The nuclear attack submarine (USS Scorpion) sank in the easter south Atlantic Ocean, in 1969. According to the US Navy investigation, the submarine sank due to an accident-it could have been a hot torpedo, or failure of any one of a dozen systems in the sub. At any rate, the Navy claims that the sub was located by the use of a towed camera vehicle. Recently, a new book has come out, claiming that the undersea microphone system (SOSUS) deployed by the navy, picked up two explosions in the area, and the wreck was located by these noises only. Furthermore, the claim was made that the Scorpion was following a Russina submarine, who may have attacked the US sub. Question: is there any evidence for this? What was found of the Scorpion was said to be consistent with an accident-could the Russians have sunke her by mistake? And, if this was the case, why woulfd the US have covered it up?
makes me think a LOT of these “accidents” were actually collisions, or actual attacks!
Coul the US get away with such perfidy for so long?
You know, when explosions are detected at the time a submarine is lost, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the sinking was caused by an attack or a collision.
Witness the Kursk
Assuming that they DID sink the sub, I suppose it’s possible that the Russians could have done it by mistake; Russian safety systems often weren’t the best, and there’s always the danger of an officer going round the bend or screwing up. As for why the US would cover it up, the government at the time might not have thought an international incident of that kind a good idea, especially if the Russian government managed to convince ours in private that it WAS a mistake.
Probably not; people talk. A single incident is one thing, but some sort of secret war with subs sinking each other on purpose would have come out long ago, from one side or the other.
By computing angle and time between reception of the events from far ranging observation points, such as the entire SOSUS line, it would be possible to get a fix on a fairly small region in which the event had occurred. That would not give the location of the wreck, though. Stuff that goes down in the ocean drifts a long way as it sinks, and every part would be slightly different in it’s hydrodynamic characteristics, so would drift differently.
So, you probably have an original report from SOSUS, and a follow up search over the region centered on that fix.
Very high level negotiations between The US, and the USSR might have remained secret as long as the USSR continued to exist. After that, the stories are too good to stay secret when the secret keepers loyalties change.
Tris
I highly recommend Blind Man’s Bluff if you are interested in this stuff. It is really a good and straight forward read.
On the Scorpion they are pretty convincing that the known design defect in the Mark 37 torpedos that basically allowed a battery explosion and rendered the torpedo hot sank the sub.
If you want a conspiracy I will give this: The official story is that the torpedo was put into service before these flaws were documented and acted upon…but in Blind Man’s Bluff there is pretty strong documentation that this was known early - before the Scorpion was lost.