Former submarine torpedomen say it is almost unthinkable that Scorpion's crew would have panicked and jettisoned a warshot torpedo. The 1967 incident involved a torpedo meant for practice shots that carried only a dummy warhead and no live explosives.
The court seems to have crafted a compromise for its classified findings. Citing Craven and his acoustic evidence, the court concluded that a torpedo was at fault. But the contention of an outside explosion seemed patterned on the Ordnance Systems Command's insistence that it was impossible for a hot run to lead to an onboard explosion.
Also in the report was a list of possible submarine accidents of all types, prepared by the Bureau of Ships. The list included gas leaks, broken hydraulic lines, fires, and more. But only one item on the list showed catastrophic results: a weapons accident. That, the bureau said, would result in "loss of ship."
In mid-1969 the Navy directed a top-secret effort to try to examine more closely the submarine's wreckage and unravel the mystery. It was most interested in the torpedo room and the torpedo doors. The Trieste II was sent down for a closer look. 'The first dive was made on July 16, only days before the Apollo 11 astronauts made the first manned landing on the moon.
"My God, what a crazy world we live in," Craven muttered to himself as he stood on the floating dock that had launched the Trieste. "We think we're doing a technological feat which is every bit as difficult and every bit as meaningful to humans as this man-on-the-moon thing, and we're the only ones who will get the chance to savor this operation."
Trieste made nine dives that year. Watching the first from monitors aboard the floating dry dock were Craven and Captain Harry Jackson, the engineer who had helped test Thresher and never stopped being haunted by his near-miss on that sub. They could see that there was no evidence of attack, and no evidence of an external torpedo hit. But there was also no conclusive evidence to show just what had sent Scorpion to the ocean bottom.
Craven would always struggle with the last piece of the puzzle. He was nearly certain a torpedo blew up inside Scorpion. But how)
It all seemed to end there, with the question left unanswered, with the families of the Scorpion men left to wander in nightmares of explosions and phantom battles and disbelief.
"All we ever wanted was an explanation," said Barbara Baar Gillum, who lost her twenty-one-year-old brother, Joseph Anthony Baar Jr. "After the disaster everything was covered up."
The Scorpion disaster quickly faded from the greater public conscience, which was already being battered by nightly images of bullets flying, soldiers bleeding, and a seemingly endless line of body bags in Vietnam. The Scorpion families might have been left alone to forever struggle with their own investigations had the Navy not decided to mark the grisly quarter-century anniversary of Scorpion's loss by releasing the court of inquiry's conclusions and videotapes of her sunken shell.
By then, Craven was sixty-nine years old and long gone from the Navy. He was, instead, intensely involved in developing a new form of agriculture in Hawaii. The Chicago Tribune printed a story about the documents and his role in using his torpedo theory to find Scorpion. It was only when that story ran that Craven was handed what he is convinced is the last piece of the puzzle.
It all played out in a scene reminiscent of the final chapter of a detective novel. The Tribune article reached the desk of Charles M. Thorne, who had been technical director of the Weapons Quality Engineering Center at the Naval Torpedo Station in Keyport, Washington. Seeing Craven's name in print, Thorne picked up the telephone and dialed.
The two men had never met. Neither had known anything about the other during the long Scorpion search and all the years after. Still, they had much in common. Thorne, too, had long had reason to fear that a torpedo had been the cause of Scorpion's death. Back in the summer of 1968, he had been a top engineer in the Keyport lab responsible for testing torpedoes and their components. He worked there for twenty-five years, and by the time he called Craven, lie had been retired for twelve years. All that time he had held information about Scorpion that he felt barred by classification rules from telling anyone. Now the engineer reached out to the scientist.
Thorne asked Craven whether he had seen a classified alert that had been mailed in mid-May 1968 to the department that had been renamed the Naval Ordnance Command. The letter described a test failure of an MK-46 battery that was designed to power the Mark 37 torpedo, a fastmoving warshot that had been deemed the primary weapon for use against Soviet subs. He was referring to an alert that the testing lab had sent to Rear Admiral Arthur Gralla who headed that command. Then Thorne went on to describe its contents. He knew them well since he had written the alert himself, although it had been reviewed and signed by Captain James L. Hunnicutt, the CO of the station and a decorated World War II submarine skipper, who has since died.
In the alert, the lab reported that a torpedo battery had exploded in flames during a vibration test because a tiny foil diaphragm, a part worth pennies, had failed. As Thorne related this to Craven, the news seemed to parallel the discovery that the failure of inexpensive rubber 0-rings had caused the space shuttle Challenger to explode. About a yard long and 17 inches wide, the batteries on Mark 37s were bolted within about an inch of the torpedo warheads. And each warhead carried 330 pounds of HBX explosive.
The lab's alert had recommended that all batteries from that production lot "be withdrawn from service at the earliest opportunity," and it said that sufficient heat was generated in the test sample "to risk warhead cook-off and loss of a submarine."
This alert was the strongest of any ever issued by the testing lab. It was the only time in the lab's twelve years of operation that it had ever warned of the possibility of a failure that could have life-threatening consequences. It was because the engineers were so deeply concerned, that they had their commanding officer sign the alert. They wanted the added emphasis.
Scorpion was carrying fourteen Mark 37 torpedoes, and she was lost days after the letter was sent. Horrified at the possible connection, lab engineers specifically asked the Naval Ordnance Command about the torpedoes Scorpion was carrying. The Navy keeps records and serial numbers of all torpedo components and where they are issued. One of the lab's engineers remembers being told verbally that one of the batteries powering a torpedo on Scorpion did indeed come from the same production lot as the torpedo battery that had exploded at Keyport. (Other former engineers there said they did not remember hearing this.)
Over the past several years, one of the engineers made requests for the battery records under the Freedom of Information Act, hoping they might answer that question once and for all. But the answer came back twice that no such records could be found.
Still, Thorne believes that a warhead cook-off initiated by a battery fire was the likely cause of Scorpion's loss, and he became all the more convinced of that when he read that Craven had concluded that Scorpion had suffered an internal torpedo explosion. He was stunned that Craven had never seen the lab's alert. Thorne had always assumed that the secret missive had been shown to the people involved in trying to make sense of the Scorpion disaster. Now it seemed that vital information had been withheld from Craven and the court of inquiry.
Thorne asked Craven for a copy of the videocassette of Scorpion's wreckage and the court of inquiry report. After viewing those, he wrote to Craven with his analysis.
"I have agonized for years over what more we might have done to have averted that tragedy," Thorne said in the letter. "The people that did the testing, the workman and other engineers, we all wondered. We asked questions."