[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 48 (Thursday, March 25, 1999)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3540-S3542]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
SUBMISS: PART III
Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, today I wish to have printed in
the Record the final portion of Mark A. Bradley's award winning article
on the disappearance of the U.S.S. Scorpion. I have had the previous
two parts of this article printed in the last two Records. I would like
to applaud Mr. Bradley once more for his outstanding achievements, and
thank him for serving as a loyal and valued member of my staff.
The material follows:
Submiss: The Mysterious Death of the U.S.S. ``SCORPION'' (SSN 589),
Part III
(By Mark A. Bradley)
Such dire predictions prompted Admiral David McDonald, then
Chief of Naval Operations, to follow Admiral Schade's request
and approve the development and testing of the experimental
``Planned or Reduced Availability'' overhaul concept in the
submarine fleet. In a June 17, 1966, message to the
commanders of both the Navy's Atlantic and Pacific fleets, he
wrote that in response to ``concerns about [the] percent [of]
SSN off-line time due to length of shipyard overhauls, [I
have] requested NAVSHIPS develop [a] program to test `Planned
Availability' concept with U.S.S. Scorpion (SSN 589) and
U.S.S. Tinosa (SSN 606). On July 20, 1966, he officially
approved the Scorpion's participation in this program which
aimed at providing the service's submarines with shorter and
cheaper but more frequent overhauls between missions. An
undated and unsigned confidential memorandum entitled
``Submarine Safety Program Status Report'' summarizes what
lay behind the creation of this new concept: ``The deferral
of SUBSAFE certification work during certain submarine
overhauls was necessitated by the need to reduce submarine
off-line time by minimizing the time spent in overhaul and to
achieve a more timely delivery of submarines under
construction by making more of the industrial capacity
available to new construction.''
Admiral Moorer, who succeeded Admiral McDonald as CNO,
expanded upon what he hoped this new plan would accomplish in
a September 6, 1967, letter to Congressman William Bates. In
that letter, he stated that ``it is the policy of the Navy to
provide submarines that have been delivered without
certification with safety certification modifications during
regular overhauls. However, urgent operational commitments
sometimes dictate that some items of the full safety
certification package be deferred until a subsequent overhaul
in order to reduce the time spent in overhaul, thus
shortening off-line time and increasing operational
availability. In these cases, a minimum package of submarine
safety work items is authorized which provides enhanced
safety but results in certification for unrestricted
operations to a depth shallower than the designed test
depth.'' According to an April 5, 1968 confidential
memorandum, the Navy did not expect the Scorpion to be fully
certified under SUBSAFE until 1974, six years after she was
lost.
On February 1, 1967, the Scorpion entered the Norfolk yard
and began her ``Reduced Availability'' overhaul. By the time
she sailed out on October 6, she had received the cheapest
submarine overhaul in United States Navy history. Originally
scheduled for more extensive reconditioning, the Scorpion was
further hurt by manpower and material shortages in the yard
because of the overhaul of the U.S.S. Skate (SSN 578),
Norfolk's first of a nuclear submarine. This retrofit had
gobbled up both workmen and resources at an unprecedented
rate. This meant that a submarine tender--a maintenance
ship--and the Scorpion's own crew had to perform most of the
work normally done by yard workers. She received little more
than the emergency repairs required to get her back to sea
and the refueling of her reactor. Out of the $3.2 million
spent on her during these eight months, $2.3 million went
into refueling and altering her nuclear reactor. A standard
submarine overhaul of this era lasted almost two years and
cost over $20 million.
When the Scorpion left Norfolk on February 15, 1968, on her
Mediterranean deployment she was a last minute replacement
for the U.S.S. Sea Wolf (SSN 575), which had collided with
another vessel in Boston Harbor. During her last deployment,
the Scorpion had 109 work orders still unfilled--one was for
a new trash disposal unit latch--and she still lacked a
working emergency blow system and decentralized emergency
sea water shutoff valves. She also suffered from chronic
problems in her hydraulics. This system operated both her
stern and sail planes, wing-like structures that
controlled her movement. This problem came to the
forefront in early and mid-November 1967 during the
Scorpion test voyage to Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin
Islands as she began violently to corkscrew in the water.
Although she was put back in dry dock, this problem
remained unsolved. On February 16, 1968, she lost over
1,500 gallons of oil from her conning tower as she sailed
out of Hampton Roads toward the Mediterranean. By that
time, she was called ``U.S.S. Scrapiron'' by many of her
crew.
On May 23, 1993, the Houston Chronicle published an article
that highlighted these mechanical problems. The article
quoted from letters mailed home from doomed crew members who
complained about these deficiencies. In one of these,
Machinist's Mate Second Class David Burton Stone wrote that
the crew had repaired, replaced or jury-
[[Page S3541]]
rigged every piece of the Scorpion equipment. Commander
Slattery also was worried about her mechanical reliability.
On March 23, 1968, he drafted an emergency request for
repairs that warned, among other things, that ``the hull was
in a very poor state of preservation''--the Scorpion had been
forced to undergo an emergency drydocking in New London
immediately after her reduced overhaul because of this--and
bluntly stated that ``[d]elay of the work an additional year
could seriously jeopardize the Scorpion material readiness.''
He was particularly concerned about a series of leaking
valves that caused the Scorpion to be restricted to an
operating depth of just 300 feet, 200 less than SUBSAFE
restrictions and 400 less than her pre-Thresher standards.
This portrait is sharply at odds with the one the Navy
painted after the Scorpion was lost. From the outset, the
service claimed the submarine was in excellent mechanical
condition. At his first press conference on May 27, 1968,
Admiral Moorer told the gathered newsmen that the Scorpion
had not reported any mechanical problems and that she was not
headed home for any repairs. This was followed by other Navy
statements that claimed the Scorpion suffered only from a
minor hydraulic leak and scarred linoleum on her deck before
her Mediterranean deployment. On May 29, however, then
Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford pointedly asked the
Navy's high command for information about the Scorpion's
participation in SUBSAFE, her overhaul status in general and
any known mechanical deficiencies.
The Court of Inquiry did not ignore these questions and
asked several of its witnesses what they knew about the
Scorpion's mechanical condition and her maintenance history.
Vice Admiral Schade told the Court that her overall condition
was above average and that her problems were normal
reoccurring maintenance items. He added that the Scorpion
suffered from no known material problems that affected her
ability to operate effectively. Schade's testimony was
supported by Captain C.N. Mitchell, the Deputy Chief of Staff
for Logistics and Management and a member of the Vice
Admiral's staff. Mitchell testified about the Scorpion's
Reduced Availability overhaul and stated that she was in
``good material condition.''
Captain Jared E. Clarke, III, the commander of Submarine
Squadron 6, also told the Court the Scorpion was sound and
``combat ready.'' In his testimony he said, ``I know of
nothing about her material condition upon her departure for
the Mediterranean that in any way represented an unsafe
condition.'' When asked about the Scorpion's lack of an
operable emergency blow system, Clarke replied that this was
not a concern because her other blow systems were more than
adequate to meet the depth restrictions she was operating
under.
Admiral Austin also summoned the two surviving crew members
the Scorpion had offloaded for medical and family reasons on
the night of May 16, 1968. When asked about any material
problems, crewman Joseph W. Underwood told the Court that he
knew of no deficiencies other than ``a couple of hydraulic
problems.'' Similarly, crewman Bill G. Elrod testified the
submarine was operating smoothly with high morale. When asked
to speculate on what did happen, Elrod could not. After
hearing all this testimony, the Court determined that the
Scorpion's loss had nothing to do with her lack of a full
SUBSAFE package and that both here ability to overcome
flooding and her material condition were ``excellent.''
Although at least one of the dead crewmen's families sent
their son's letters spelling out the Scorpion's poor state of
repair to the Navy, there is no evidence the Court ever
received or considered them.
Whatever the truth, the Scorpion's loss triggered neither
the klieg lights of the national media nor the congressional
investigations that followed the Thresher's demise. Lost
somewhere in the murky twilight among the North Koreans'
seizure of the U.S.S. Pueblo and the Tet offensive that
January and the assassinations of Martin Luther King that
April and Robert Kennedy that June, the Scorpion's death
failed to arouse much interest in a nation whose streets were
on fire and whose very fiber was being ripped apart by an
increasingly unpopular and bloody war in Vietnam. With
phrases like ``body count'' and acronyms like ``MIA'' and
``KIA'' becoming part of the national vernacular, the loss of
one nuclear submarine and her crew of 99 men hardly made a
ripple.
The Navy added to the country's amnesia by conducting its
inquiries under a cloak of extraordinary secrecy. Even now,
much about the Scorpion's fate remains highly classified and
beyond the public's reach, and the crew's 64 windows and over
100 children know little more today about what happened to
their husbands and fathers than they did 30 years ago. This
gap between what is known and what is not has spawned many
conspiracy theories. The most popular is that the Soviets
finished the Scorpion in an underwater dogfight.
This theory had some credibility after the Federal Bureau
of Investigation arrested master spy John Walker on May 20,
1985. Walker, a U.S. Navy warrant officer and the leader of a
Soviet-sponsored spy right for almost 20 years, did enormous
damage to America's security by giving his KGB masters many
of the Navy's most closely guarded secrets. On May 20, 1968,
he was working as a watch officer in the Navy's closely
guarded submarine message center in Norfolk. Although there
is evidence to believe that Walker gave the Soviets
intelligence about the Atlantic Submarine Force, particularly
about its coded communications, there is nothing to suggest
that he played any direct in the Scorpion's demise.
He appears to have played a much more important role when
he passed on to his Russian handlers much of the top secret
traffic that came through the message center immediately
after the submarine was reported lost. This highly classified
information included how the Navy conducted its search, what
the U.S. intelligence community knew about the Soviet vessels
operating off the Canary Islands, what part SOSUS had played
in detecting the disaster and what the service's main
theories were for the Scorpion's loss. While it is tempting
to blame the Soviets and Walker for this disaster, the
probable truth is far different but no less disturbing.
Although the theory of a weapons accident on board the
Scorpion has officially never been discounted, the physical
evidence does not seem to support it. None of the thousands
of photographs taken of the wreckage show any torpedo damage
nor does the Scorpion's approximately 3,000 feet by 1,800
feet debris field contain any items from her torpedo room as
would be expected if that area had suffered a major
explosion. All the debris is from her operations center, the
locus of her galley and above her huge battery.
The more likely cause of the Scorpion's death lies in the
Navy's failure to absorb the lessons learned from the
Thresher. Hyman Rickover, the father of the Navy's nuclear
program, warned after that disaster that another would occur
if the service did not correct the inadequate design, poor
fabrication methods and inadequate inspections that caused
it. Through SUBSAFE, the Navy instituted a program to correct
these and maintain and build a nuclear submarine fleet that
was both safe and effective. Unfortunately, the strains of
competing with the Soviets in the Cold War while fighting an
actual one in Vietnam derailed this concept and forced the
service to look for ways to decrease the off-line time of the
submarines it already had while freeing its already choked
yards to build more.
The Reduced Availability concept arose from these pressures
and allowed the Navy to defer what the Thresher taught could
not be delayed. Through an accident of timing, the Scorpion
was the first nuclear submarine chosen for this program. She
was selected because her next regulatory scheduled overhaul
was predicted to set a record in duration, and the Navy's
high command believed that the work she received during her
1963-1964 reconditioning in Charleston provided enough of a
safety margin to see her through until her next overhauls.
She also was chosen because her 1967 overhaul came due during
a time when the service was feeling enormous pressure to
compete with the Soviets and reduce the amount of time its
submarines and yards were tied up with safety retrofits.
Rushed to the Mediterranean after the cheapest overhaul in
U.S. nuclear submarine history and lacking full SUBSAFE
certification, the Scorpion's mechanical condition and safety
capabilities were far from what the Navy advertised. A trash
disposal unit flood could have set into train a deadly chain
of events that triggered a succession of material and
systemic failures in an already weakened submarine that left
her unable to recover. Although the Court doubted that a
hydrogen gas explosion from the Scorpion's battery could have
generated enough force to rupture her hull, it did not
consider its exploding after being swamped with cold sea
water from uncontrollable flooding and filling her with
deadly chlorine gas.
Even under the best of circumstances, the submarine force
was a dangerous place to serve in the 1960s. Its sailors and
officers often were engaged in extremely hazardous missions
in warships that were like no others that had come before
them. With far greater speeds, diving capabilities and
complex operating systems, nuclear submarines required far
greater care in their construction and maintenance than their
diesel predecessors. This was the key lesson from the
Thresher and if may well have taken the loss of the Scorpion
finally to hammer home this point to the Navy's high command.
After this tragedy, the Navy quietly dropped the Reduced
Availability concept. In a May 21, 1995, article published by
the Houston Chronicle, the Naval Sea Systems Command stated
that it had no record of any such maintenance program. The
reason for this may lie in a March 25, 1966, confidential
memorandum from the Submarine Force: [The] ``success of this
`major-minor' overhaul concept depends essentially on the
results of our first case at hand: Scorpion.'' Although the
cause of her death is still officially listed as unknown, the
United States has never lost another nuclear submarine.
a note on sources
In the 30 years since the Scorpion's loss, not one book has
been written on her. The only newspaper articles written
about her are eight by Ed Offley for the Virginian-Pilot &
Ledger-Star and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and four
written by Stephen Johnson for the Houston Chronicle. The
most important primary sources are the U.S. Navy Court of
Inquiry Record of Proceedings and the Supplementary Record of
Proceedings. In addition, the Naval Historical Center has
over 11 boxes of Scorpion material currently available to
researchers and expects to have more as already declassified
material is cataloged. These boxes include the sanitized
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testimony of many of the witnesses who appeared before the
two courts of inquiry. Although the Chief of Naval Operations
currently is considering releasing more of the Navy's
Scorpion material, much still remains beyond the reach of
researchers and the Freedom of Information Act. On December
19, 1997, the Navy denied my attempt to get copies of the
first Court of Inquiry's Annex. Those documents still retain
their top secret rating and are withheld because ``of
information that is classified in the interest of national
defense and foreign policy.''
The most useful books for this article have been the
following:
On submarines, Modern Submarine Warfare by David Miller and
John Jordan, New York: Military Press (1987); Jane's Pocket
Book of Submarine Development, ed. By John Moore, New York:
MacMillan (1976); The American Submarine by Norman Polmar,
Annapolis: The Nautical & Aviation Publishing Co., (1981);
and Nuclear Navy 1946-1962 by Richard Hewlett and Francis
Duncan, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press (1974).
On intelligence matters, Jeffrey Richelson, The U.S.
Intelligence Community, Cambridge: Ballenger Publishing
Company (1989) and Pete Early, Family of Spies, New York:
Bantam Books (1988).
Stephen Johnson, a reporter for the Houston Chronicle, was
the first to concentrate on the Scorpion's maintenance and
overhaul history and was very generous with both his time and
research. Vice Admiral Robert F. Fountain (Ret), a former
executive officer on the Scorpion, very kindly consented to
an interview as did Rear Admiral Hank McKinney (Ret), the
former commander of the U.S. Navy's Pacific Submarine Force.
In May 1998, the Chief of Naval Operations declassified a
1970 study undertaken by a specially appointed Structural
Analysis Group that pointed to a battery casualty as the most
likely cause for the Scorpion's loss.
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