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USS Scorpion (SSN-589) was a Skipjack-class nuclear submarine of the United States Navy, and the sixth ship of the U.S. Navy to carry that name. Scorpion was declared lost on 5 June 1968, one of the few U.S. Navy submarines to be lost at sea while not at war and is one of only two nuclear submarines the U.S. Navy has ever lost, the other being USS Thresher

, which sank on 10 April 1963 off the coast of New England

Service history

Scorpion's keel was laid 20 August 1958 by the Electric Boat Division of the General Dynamics Corporation in Groton, Connecticut

. She was launched on 19 December 1959, sponsored by Mrs. Elizabeth S. Morrison (daughter of the last commander of the World War II-era USS Scorpion, which had been lost with all hands in 1944), and commissioned on 29 July 1960 with Commander Norman B. Bessac in command.

1960 – 1967

Assigned to Submarine Squadron 6, Division 62, Scorpion departed New London, Connecticut

, on 24 August for a two-month deployment in European waters. During that period, she participated in exercises with units of the Sixth Fleet and of other NATO

navies. After returning to New England

in late October, she trained along the eastern seaboard until May 1961, then crossed the Atlantic again for operations which took her into the summer. On 9 August 1961 she returned to New London, and, a month later, shifted to Norfolk, Virginia

. In 1962, she earned the Navy Unit Commendation.

With Norfolk her home port for the remainder of her career, Scorpion specialized in the development of nuclear submarine warfare tactics. Varying her role from hunter to hunted, she participated in exercises which ranged along the Atlantic coast and in the Bermuda

and Puerto Rico operating areas; then, from June 1963 to May 1964, she interrupted her operations for an overhaul at Charleston, South Carolina

. Resuming duty off the eastern seaboard in late spring, she again interrupted that duty from 4 August to 8 October to make a transatlantic patrol. In the spring of 1965, she conducted a similar patrol in European waters.

During the late winter and early spring of 1966, and again in the autumn, she was deployed for special operations. Following the completion of those assignments, her commanding officer received the Navy Commendation Medal for outstanding leadership, foresight, and professional skill. Other Scorpion officers and crewmen were cited for meritorious achievement. The Scorpion is reputed to have entered an inland Russian sea during a "Northern Run" in 1966 where it successfully filmed a Soviet missile launch through its periscope before being forced to use its high speed to flee Soviet Navy ships. Scorpion had a reputation for excellence and as a fast attack submarine it was a plum assignment for officers seeking to move up in a Navy in which submarine officers were gaining increasing clout.

Overhaul

On 1 February 1967, Scorpion entered the Norfolk Naval Shipyard

for another extended overhaul. However, instead of the much-needed complete overhaul, she received only emergency repairs to get her back on duty as soon as possible. Operational pressures and complex and unforeseen problems created by the Submarine Safety Program (SUBSAFE) that was initiated after the 1963 loss of the USS Thresher

, meant that submarine overhauls went from nine months in length to 36 months. Intensive vetting of submarine component quality required by the SUBSAFE program coupled with various improvements and intensified structural inspections - particularly hull welding inspections using ultrasonic testing - were issues that reduced the availability of critical parts such as seawater piping. Cold War pressures prompted U.S. Submarine Fleet Atlantic (SUBLANT) officers to hunt for ways to reduce overhaul durations. The cost of that last overhaul was nearly one-seventh of those given other nuclear submarines at the same time. This was the result of concerns about the "high percentage of time offline" of nuclear attack submarines which was estimated to be at about 40% of total available duty time.

As Scorpion's original "full overhaul" was whittled down in scope, it was decided it would not receive long-overdue SUBSAFE work. Scorpion would not receive a new, central valve control system; in the event of an emergency, her crew would have to scramble around the engine room to find and manually operate large valves. Crucially, Scorpion would not receive a fix for the same emergency system that did not work on the Thresher, the submarine whose loss was the reason for the existence of the SUBSAFE program. On that ship a pipe leak at depth prompted an emergency shutdown of the submarine's nuclear reactor; powerless, the Thresher could still have surfaced if the Emergency Main Ballast Tank blow system worked. It did not. (Later, dockside tests on Thresher's sister ship Tinosa proved that the EMBT system did not work at test depth; moisture in the high-pressure air flasks froze the valves shut.) Following a dispute between Charleston Naval Ship Yard, which claimed the EMBT system worked as-is, and SUBLANT, which claimed it did not, the EMBT was "tagged out" or listed as unusable. The aforementioned problems with overhaul duration, that saw the Scorpion selected for a reduced experimental overhaul program, also caused all SUBSAFE work to be delayed as well during 1967.

The reduced overhaul concept Scorpion went through had been approved by the Chief of Naval Operations on 17 June 1966. On 20 July, the CNO also allowed deferral of the SUBSAFE extensions, which had otherwise been deemed essential since 1963.

During Scorpion's last six months of operational life, at least two sailors, EM2 Daniel Rogers and Radioman Chief Daniel Pettey, struggled to be released from duty aboard Scorpion due to the bad morale problems they witnessed. Rogers sought disqualification from submarine duty – which was then allowed – while Pettey actually attempted to transfer to the U.S. Army only to be released from Scorpion while in the Mediterranean just months before it was lost.

Loss

Disappearance

In late October 1967, Scorpion started refresher training and weapons system acceptance tests, and was given a new Commanding Officer, Francis Slattery. Following type training out of Norfolk, Virginia

, it got underway on 15 February 1968 for a Mediterranean Sea

deployment. It operated with the Sixth Fleet into May and then headed west for home. Scorpion suffered several mechanical malfunctions including a chronic problem with Freon leakage from refrigeration systems. An electrical fire occurred in an escape trunk when a water leak shorted out a shore power connection.

Upon departing the Mediterranean on 16 May, two men departed Scorpion at Rota, Spain. One man left due to emergency leave and the other enlisted man departed for health reasons. Scorpion was then detailed to observe Soviet naval activities in the Atlantic in the vicinity of the Azores. With this completed, Scorpion prepared to head back to Naval Base Norfolk.

For an unusually long period of time, beginning shortly before midnight on 20 May and ending after midnight 21 May, Scorpion was attempting to send radio traffic to Naval Station Rota in Spain but was only able to reach a Navy communications station in Nea Makri

, Greece, which forwarded Scorpion's messages to SUBLANT. Six days later, it was reported overdue at Norfolk. Navy personnel suspected possible failure and launched a search.

The search

A public search was initiated, but without immediate success and on 5 June, Scorpion and her crew were declared "presumed lost." Her name was struck from the Naval Vessel Register on 30 June. Some recent reports now indicate that a large and secret search was launched three days before Scorpion was expected back from patrol; this combined with other declassified information led many to speculate the US Navy knew of the Scorpion's destruction before the public search was launched.

The public search continued with a team of mathematical consultants led by Dr. John Craven, the Chief Scientist of the U.S. Navy's Special Projects Division. They employed the methods of Bayesian search theory, initially developed during the search for a hydrogen bomb lost off the coast of Palomares, Spain in January, 1966 in the Palomares B-52 crash

. At the end of October, the Navy's oceanographic research ship, USNS Mizar (T-AGOR-11), located sections of the hull of Scorpion in more than 3000 meters (10,000 ft) of water about 740 kilometers (400 nautical miles) southwest of the Azores. This was after the navy had released sound tapes from its underwater "SOSUS" listening system which contained the sounds of the destruction of Scorpion. Subsequently, the Court of Inquiry was reconvened, and other vessels, including the bathyscaphe Trieste II, were dispatched to the scene, collecting a myriad of pictures and other data.

Although Dr. Craven received much credit for locating the wreckage of Scorpion, Gordon Hamilton — an acoustics expert who pioneered the use of hydroacoustics to pinpoint Polaris missile splashdown locations — was instrumental not only in acquiring the acoustic signals that were used in locating the vessel, but also in analyzing those signals to provide a concise "search box" wherein the wreck of the Scorpion was finally located. Hamilton had established a listening station in the Canary Islands, which obtained a clear signal of what some scientists believe was the noise of the vessel's pressure hull imploding as she passed below crush depth. A little-known Naval Research Laboratory scientist named Chester "Buck" Buchanan, using a towed camera sled of his own design aboard the USNS Mizar, finally located Scorpion after nearly six months of searching. The towed camera sled, which was fabricated by J.L. "Jac" Hamm of Naval Research Laboratory's Engineering Services Division, is currently housed in the Navy Museum, Washington Navy Yard, Washington, DC. (Buchanan had located the wrecked hull of the USS Thresher in 1964 using this same technique.)

Wreckage

It would appear that the bow of the Scorpion skidded upon impact with the globigerina ooze on the seafloor, digging a sizable trench which created a significant hazard for the Trieste II crews attempting to maneuver close to acquire photographs and assess the wreckage with their own eyes. Much of the operations compartment had disappeared, and most of the debris field was identified as coming from the operations compartment. The sail was dislodged as the hull of the operations compartment upon which it perched disintegrated, and was lying on its port side. One of Scorpion's running lights was locked in the open position as if it had been on the surface at the time of the mishap, although it may have been left in the open position during the vessel's recent nighttime stop at Rota. One Trieste II pilot who dived on the Scorpion said the shock of the implosion may have knocked the light into the open position.

The aft section appeared to have skidded sideways on impact, since it was less hydrodynamically efficient than the bullet-shaped torpedo room, which investigators believed would have developed a greater downward velocity. The aft section of the engine room had telescoped forward into the larger-diameter hull section.

Observed damage

The secondary Navy investigation – using an extensive photographic, video and eyewitness inspections of the wreckage in 1969 – offered the opinion that Scorpion's hull was smashed by implosion forces as it sank below crush depth. The Structural Analysis Group, which included Naval Ships Systems Command's Submarine Structures director Peter Palermo, plainly saw that the torpedo room was intact, though it had been pinched from the operations compartment by massive hydrostatic pressure. The operations compartment itself was largely obliterated by sea pressure and the engine room had telescoped forward into the hull by collapse pressure, when the cone-to-cylinder transition junction failed between the auxiliary machine space and the engine room.

The only damage to the torpedo room compartment appeared to be a hatch missing from the forward escape trunk; Palermo pointed out that this would have occurred when water pressure entered the torpedo room at the moment of implosion. He also pointed out that the aft escape trunk hatch was sprung open and appeared twisted, though it was still on its hinges. This conclusion was drawn by Palermo eighteen years after the Scorpion was lost, when he reviewed new and extremely clear images taken by Jason Junior and DSV Alvin as part of a Navy-Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

survey of the Scorpion's wreck site.

Palermo could not rule out sabotage or collision as "plausible" causes of destruction. Palermo writes that the position of the masts and other evidence possibly indicate Scorpion was near the surface "just prior to sinking." Palermo admits that a precursor signal that occurred some 22 minutes prior to the acoustic train left by the sinking "could have been the results of an internal explosion." He further states that "some of the remaining 14 acoustic events do have some of the characteristics of explosions", though he qualifies this by writing that such characteristics "may" also be attributed to other sources.

Acoustic evidence

An extensive, year-long analysis of Gordon Hamilton's hydroacoustic signals of the submarine's demise was conducted by Robert Price, Ermine (Meri) Christian and Peter Sherman of the Naval Ordnance Laboratory. All three physicists were experts on undersea explosions, their sound signatures and destructive effects. Price was also an open critic of Dr. Craven. Their opinion, presented to the Navy as part of the Phase II investigation, was that the death noises likely occurred at 2,000 feet (600 m) when the hull failed. Fragments then continued in a freefall for another 9,000 feet (2700 m). This appears to differ with conclusions drawn by Dr. Craven and Hamilton, who pursued an independent set of experiments as part of the same Phase II probe, demonstrating that alternate interpretations of the hydroacoustic signals were possible based on the submarine's depth at the time it was stricken and other operational conditions. Though the Structural Analysis Group (SAG) findings argue an explosive event is unlikely, and are highly dismissive of Craven and Hamilton's tests, they failed to present information that ruled out an explosive event.

The 1970 Naval Ordnance "Letter", the intensive acoustics study of the Scorpion destruction sounds by Price and Christian, was a supporting study within the SAG report. In its Conclusions and Recommendations section, the NOL acoustic study states:

The Naval Ordnance Laboratory based much of its findings on an extensive acoustic analysis of the torpedoing and sinking of the USS Sterlet in the Pacific in early 1969, seeking to compare its acoustic signals to those generated by Scorpion. Price, a critic of Craven and Hamilton's analysis of the sounds emitted by the Scorpion, found the Navy's scheduled sinking of Sterlet fortuitous. Nonetheless Sterlet was a small World War 2 era diesel-electric submarine of a vastly different design and construction from Scorpion with regard to its pressure hull and other characteristics. Its sinking resulted in three identifiable acoustic signals as compared to Scorpion's fifteen, something Price could not adequately explain. The mathematical calculations Price used to arrive at his analysis – and dispute some of Craven and Hamilton's conclusions – remain unknown to the public.

When completed, the NOL acoustics study of the Sterlet and Scorpion sinking sounds provided a highly debated explanation as to how Scorpion may have reached its crush depth by anecdotally referring to the uncontrolled and nearly-fatal dive of the diesel submarine USS Chopper in January 1969:

In the same May, 2003 N77 letter excerpted above (see 1. with regard to the Navy's view of a forward explosion), however, the following statement appears to dismiss the NOL theory, and again unequivocally point the finger toward an explosion forward:

Secrecy

Bow section of the sunken USS Scorpion containing two nuclear torpedoes on the sea floor.

US Navy photo.

At the time of her sinking, there were 99 crewmen aboard Scorpion. The boat contained a treasure-trove of highly sophisticated spy gear and spy manuals, two nuclear-tipped torpedoes, and a nuclear propulsion system. The best available evidence indicates that Scorpion sank in the Atlantic Ocean

on 22 May 1968 at approximately 1844Z after an explosion of some type, while in transit across the Atlantic Ocean

from Gibraltar

to her home port at Norfolk, Virginia

.

Several hypotheses about the cause of the loss have been advanced. Some have suggested that hostile action by a Soviet

submarine caused Scorpion's loss (see discussion of Offley's "Scorpion Down," below). Shortly after her sinking, the Navy assembled a Court of Inquiry to investigate the incident and to publish a report about the likely causes for the sinking. The court was presided over by VADM Bernard Austin who presided over the inquiry into the loss of the USS Thresher. The panel's conclusions, first printed in 1968, were largely classified. At the time, the Navy quoted frequently from a portion of the 1968 report that said no one is likely ever to "conclusively" determine the cause of the loss. The Clinton Administration declassified most of this report in 1993, and it was then that the public first learned that the panel considered that a possible cause of the malfunction was one of Scorpion's own torpedoes. (The panel qualified its opinion saying the evidence it had available could not lead to a conclusive finding about the cause of her sinking.) However, the Court of Inquiry did not reconvene after the 1969 Phase II investigation, and did not take testimony from a group of submarine designers, engineers and physicists who spent nearly a year evaluating the data .

Present location

Stern section of Scorpion, seen in 1986 by Woods Hole personnel

Today, the wreck of the Scorpion is reported to be resting on a sandy seabed at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean

in approximately 3000 m of water. The site is reported to be approximately 400 miles (740 km) southwest of the Azores Islands, on the eastern edge of the Sargasso Sea

. The U.S. Navy has acknowledged that it periodically visits the site to conduct testing for the release of nuclear materials from the nuclear reactor or the two nuclear weapons aboard her, and to determine whether the wreckage has been disturbed. The Navy has not released any information about the status of the wreckage, except for a few photographs taken of the wreckage in 1968, and again in 1985 by deep water submersibles.

The Navy has also released information about the nuclear testing performed in and around the Scorpion site. The Navy reports no significant release of nuclear material from the sub. The 1985 photos were taken by a team of oceanographers working for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

in Woods Hole, Massachusetts

. The circumstances of the Woods Hole mission show the high level of secrecy the Navy attaches to Scorpion; at the time the photographs were taken, the Navy and Woods Hole both maintained that the Woods Hole team was searching for the wreckage of the noted sunken ocean liner, RMS Titanic

. It was only after newspapers learned and reported that the Woods Hole team was also searching for Scorpion that the Navy admitted as much, and released some of the photographs taken during the expedition.

Environmental monitoring

The U.S. Navy has periodically monitored the environmental conditions of the site since the sinking and has reported the results in an annual public report on environmental monitoring for U.S. nuclear-powered ships and boats. The reports provide specifics on the environmental sampling of sediment, water, and marine life that is done to ascertain whether the submarine has significantly affected the deep-ocean environment. The reports also explain the methodology for conducting this deep sea monitoring from both surface vessels and submersibles. The monitoring data confirm that, by the standards of the U.S. Navy, there has been no significant effect on the environment. The nuclear fuel aboard the submarine remains intact and no uranium in excess of levels expected from the fallout from past atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons has been detected by the Navy's inspections. In addition, Scorpion carried two nuclear-tipped Mark 45 anti-submarine torpedoes when she was lost. The warheads of these torpedoes are part of the environmental concern. The most likely scenario is that the plutonium and uranium cores of these weapons corroded to a heavy, insoluble material soon after the sinking, and they remain at or close to their original location inside the torpedo room of the boat. If the corroded materials were released outside the submarine, their large specific gravity and insolubility would cause them to settle down into the sediment.

Theories about the loss

The cause of her loss has to date not been fully confirmed by the USN and various possibilities have been raised.

Accidental activation of torpedo

The US Navy's Court of Inquiry listed as one possibility the inadvertent activation of a battery-powered Mark 37 torpedo. This acoustic homing torpedo, in a fully-ready condition and without a propeller guard, is believed by some to have started running within the tube. Released from the tube, the torpedo then somehow became fully-armed and successfully engaged its nearest target — Scorpion herself. This is considered highly unlikely due to the fact that Scorpion would have maintained the ability to destroy the weapon before it reengaged. Although much has been made of claims by Dr. Craven that the SOSUS network tracked the submarine moving back onto its original course, which would be consistent with performing a 180-degree turn in an attempt to activate a torpedo's safety systems, Gordon Hamilton has said that the acoustical data is too garbled to reveal any such details.

Another problem with the torpedo theory is that numerous safeguards are in place that would enable the torpedomen to disable the warhead if it were launched and its anti-circular run switch also failed, allowing it to strike its mother ship without detonating, in which case the weapon would thud harmlessly off the hull. Few torpedomen familiar with the Mark 37 have expressed confidence in the self-destruction-by-torpedo theory.

In Silent Steel, Fountain reveals he does not believe Scorpion was sunk by her own torpedo, and during the Court of Inquiry, physicists and engineers who carried out the simulations demanded by Dr. Craven testified that the massively complex simulations, using the crude computing power of the day, were of little value since they were so speculative. This testimony brought a rebuke from the court's members who were sufficiently persuaded by Craven's theories to list them foremost above all others. What has become apparent is that many investigators, even according to a Navy history of the investigation, were upset by Craven's devotion to his hot-running torpedo theory.

Explosion of torpedo

A later theory was that a torpedo may have exploded in the tube, caused by an uncontrollable fire in the torpedo room. The book Blind Man's Bluff documents findings and investigation by Dr. John Craven, who surmised that a likely cause could have been the overheating of a faulty battery (Dr. Craven later stated in the book Silent Steel that he was misquoted.) The Mark 46 silver-zinc battery used in the Mark 37 torpedo had a tendency to overheat, and in extreme cases could cause a fire that was strong enough to cause a low-order detonation of the warhead. If such a detonation had occurred, it might have opened the boat's large torpedo-loading hatch and caused Scorpion to flood and sink. However, while Mark 46 batteries have been known to generate so much heat that the torpedo casings blistered, none is known to have damaged a boat or caused an explosion.

Dr. John Craven mentions that he did not work on the Mark 37 torpedo's propulsion system and only became aware of the possibility of a battery explosion twenty years after the loss of the Scorpion. In his book The Silent War, he recounts running a simulation with former Scorpion Executive officer LCDR Robert Fountain, Jr. commanding the simulator. Fountain was told he was headed home at 18 knots (33 km/h) at a depth of his choice, then there was an alarm of "hot running torpedo". Fountain responded with "right full rudder", a quick turn that would activate a safety device and keep the torpedo from arming. Then an explosion in the torpedo room was introduced into the simulation. Fountain ordered emergency procedures to surface the boat, stated Dr. Craven, "but instead she continued to plummet, reaching collapse depth and imploding in ninety seconds — one second shy of the acoustic record of the actual event."

Craven, who was the Chief Scientist of the Navy's Special Projects Office, which had management responsibility for the design, development, construction, operational test and evaluation and maintenance of the Polaris Fleet Missile System - at the time of Scorpion's sinking the most technically advanced military system ever deployed - had long believed Scorpion was struck by her own torpedo, but revised his views during the mid-1990s when engineers testing Mark 46 batteries at Keyport, Washington, said the batteries leaked electrolyte and sometimes burned while outside of their casings during lifetime shock, heat and cold testing. Although the battery manufacturer was accused of building bad batteries, it was later able to successfully prove its batteries were no more prone to failure than those made by other manufacturers. In fact, the batteries suspected of being unreliable were manufactured too late to have been installed in Scorpion's torpedoes.

Malfunction of Trash Disposal Unit

During the 1968 inquiry, Vice Admiral Arnold F. Shade testified that he believed that a malfunction of the trash disposal unit (TDU) was the trigger for the disaster. Shade theorized that the sub was flooded when the TDU was operated at periscope depth and that other subsequent failures of material or personnel while dealing with the TDU-induced flooding led to the sub's demise.

Enemy action

Some writers suggest that Scorpion was sunk by a Soviet submarine, possibly in retaliation for the sinking of Soviet submarine K-129

. See "Books" below, on the books Red Star Rogue, Scorpion Down, and All Hands Down.

US Navy conclusions

The results of the U.S. Navy's various investigations into the loss of the Scorpion are inconclusive. While the Court of Inquiry never endorsed Dr. Craven's torpedo theory regarding the loss of Scorpion, its Findings of Facts released in 1993 carried Craven's torpedo theory at the head of a list of possible causes of the Scorpion's loss.

The Navy failed to inform the public that both the U.S. Submarine Force Atlantic and the Commander-in-Chief U.S. Atlantic Fleet opposed Craven's torpedo theory as unfounded and also failed to disclose that a second technical investigation into the loss of Scorpion completed in 1970 actually repudiated claims that a torpedo detonation played a role in the loss of the Scorpion. Despite the second technical investigation, the Navy continues to attach strong credence to Craven's view that an explosion destroyed her, as is evidenced by this excerpt from a May 2003 letter from the Navy's Submarine Warfare Division (N77), specifically written by Admiral P.F. Sullivan on behalf of VADM John J. Grossenbacher (Commander Naval Submarine Forces), the Naval Sea Systems Command, Naval Reactors, and others in the US Navy regarding its view of alternate sinking theories:

Some erroneously claim VADM Grossenbacher's (and ADM Sullivan's) determination is drawn solely from the inconclusive Findings of Fact, generated by the US Navy's Court of Inquiry into the Scorpion sinking. This is untrue, as their letter (see excerpt below) explicitly mentions their review of a secondary study by the Structural Analysis Group in 1970, and a later report by Dr. Robert Ballard, whose investigative team visited the Scorpion wreck in 1985 using the search for Titanic

as a cover since the visit was part of a recently declassified mission to visit the Scorpion as well as the Thresher

nuclear sub which was lost off the coast of Cape Cod

, Massachusetts

Books

Silent Steel

Released in 2006, Stephen Johnson’s Silent Steel: The Mysterious Death of the Nuclear Attack Sub USS Scorpion provides a meticulously detailed listing of every mechanical problem on the submarine cited by the Navy or mentioned in crewmen's letters, but ultimately fails to provide any explanation for Scorpion's sinking. Johnson, a critic of Dr. Craven, agrees with Navy scientists who, in 1970, gave their opinion that the sub’s hull was smashed by implosion damage and not a torpedo blast, a finding they support with their interpretation of certain evidence about the condition of the hull and hydroacoustic recordings of the disaster. Silent Steel portrays an overworked submarine denied needed maintenance and manned by a demoralized crew, a depiction contradicted by many former Scorpion enlisted men and officers, and based in part on the testimony of sailors who had applied for transfer from the boat. Johnson also enumerates many of the Navy-wide submarine maintenance issues that denied the Scorpion an overhaul and overdue safety improvements, though the Navy would maintain that virtually all necessary and vital improvements and repairs were made on the submarine before her final deployment. The Submarine Safety Program, initiated following the 1963 loss of the USS Thresher, delayed new submarine construction and sub overhauls by monopolizing skilled workers and critical spare parts. Fearing that a normal overhaul and safety work during 1967 might sideline the Scorpion for three years, it was selected for a brief experimental overhaul, but this was canceled due to a shortage of workers. The Scorpion sank eight months after leaving Norfolk Naval Shipyard.

Blind Man's Bluff

In 1999, two New York Times reporters published Blind Man's Bluff, a book providing a rare look into the world of nuclear submarines and espionage during the Cold War. One lengthy chapter deals extensively with Scorpion and her loss. The book reports that concerns about the Mk 37 conventional torpedo carried aboard Scorpion were raised in 1967 and 1968, before Scorpion left Norfolk for her last mission. The concerns focused on the battery that powered the torpedoes. The battery had a thin metal-foil barrier separating two types of volatile chemicals. When mixed slowly and in a controlled fashion, the chemicals generated heat and electricity, powering the motor that pushed the torpedo through the water. But vibrations normally experienced on a nuclear submarine were found to cause the thin foil barrier to break down, allowing the chemicals to interact intensely. This interaction generated excessive heat which, in tests, could readily have caused an inadvertent torpedo explosion. The authors of Blind Man's Bluff were careful to say they could not point to this as the cause of Scorpion’s loss — only that it was a possible cause and that it was consistent with other data indicating an explosion preceded the sinking of Scorpion. Notably, the authors cite examples of hot running torpedo incidents that had occurred on other US submarines prior to the loss of Scorpion. (Although none of those incidents caused the loss of a submarine.)

Red Star Rogue

In 2005, the book Red Star Rogue: The Untold Story of a Soviet Submarine's Nuclear Strike Attempt on the U.S., by former American submariner Kenneth Sewell in collaboration with journalist Clint Richmond, claimed K-129 was sunk 300 miles (560 km) northwest of Oahu

on 7 March 1968 while attempting to launch her three ballistic missiles, in a rogue attempt to destroy Pearl Harbor

.

Sewell claims that the sinking of Scorpion was caused by a retaliatory strike for the sinking of K-129

, which the Soviets had attributed to a collision with USS Swordfish .

In 1995, when Peter Huchthausen began work on a book about the Soviet underwater fleet, he interviewed former Soviet Admiral Victor Dygalo, who stated that the true history of K-129 has not been revealed because of the informal agreement between the two countries' senior naval commands. The purpose of that secrecy, he alleged, is to stop any further research into the losses of either Scorpion or K-129. Huchthausen states that Dygalo told him to "forget about ever resolving these sad issues for the surviving families."

Scorpion Down

Ed Offley, a reporter on military affairs, has closely followed developments in information concerning the sinking of the Scorpion. His most recent article on the subject is "Buried at Sea" published in the Winter 2008 issue of the Quarterly Journal of Military History. This article summarizes the facts in the case as presented in his 2007 book Scorpion Down: Sunk by the Soviets, Buried by the Pentagon: The Untold Story of the USS Scorpion. In the book Offley, gathering decades of his own research, hypothesizes that the Scorpion was sunk by the Soviets, possibly in retaliation for the loss of the K-129

Golf-II ballistic missile submarine earlier that year. The book paints a picture of increasing Soviet anger at US Navy provocations (specifically close-in monitoring of Soviet naval operations by almost every US nuclear submarine). At approximately the same time, the Soviet intelligence community scored a huge boon in receiving the mechanical cryptologic devices from the USS Pueblo

. These machines, combined with daily crypto keys from the John Anthony Walker spy ring, likely allowed the Soviets to monitor in real time U.S. Navy ship dispositions and communications. Offley contends that the Scorpion was tracked by several Soviet Navy assets from the Mediterranean to its final operational area south of the Azores, where it was then sunk by a Soviet torpedo. Among the oral testimony relied upon by Offley are recountings of SOSUS recording documenting torpedo sounds, evasion sounds, an explosion, and eventually the sounds of implosions as the Scorpion plunged past crush depth.

All Hands Down

This book was written by Kenneth R. Sewell, a nuclear engineer and a U.S. Navy veteran who spent five years aboard the USS Parche (SSN-683), a fast attack submarine.This book attempts to link the sinking of the USS Scorpion with the USS Pueblo

incident, the John Anthony Walker spy ring, and Cold War Soviet aggression, The thesis of this book is that action off the Canary Islands

was the direct cause of the sinking. This book purports that this is supported by motives in the Soviet Navy following the sinking of the Soviet submarine K-129

, which caused the Russian Navy to trap a US submarine.The bait for this trap would be strange military operations and furtive naval maneuvers in the Atlantic, accompanied by countermeasures that would only seemingly be defeated by the deployment of a nuclear submarine. With information from spying by Walker, the position and arrival time of the Scorpion was known by the Russians, and its sinking followed the springing of the trap. The book claims the Scorpion was sunk by a Ka-25 helicopter equipped with anti-submarine torpedoes, which took off from one ship and landed on a different one. This was so that no one, other than the aircrew of the helicopter would notice one torpedo missing.The book then purports a cover-up by American and Soviet officials, to avoid public outrage and an increase in Cold War tension.

References

Offley, Ed: "Scorpion Down", pages 247-248. Basic Books, 2007

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