nuclear-news

Mystery of USA’s lost nuclear attack submarine

Experts out to solve deep-sea mystery of the USS Scorpion By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY 12 April 12,  Shipwreck disaster experts are calling for a deep-sea expedition to a lost U.S. nuclear attack sub, the USS Scorpion, in an effort to verify a new theory on what caused the Cold War vessel to sink. The Scorpion was lost May 22, 1968,
killing 99 men, about 400 miles south of the Azores Islands in the
middle of the Atlantic Ocean. The sub has been inspected by undersea
recovery teams, including a visit in 1985 by oceanographer Robert
Ballard before his team’s discovery of the Titanic shipwreck. The
cause of the sub’s loss has remained hotly disputed. A Navy Court of
Inquiry found “the cause of the loss cannot be definitively
ascertained.”….
Because the sub carried two nuclear-tipped torpedoes and a nuclear
reactor, the Navy has periodically tested the water around the
submarine for radiological releases, at least as recently as 1998.
“What happened to the Scorpion isn’t so much a mystery, as a secret,”
says Ed Offley, author of Scorpion Down: Sunk by the Soviets, Buried
by the Pentagon, which argues for the covert Soviet sub attack
explanation. Investigators who start from technical documents related
to the ship’s loss, typically differ with his interpretation, he says,
which was based on interviews with Navy personnel.
“It couldn’t hurt to have a documented expedition to Scorpion,” says
Offley, who is not a member of the proposed expedition team.
On May 27, 1968, family members of the USS Scorpion’s crew waited on a
Norfolk dock for the return of the submarine.
At least 11 of them have joined in the call for the expedition.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/story/2012-04-11/submarine-scorpion-navy-nuclear/54185216/1

April 12, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | history, USA