[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and sophisticated electronics, the outdated Whiskeys were no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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