[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

[[Page S3542]]

     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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