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."[8]
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."
The officer, as well as Craven and many others agree that there needs to be more investigation, perhaps another effort to take a look inside Scorpion's torpedo room. For now, Craven remains convinced that a torpedo was the most likely cause of the sub's loss. He is not alone. In June 1998, Craven stood before a throng of Navy officers when he became the first man to be given the distinguished civilian service award by the Naval Submarine League for his work on Scorpion, Polaris, and other projects. When the ceremony was over, an officer approached him. His voice lowered so it wouldn't carry through the crowded room, the officer began talking about Scorpion and told Craven that he had been convinced for years that she was lost after a torpedo accident.
Without knowing about the alert sent from Keyport, without knowing that there were known problems with the batteries powering the Mark 37 torpedos, the officer told Craven: "I know it was a torpedo because I had a torpedo battery cook-off on me."
Six — "The Ballad Of Whitey Mack"
Commander Chester M. Mack, a 6'6" maverick known as "Whitey," after his pure blond pate, looked through his periscope out onto the Barents Sea. He was here in search of a new and lethal Soviet ballistic missile submarine that NATO had dubbed, without mirth, the "Yankee."
It was March 1969, and in one terrifying technological leap, the Soviets had finally come out with a nuclear-powered missile sub with a design that seemed borrowed from Polaris and that might be capable of striking the White House or the Pentagon from more than 1,000 miles offshore. It was Mack's job to learn more about it.
Mack had driven his sub straight through the Barents, the zealously guarded training area for the Northern Fleet, the Soviet Navy's most advanced and powerful. He was traveling with the arrogance of somebody who knew he was at the helm of one of the Navy's newest subs, a Sturgeon-class attack boat armed with the latest sonar and eavesdropping equipment. He was also traveling with a lot more luck than most, because in this game of hit and miss, he had just found what he was looking for.
8
Saxon and two others aboard