[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 47 (Wednesday, March 24, 1999)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3292-S3294]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                                SUBMISS

 Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, today I ask that the second 
portion of Mark A. Bradley's article on the disappearance of the U.S.S. 
Scorpion be printed in the Record. The first portion of this article, 
which was featured in the Spring/Summer volume of the Journal of 
America's Military Past, appeared in yesterday's Record. Mr. Bradley 
was awarded the James Madison prize by the Society for History in the 
Federal Government for this article. I will ask that the third and 
final portion of this article be printed in tomorrow's Record.
  The material follows:

  Submiss: The Mysterious Death of the U.S.S. ``SCORPION'' (SSN 589), 
                                Part II

                          (By Mark A. Bradley)

       While the theory of Russian involvement is tantalizing, it 
     is highly unlikely that the Soviet Navy possessed the 
     capability in May 1968 to hunt down the Scorpion. Although 
     the Soviets were on the brink of commissioning two new 
     classes of hunter-killer and ballistic missile submarines--
     the Victor I and the Charlie I--fully able to contend with 
     American sea power, they still relied heavily at that time on 
     their vintage diesel Whiskey class submarines to shadow and 
     challenge hostile warships. Slow and lacking advanced weapons 
     and sophisticated electronics, the outdated Whiskeys were no 
     match for the Scorpion.
       Similarly, the Soviet's Echo II class nuclear submarine had 
     limited capabilities. Although the Echo II was armed with 
     conventional antisubmarine torpedoes, her main weapons were 
     surface-to-surface missiles. According to U.S. intelligence 
     estimates, the Echo II required over 25 minutes to surface 
     and fire, ample time for the Scorpion to parry an attack and 
     to launch one of her own. Moreover, the United States Navy 
     did not begin to decommission its Skipjack class submarines 
     until 1986. Until then, the surviving five remained in 
     firstline service, an unlikely practice for the Navy to 
     maintain if it knew or suspected that the Soviets so easily 
     had hunted down and killed the Scorpion nearly 20 years 
     before.

[[Page S3293]]

       After rejecting Soviet involvement, the Court similarly 
     discounted sabotage, a collision with an undersea mountain, a 
     nuclear accident, a structural failure, a fire, an irrational 
     act by a crew member, a loss of navigational control and, 
     with far less certainty, a weapons accident. Although it 
     found no direct evidence that one of the submarines's own 
     torpedoes had exploded, the Court noted that on December 
     5, 1967, the Scorpion had confronted an accidentally 
     activated Mark 37 torpedo in one of it firing tubes and 
     had sidestepped disaster by expelling it before it could 
     detonate.
       Her standard method for deactivating a ``hot run''--the 
     Navy's term for an accidentally activated torpedo with a live 
     warhead--was to flood the tube with cold water, keeping the 
     torpedo cool, and turn the warship in a U turn more than 170 
     degrees, activating an anti-circular homing device that shut 
     down the projectile's motor. Then her crew would drain the 
     tube, install a propeller lock and jettison it. Small and 
     battery powered, the Mark 37 was a wire-guided anti-submarine 
     torpedo that had a disturbing history of accidentally 
     activating, particularly during testing. In May 1968, the 
     Scorpion had 14 Mark 37s in an arsenal that included two Mark 
     45 ASTOR torpedoes with nuclear warheads and 7 other 
     conventional projectiles.
       She also had a new commander. When he took over the 
     Scorpion on October 17, 1967, Francis Atwood Slattery was 36 
     years old. From West Paris, Maine, he had graduated from 
     Annapolis in 1954 and was a member of the Naval War College's 
     class of 1967. A former executive officer on U.S.S. Nautilus, 
     ``Frank'' Slattery was among a very small cadre of 
     technically gifted offices the Navy had tapped for elite 
     nuclear submarine duty. After promotion to the rank of 
     commander on October 2, 1967, the Scorpion was his first 
     command.
       His newness to command showed in December when navy 
     inspectors gave the Scorpion an unsatisfactory rating after 
     she failed a series of casualty drills involving her nuclear 
     torpedoes and again in January when she engaged in an 
     advanced submarine versus submarine exercise and received the 
     lowest tactical grade of all the participants. Nevertheless, 
     by the time she was deployed to the Mediterranean in 
     February, the Navy rated her fully ready and, by March, she 
     was praised by the 6th Fleet Command Staff for begin a well-
     trained, well-run submarine. By April 1968, seven of her 12 
     officers and 61 of her 87 enlisted men were fully qualified 
     in submarines, and the Court found no ground to blame either 
     her officers or her enlisted men for what happen on May 22.
       As Admiral Austin closed his investigation and submitted 
     his inconclusive findings, the Mizar found the Scorpion in 
     the early morning hours of October 28, 1968, and began 
     photographing the wreckage. Once all the photographic and 
     sound recordings were collected, Admiral Austin reconvened 
     his court in early November and asked a special Technical 
     Advisory Group comprising scientists and veteran submariners 
     to pore over the newly discovered physical evidence. 
     Admiral Thomas Moorer, the Chief of Naval Operations, 
     earlier had created this group to provide technical 
     expertise to the Court.
       Headed by Dr. John Craven, the naval scientist who in 1966 
     led the team that retrieved a hydrogen bomb that had 
     plummeted into the Atlantic near Palomares, Spain, after two 
     U.S. Air Force planes collided, and assisted by the Naval 
     Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., the technical 
     experts first examined the acoustical recordings and made a 
     startling discovery--the Scorpion had been heading east, 
     instead of west toward Norfolk, when the first cataclysmic 
     explosion erupted. The advisors estimated that the first 
     sound to register on SOSUS had been caused by at least 30 
     pounds of TNT detonating 60 feet or more below the surface 
     and theorized that the Scorpion had been engaged in a hastily 
     ordered U-turn in a desperate attempt to disarm a hot run 
     torpedo that exploded and caused uncontrollable flooding. 
     According to Craven, the hot run scenario was the only one 
     that fit all the evidence.
       In a December 16, 1984, article published in the Virginian-
     Pilot & Ledger-Star, Craven related that the photographs 
     indicated that the Scorpion's torpedo room was still intact 
     and had not been crushed by water pressure as she spiraled 
     toward her watery grave. In that interview, Craven said he 
     believed the torpedo room did not implode, pointing out that 
     it was the first part of the Scorpion to flood after the 
     explosion and already had filled with water when the 
     submarine began to sink. Noting the absence of visible damage 
     from outside the hull, he added that a torpedo probably 
     detonated inside the compartment instead of in one of the 
     submarine's six firing tubes.
       Craven also noted that the photographs showed that several 
     access hatches to the torpedo room were open. This meant they 
     probably were pushed out by internal pressure. The other 
     SOSUS recordings were sounds of the Scorpion's various 
     compartments collapsing and buckling as she bent like a piece 
     of taffy as she sank below her crush depth and slammed into 
     the ocean floor at a speed estimated to between 25 and 35 
     knots per hour.
       Although the Court discovered that Schade's May 20 
     operational order did not specify whether the Scorpion's 
     torpedoes were to be fully armed, it seems likely that 
     Slattery would have exercised his discretion and ordered them 
     ready as she approached the Soviet ships. If so, this would 
     have been the first time in over a year that the Scorpion had 
     engaged in an operation which required her tactical torpedoes 
     to be fully loaded. She would have done so with a new torpedo 
     gang and weapons officer. All her torpedo men had been 
     replaced since her last operation, and her weapons officer 
     had been relieved during her Mediterranean deployment.
       The Court speculated that the Scorpion probably had begun 
     disarming her torpedoes by the time she broadcast her final 
     message on the evening of May 21 because of the Navy's strict 
     policy forbidding submarines from entering Norfolk with fully 
     armed warheads. If so, the investigators theorized that 
     something as simple as a short in a piece of testing 
     equipment accidentally could have activated one of the Mark 
     37's batteries and triggered a hot run. Left with only 
     seconds to react, Slattery would have ordered the Scorpion 
     into the abrupt U-turn she was making when the torpedo 
     exploded and filled her with rushing sea water.
       Almost immediately, the Navy's Bureau of Weapons challenged 
     the hot run theory and commissioned its own study to 
     undermine it. The Bureau's position was supported by Admiral 
     P. Ephriam Holmes, the commander of the Navy's Atlantic 
     Fleet, and Vice Admiral Schade. Both pointed out that there 
     was no visible torpedo damage to the Scorpion's hull in any 
     of the thousands of photographs taken by the Mizar and 
     Trieste II, that her weapons room showed no signs of a 
     cataclysmic explosion that would have followed as the 
     warship's torpedoes erupted in a massive chain reaction, and 
     that her torpedo firing doors were tightly shuttered. 
     Moreover, former crew members were unable to identify any 
     objects in her debris field that came from her torpedo room.
       Admiral Schade, a veteran World War II submariner and 
     holder of both the Navy Cross and the Silver Star, told the 
     Court that he believed the Scorpion simply was lost after she 
     flooded and sank below her designed operating capacity. 
     Although unsure of how the flooding started, Schade 
     speculated that it happened while the submarine was at 60 
     feet or at periscope depth and that she already was full of 
     water by the time she began to sink. In a letter to Admiral 
     Austin, he wrote that he believed that the most likely cause 
     of the disaster was an accident involving the submarine's 
     trash disposal unit.
       Located in the Scorpion's galley, her trash disposal 
     consisted of an inner door separated from highly pressurized 
     sea water by a basketball-sized valve connected to a 10\1/2\-
     inch tunnel. Although the inner door was supposed to be 
     mechanically prevented from opening while trash was being 
     flushed, and the crew was trained to use a bleed valve to 
     make sure no pressurized sea water was outside before 
     ejecting waste, a broken system or valve coupled with human 
     error could have unleashed a fatal chain of events as a 
     torrent of high-pressure sea water roared through the 
     submarine. Pouring through the Scorpion's galley and swamping 
     her operations center, the rushing cascade would have 
     overwhelmed her pumps, washed over and shorted out her 
     electric control panels, flooded over her huge battery 
     several decks below and exploded into a deadly mist of 
     fiery hydrogen and poisonous chlorine gas. With her crew 
     dead or unconscious and water pressure squeezing her as 
     she plunged deeper and deeper, the Scorpion would have 
     imploded as she rocketed nearly two miles to the ocean's 
     floor.
       Vice Admiral Robert Fountain (Ret), the former executive 
     officer on the Scorpion from 1965 until 1967, supports this 
     theory. In a recent interview, Fountain explained that the 
     Scorpion normally came up to periscope depth to expel her 
     trash and that she especially would have needed to do so 
     after completing an underwater intelligence operation. He 
     also pointed out that the submarine had experienced flooding 
     because of her trash disposal unit before. Some of the 
     photographs taken by the Mizar and Trieste II appear to back 
     Fountain's claim. These show that all the submarine's 
     identifiable debris is from her operations center where her 
     galley was located, and that a large section of her hull is 
     missing where her huge 69-ton battery was stored.
       The Austin Court considered this theory and determined it 
     was possible but ``not probable'' without further comment. 
     Moreover, the several witnesses testified that they believed 
     the warship's safety systems would have deployed to save her 
     if she was flooding that close to the surface. This 
     assessment might have been right if the Scorpion's safety 
     systems were fully working and certified, but they were 
     neither.
       The Scorpion's safety systems were a direct product of the 
     worst submarine disaster in American history--the loss of 
     U.S.S. Thresher and her entire crew of 112 sailors and 17 
     civilians on April 10, 1963. It is impossible to overestimate 
     what the Thresher's loss meant to the Navy. A public 
     relations nightmare during the very dangerous middle years of 
     the cold War, the Thresher's abrupt demise during test dives 
     220 miles off Cape Cod shattered the myth of the service's 
     technological invincibility--much like the Challenger's 
     explosion did to NASA's some 23 years later--and caused acute 
     embarrassment and unwelcome political oversight. Not only did 
     it deprive the Navy of its most advanced submarine, but the 
     disaster also spawned a round of congressional hearings and 
     newspaper editorials questioning the design, testing and 
     safety of the service's underwater nuclear fleet.
       To combat these criticisms and regain its prestige, the 
     Navy instituted its Submarine

[[Page S3294]]

     Safety Program (SUBSAFE). First initiated in May 1963 and 
     formalized that December, SUBSAFE was designed to ensure the 
     Thresher was not repeated. After months of exhaustive 
     hearings, which produced 12 volumes and 1,718 pages of 
     evidence, the service's experts traced the Thresher's sinking 
     to a series of failed silver-braze joints and pipes that 
     set into motion a deadly chain of catastrophic events that 
     ended with the warship's main systems flooded and her 
     ballast system unable to muster enough air to send her to 
     the surface. The investigators concluded that once the 
     submarine dove to her test depth of 1,300 feet, water 
     pressure ruptured her pipes and created a two inch leak. 
     This sent an unstoppable stream of icy water over her 
     control panels that her crew was unable to stop because 
     they could not reach her centralized shutoff valves in 
     time. It stopped her reactor and sent her backwards and 
     downwards as she lost all power. Unable to blow enough air 
     into her ballast tanks through her narrow pipes--moisture 
     in her pipes had frozen, blocking her air vents--the 
     Thresher imploded as she fell over 8,000 feet to the 
     bottom.
       In the wake of this, the Navy's Bureau of Ships and the 
     Ship Systems Command placed depth restrictions on all the 
     service's post-World War II submarines--the Scorpion was 
     limited to a depth of 500 feet instead of her standard 
     operating depth of 700 feet--and ordered their inspectors and 
     workmen to begin the time-consuming and expensive task of 
     examining and replacing faulty sea water hydraulic piping 
     systems and rewelding possible faulty joints in over 80 
     submarines. They also ordered the improvement of flood 
     control systems by increasing ballast tank blow rates and the 
     installation of decentralized sea water shutoff valves.
       By the time SUBSAFE was instituted, the Scorpion was in 
     dry-dock at the Charleston Naval Shipyard for her first and 
     last full overhaul. Arriving on June 10, 1963, and remaining 
     until April 28, 1964, she had nearly completed her repairs by 
     the time the yard's command received orders to implement the 
     new safety requirements. Although workmen inspected the 
     Scorpion's hull and replaced many of her welds, they were not 
     authorized to install emergency sea water shut-off valves. 
     Moreover, the Naval Sea Systems Command deemed the interim 
     emergency blow system the yard constructed unsuitable for 
     service and ordered it disconnected. The Navy decided to 
     defer installing these two systems until early 1967, the date 
     of the Scorpion's next scheduled overhaul.
       By then, the Navy had spent over $500 million on SUBSAFE 
     and estimated that it needed at least another $200 million 
     more to certify all its submarines. In addition, severe 
     outside pressures were forcing the Navy to rethink how best 
     to allocate its already stretched resources. Faced with 
     fighting an increasingly protracted war in Vietnam while 
     meeting the unchanging demands of maintaining America's 
     global security obligations at a time when the 
     Soviets decided to expand and transform their navy into a 
     full-blown blue water fleet, the service's high command 
     began to grope for new ways to meet its backbreaking 
     obligations.
       Confronted now with the urgent need to launch more warships 
     and to keep the ones it already had at sea, the Navy decided 
     to delay installing full SUBSAFE systems in many of its older 
     submarines. What prompted this shift started with a series of 
     confidential memoranda and messages drafted in 1966 as the 
     Navy sought ways to reduce the time its submarines spent in 
     dry dock meeting SUBSAFE's requirements. A Naval Sea Systems 
     Command study of that era revealed not only the rising costs 
     of this program but that approximately 40 percent of the 
     average submarine's time was spent undergoing reconditioning 
     instead of serving at sea.
       The Navy's leadership was clearly worried by the political 
     fallout these statistics would generate. On March 24, 1966, 
     the Commander of Submarine Squadron 6--the Scorpion's unit--
     drafted a memorandum to Admiral Schade, Commander Submarine 
     Force, Atlantic Fleet that candidly admitted that ``the 
     inordinate amount of time currently involved in routine 
     overhauls of nuclear submarines is a recognized source of 
     major concern to the Navy as a whole and the submarine force 
     in particular and stands as a source of acute political 
     embarrassment.'' The memorandum blamed the Navy's Bureau of 
     Ships and the managers of the service's shipyards for these 
     problems and complained about the shortage of skilled workers 
     needed to complete the overhauls, their poor planning in 
     ordering critical materials on time, and the overall 
     magnitude of what SUBSAFE required. It also warned that the 
     Scorpion's next scheduled reconditioning in November 1966 
     ``will establish a new record for in overhaul 
     duration.''

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