potential very quickly.
That said, if anyone decides to mount a recovery or salvage mission of any kind, it may be worth upgrading that "no" to a soft "maybe".
As far as I know, nobody has tried to retrieve conventional munitions from a shipwreck, and reasonably enough - they're not dangerous enough to be worth the trouble. Nations will go after lost nuclear warheads, though; indeed, Bayesian search theory saw significant development and interest to serve that purpose [1], and the CIA's been known to go to Bond-movie levels of trouble to the same end [2].
Granted, these were both First Cold War projects, but it seems like there's some degree of possibility that this use of "First Cold War" may eventually prove not to have been a somewhat silly joke, so...
No, but by the wonders of a moment's consideration we can surmise that leaving an example of the US's newest stealth technology, in the backyard pool of the power it's primarily designed to be used against, might not strike someone in the US Department of Defense as the world's cleverest idea.
(For what it's worth, I don't love linking to Less Wrong for this or any reason, but I couldn't as quickly find another reference for the point about Bayesian search theory. If not for the fact that I've seen it mentioned elsewhere in, let's say, less breathlessly wide-eyed technopositivistic contexts, I wouldn't have included it at all.)
That's basically my point. There are plenty of good reasons for salvaging the Moskva that are completely unrelated to whether it carried nuclear weapons.
Understandable! I used the phrase "soft maybe" earlier with deliberation aforethought, but I can't blame anyone for overlooking that in favor of the giant red flag I also sent up in the same comment. (Not when there's still 98 years and change to go on my ban from Scott Siskind's Substack, anyway...)
With regard to the value of recovering Moskva, I suppose I don't know. It's not all that young a design, and evidently struggles against even subsonic antiship missiles. Not that that means it's worth nothing, of course, but I could see the possibility that to attempt a recovery would be throwing good money after bad. That said, you quite evidently have experience in this realm that I lack, and your analysis is thus certainly better informed than mine.
National pride could be a big reason, maybe it carried their newest hypersonic missile, or maybe it carried some other new technology.
And since it sunk in the Black Sea, depending on the exact location, it could have sunk in a relatively shallow area, where it is easy to do the salvage even if there is no really good reason.
The Israeli Navy, for example, spent several decades searching for its lost submarine INS Dakar. It was located in 1999 and then the conning tower was salvaged from a depth of 3,000m and placed in the Naval Museum.
