[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 145 (1999), Part 4] [Senate] [Pages 5631-5633] [From the U.S. 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 Slow and lacking advanced weapons and sophisticated electronics, the outdated Whiskeys were no match for the Scorpion.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. 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 [[Page 5632]] 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 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 [[Page 5633]] 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.'' ____________________