Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew (22 page)

"If the hot torpedo shell is not discovered until the paint begins to blister or burn," Thorne wrote to Craven, "there may not be time to move the torpedo from a stowage rack and load it into a tube for jettison before warhead cook-off."

Such a torpedo accident could have occurred in any of the fourteen Mark 37 torpedoes on Scorpion, or, for that matter, on any of the submarines equipped with those torpedoes. Carrying a battery from a defective lot would have heightened the risk, but the risk existed in the design nonetheless. The diaphragm on one or several of the batteries could have ruptured as the weapons lay in torpedo tubes or in their racks. Men didn't have to be testing them or handling them in any way. Shipboard vibration could have been enough.

Scorpion may have been more at risk than any other boat. The vibration tests in the lab that led to the explosion were supposed to emulate the usual vibrations that could be expected on board a sub and when transporting torpedoes to a submarine-vibrations that were far less severe than the shaking Scorpion had suffered in the 1967 incident when she was sent corkscrewing through the water. If Scorpion suffered a repeat of that incident, any one of the batteries might have failed. Weapons engineers say that judging from the crew's descriptions, the vibrations created during the 1967 mishap far exceeded military specifications for battery safety. Scorpion, in fact, had been failed twice. The potential for a repeat of the vibration incident existed because she had never received the overhaul she was due for. And she had been sent to sea carrying weapons Naval Ordnance knew suffered from a critical defect.

Nevertheless, Naval Ordnance has never acknowledged that Scorpion could have been at risk for torpedo detonation, or even that Scorpion's torpedoes were powered by batteries with a defective design. In fact, after the sub was lost, the Naval Underwater Systems Center in Newport, Rhode Island, vigorously argued against the test lab's conclusions.

Naval Ordnance also withheld the information about the flawed battery design even after another torpedo battery began to heat up on board a submarine in the western Pacific months after Scorpion was lost. The crew of the second boat reported that their torpedo battery reached temperatures so high they had to spray the torpedo constantly with water to cool it. The water turned to steam. They had no choice but to continue spraying until the torpedo could be loaded into a tube and jettisoned.

Finally, about a year after Scorpion went down, Naval Ordnance did order a new battery design. The new system replaced the thin foil diaphragm with two stronger ones. In this new design, both diaphragms could be broken only when they were mechanically punctured with a cookie-cutter device, eliminating the danger that shipboard vibration could lead to a battery fire and set off an explosion.

Any written record of the Keyport lab's alert, and the alert itself, appear to be missing. There should be copies of the engineers' alert at the main administrative offices of the Naval Undersea Warfare Engineering Center, formerly the Naval Torpedo Station at Keyport, and at the ordnance command, but another recent request made under the Freedom of Information Act for a copy of the alert at both sites came back with the answer that there was no record of it, or even of its destruction-something that also should have been logged if the alert was removed from the files.

Still, after hearing Thorne's story, Craven and some sub commanders and weapons experts are looking back at the Scorpion disaster. Craven is angry that the ordnance command failed to disclose the fires itself. "The public and the press and a lot of other people feel an organization is engaged in a cover-up when they so stoutly deny this kind of thing," he says.

Taking the new evidence into account, Craven theorizes that the cry that led Scorpion's skipper to make that final turn could have been "Hot torpedo" instead of "Hot-running torpedo."

Chester M. Mack, who skippered Lapon when she searched for the downed Scorpion, insists that no captain would ever take the time to ask for more information before executing an immediate 180degree turn. "`Hot torpedo'-there's only one thing it could mean. The damn thing is running in the torpedo room," Mack says.

After years of being told over and over again that he was wrong, that it was impossible for a torpedo to detonate on board Scorpion, Craven is now convinced that he has what is very possibly the final piece to the mystery he set out to solve more than a quarter of a century ago.

It is a mystery that continues to unfold. In 1998, almost five years after the Navy released the court of inquiry report, almost five years after Craven first spoke to Thorne, the Navy released a 1970 report by another technical advisory group-this one convened shortly after Craven retired from the Navy. It was set up to review pictures and data collected by Trieste during her nine dives down to Scorpion. The report had been completed only a year after the court of inquiry had finished its work, but the document had been held back from the public, from the Scorpion families, even after the court of inquiry report
was released, and even though it specifically discounts many of the conclusions reached by the court of inquiry.*

This advisory group throws out the court of inquiry's conclusion that Scorpion was likely felled by the external explosion of an ejected torpedo that turned back on her. It also tosses out the possibility that Scorpion was destroyed by an internal torpedo explosion. Still, the authors of the report clearly did not have the information about the torpedo battery failures in the Keyport lab. Indeed, Craven, Thorne, and some submarine captains believe that much of the evidence used to refute the torpedo theory actually supports it.

The group's report also makes no attempt at all to explain why Scorpion was found just where Craven said she would be if her captain had turned to battle what he believed was a hot running torpedo. Instead the Navy had gone back to debating the meaning of the acoustic trail Craven and his team followed to Scorpion's grave. Although the details of the Scorpion search and the crucial role Craven played were retold in a second report the Navy declassified at the same time, the 1970 analysis instead relies heavily on Naval Ordnance assurances that Scorpion could not have suffered a torpedo accident. The group, in short, based its conclusions on statements made by the same Navy department that was withholding critical information that had been kept from the court of inquiry and the search teams.

By the time the second report was written, Naval Ordnance's argument had changed. Instead of insisting that a torpedo could never explode on board a sub, Naval Ordnance had focused on the visual evidence collected by Trieste: from the outside, the hull of the torpedo room looked basically intact, while the ship's battery well was largely destroyed. The Trieste pictures did show that all three hatches leading from the torpedo room through the pressure hull-the forward escape trunk access, the escape trunk hatch, and torpedo loading hatch-were all dislodged. (Trieste could not get cameras inside the torpedo room to check for internal damage.t)

As the report states:

The most logical location for an internal explosion that would cause the loss of the submarine would he the Torpedo Room. However, the evidence indicates that the Torpedo Room is essentially intact ... It is possible that the explosion of a single weapon could rupture the pressure hull in the keel area, and cause the loss of the submarine-thus, this possibility must be considered. However, experts from NAVORD have stated that the explosion of one weapon would cause sympathetic explosion of others. If more than one weapon exploded there would be extensive damage to the how section, which would have the appearance of outward deformation. There is no deformation of the nature in any of the visible structure, nor is there deformation to indicate an explosion in a torpedo tube. Internal explosion in the Forward Room is considered unlikely.

Because of that argument, the technical advisory group also discounted the simulated reenactment of Scorpion's loss staged by Craven and Fountain.

Still, Craven and several munitions experts say that the ordnance command's argument is deeply flawed and that if the command had told investigators about the failures of the batteries on the Mark 37 torpedos, the analysis would have been changed considerably.

The kind of external hull damage the ordnance command insisted would have followed a torpedo explosion, weapons experts say, may not have followed a torpedo explosion caused by a fire. Rather, the damage the command was describing would likely occur during, a fulltriggered explosion, an explosion in which a torpedo is set off just the way it is designed to be set off, with the power of 330 pounds of HBX explosives unleashed all at once in a massive and directed forward thrust. That kind of detonation would, the experts agree, likely detonate other torpedoes. And a multiple detonation would, as naval ordnance said, probably crack or at least buckle the submarine's hull in a way that would be visible from the outside.

But the fact that there was a possibility of a torpedo detonation caused by fire in the torpedo battery profoundly changes the equation. A weapons explosion caused by fire will almost certainly not be the same power or predictable shape of a neatly triggered explosion. In fact, there is no way to predict the size, the shape, the properties of a blast caused by fire. Such blasts just don't follow the usual rules. It is, weapons experts say, entirely possible, even probable, that a torpedo warhead set off by a fire, could go up in what is known as a low-order detonation.

A low-order detonation could be strong enough to kill anyone nearby and could be strong enough to blow the hatches in a torpedo room without setting off other torpedos, especially if those other torpedos were not laying directly against the torpedo that exploded. Submarines often went out without their torpedo racks full. (That's why men often bunked in the torpedo rooms. Any torpedo rack without a torpedo laying on top of it made a reasonable place for a mattress.) One low-order detonation, without subsequent detonations of other torpedoes nearby, could easily occur without the kind of external hull damage the men diving on Trieste had been told to look for. The Navy itself acknowledged that to be entirely possible in the 1969 court of inquiry report into Scorpion's loss. The report cites a 1960 incident on the USS Sargo (SSN-583) in which an oxygen fire in the after-torpedo room spread and caused two Mark 37 torpedo warheads to detonate "low-order." The report states: "The pressure hull of the Sargo was not ruptured." Sargo was pier-side and on the surface at Pearl Harbor at the time.

Indeed, the fact that Scorpion's torpedo room is intact raises the probability that she was lost to a torpedo casualty, say sub commanders and Craven. Scorpion's torpedo room did not implode, which makes it very likely that it was flooded before she fell to crush depth. Since a flooded room is exposed to equal ocean pressures both inside and out, it does not collapse at crush depth and it does not implode. It is left intact.

The technical advisory group does say that the torpedo room hatches "probably failed" when "pressure inside the torpedo room increased," or when the bulkhead leading to the operations compartment gave way. The idea seems to be that the hatches were forced open by the violent implosions going on right outside the torpedo room. The advisory group offers no theory about why the torpedo room would have lost only its hatches, when the group's own experts say compartments just outside were completely destroyed in the same violent instant. Trieste's pictures show that Scorpion's operations compartment, which is right next to the torpedo room, is squashed flat and that just beyond operations, Scorpion's tail has telescoped completely into her auxilliary machine space.

The Trieste photos also show that the massive battery that powered Scorpion was torn apart. The advisory group theorizes that this is what destroyed Scorpion-echoing the theory about what destroyed the Soviet Golf. The sub's battery could have exploded as it was being charged if ventilators failed and the concentration of highly combustible hydrogen gas was allowed to build up. The battery, however, could also have been torn apart by the same forces that destroyed the rest of the submarine.

Admiral Schade, Fountain, and others have guessed that perhaps Scorpion's trash disposal unit failed, allowing tons of seawater to pour into the sub and into the battery well. Seawater can cause a battery to emit a number of gases, including hydrogen gas. The trash disposal theory, however, is based both on the lack of any other apparent reason and the fact that a trash disposal unit failed on the USS Shark (SSN--591), Scorpion's sister ship. (Shark survived.) Again, many of these observers had discounted that the first flooding could have been caused by a torpedo, because they were told that there was no way for a torpedo to explode on board Scorpion, certainly not without blowing up the rest of the weapons as well.

"I think we are all guessing," says Ross E. Saxon, who went down on Trieste and took some of the photographs studied by the technical advisory group. "We who were out there, who dove down on the thing, are guessing.'",

Offered the new information about the flawed torpedo batteries, some people close to the investigation who had discounted a torpedo explosion after the 1970 report now say that a torpedo explosion has to be put back on the list of possible causes of Scorpion's loss.

"If a room blows up and there was a hand grenade there, but then I call up and say I took the hand grenade out of the room, you would discount the hand grenade," says an active-duty Navy official familiar with the case through its latest developments. "If I didn't tell you there were two hand grenades though, if someone was being less than fully truthful, providing less than all of the information, maybe there would be cause to go back and look at it again. Based on the information on file now, the two most likely causes are a ship's battery explosion and a weapons cook-off. Based on the information we had, I'd say battery explosion. Now there is a good way for a weapon to cook-off. Any information about specific engineering problems in a weapon ought to be tossed into the fore, ought to be discussed."