Being a university history major [ ... ... ] a topic that has been so completely covered that just about every book, and documentary film dealing with any aspect of Soviet tank design makes mention, I believe I am finished with it.
As a history major, you would do well to note that information often travels from source to source and can take on a life of its own, independent of the truth of it.
There is an article by Stephan J Gould, reprinted in
Bully for Brontosaurus, that describes an incident like this. He picks up that most recent (at the time of writing) high school biology textbooks make the simile that
Eohippus (an early horse) was about the size of a "fox terrier". Given that most American children couldn't tell the difference between a fox terrier and most other sorts of dogs, he finds the simile curious, and proceeds to delve into 70-odd years of textbook history, eventually turning up the single original reference that makes this comparison. It seems that this had been copied - consciously or not - from generation to generation of textbooks.
And along the way, he finds example after example of outright wrong information (some based on known hoaxes) that finds its way into the textbook stream and taking on a life of its own.
I would be careful - in your case, professionally careful - of trotting out "common knowledge" as fact. It is true that the T64, T72, and T80 keep their ammunition in the fighting compartment, but that has been true of all tanks up until recently, with (I think) the M1 being the first tank to store the ammo in a bustle bunker fitted with blowout panels.
I have seen an ammunition-loaded tank hit by an ATGM, and what resulted was more like a really intense fire (think of a "shower" firework going off, or a roadside safety flare, just scaled up really big) Not very healthy, but not a catastrophic explosion either. Most modern explosives require an actual detonation in proximity to the matrix in order to get them to detonate; in the absence of that, they don't explode, they burn.
The Sherman, which kept its ammo in the fighting compartment, was infamous for burning (they called it the Ronson, after the lighter) but I can't remember ever reading about a Sherman exploding its turret off.
That's not to say that T72 etc *don't* ever suffer catastrophic, turret-flinging explosions... but there is room for professional skepticism here. It might make an interesting paper to see how many turret-flingers there were in both Gulf Wars, to determine the frequency of this. And certainly, "ammo in the fighting compartment" is NOT unique to these tanks.
DG