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 reportwas released, and even though it specifically discounts many of the conclusions reached by the court of inquiry.[6]
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.[7]
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.
6
In 1986, another attempt was made to examine the wreckage. This time Woods Hole’s Alvin submersible was sent down, toting the Jason Jr., a remote controlled, swimmer camera. The report from that expedition is still classified, but people with access to the findings say that the Jason could not enter the torpedo room. A team analyzing that expedition said as much in a letter dated January 14, 1987, that was declassified in 1998 along with the TAG report.
7
The TAG report docs agree with the court of inquiry findings in one profound way — both say there is no evidence that