"Well, boys, I reckon this is it — nuclear combat toe to toe with the Rooskies. Now look, boys, I ain't much of a hand at makin' speeches, but I got a pretty fair idea that something doggone important is goin' on back there."
Posted on 02/18/2025 4:52:16 AM PST by Nervous Tick
The loss of the Skipjack-class nuclear attack submarine USS Scorpion (SSN-589) remains to many an unresolved mystery more than 56 years after it sank, with all hands, on 22 May 1968. But a closer look at the event suggests a different description: that it is one of the more closely guarded secrets of the Cold War.
This is a focused review of the critical 18-day period immediately following the sinking, and eight key events that occurred during that span. It includes the sinking itself; the Scorpion’s failure to reach Norfolk as scheduled on Monday 27 May; the formal declaration of “Event SUBMISS” at 1500 EDT that day; the frantic eight-day open-ocean search that ended on 4 June with the Navy’s announcement both submarine and crew were presumed lost; and the opening of the Court of Inquiry into the incident the following day. In addition, it includes evidence to suggest the wreckage was not, as the Navy declared, discovered five months later on 28 October, but in early June—less than a week after the Navy pronounced the Scorpion was presumed lost.
...
The veterans’ account of happened next at the COMSUBLANT message center indicates that 12 hours earlier, something far from routine had taken place in the eastern Atlantic. According to Hannon and Larbes, the quiet of the overnight watch ended abruptly several hours after midnight, when a number of senior COMSUBLANT officers suddenly barged into the message center, loudly speaking and arguing over the Scorpion’s status.
“I had never seen a captain or an admiral come into that place in the two and one-half years I worked there,” Larbes recalled. “Now we had captains and admirals running around wanting more information [about the Scorpion]. It was so crazy – they even suspended all of the saluting and all that.”
When Hannon arrived back at the message center shortly before 0800 on Thursday morning, 23 May, he found the workspace still full of senior officers, including a two-star Marine general. They were clogging the narrow aisles between the desks and tables with crypto machines. The room was full of cigarette smoke, and Hannon had difficulty performing his daily routine because of the nonstop telephone calls, arguments, and heated conversations.
But seemingly secure in a workspace where everything was classified Top Secret, the officers made no attempt to conceal their conversations from the duty radiomen, Hannon and Larbes said. Based on what they overheard, when the senior officers arrived at the message center after midnight, they already knew the Scorpion’s fate.
“There were officers openly discussing the fact that they believed the Scorpion had been sunk,” Hannon said.
...
In the days and weeks that followed, Hannon said he became confused, then furious, as he watched the Navy hide the truth about the sinking, beginning with COMSUBLANT’s release on 24 May of the Scorpion’s scheduled 1300 arrival on Monday, 27 May, some five days after it sank. On the morning of the day that its disappearance could no longer be hidden, Hannon said he drove over to the destroyer-submarine piers and was devastated to see the families of the crew braving the nor’easter for the return of loved ones who were already gone.
“That sight has haunted me for more than 50 years,” Hannon said in 2017.
BS. on all counts. Captains and Admirals routinely visit their comm centers to keep up with fast flowing information coming across on a specific topic of interest. And the Navy does not salute in doors.
That sounds like an act of war.
Had this been widely known, we would have had little choice but to go to war.
A full up shootin' war, nuclear power to nuclear power.
The results of which are left to the reader as an exercise...
Yup. “It was complicated.”
If I recall correctly, they considered torpedo loop-back as a possible cause.
What is not discussed is now Carven's efforts found the Scorpion. And noone has discussed what was actually known about what was going on.
i read scorpion down. interesting read. i seem to recall that the soviets lost a sub prior and blamed the us. scorpion was payback, according to the book. also lbj didn’t want to go to war.
also interesting was an article from a british source that said that bob ballard was on a mission to map the scorpion and threshers wrecks and incidentally found the titanic.
i’m sure the superior min ds of FR will correct me if i’m mistaken
That was a good article. Its deliberate sinking seems to be the strongest case.
With the Cold War over, sending subs to sea with dangerously defective torpedoes is now harder to explain to the public than a Soviet attack that was kept secret. As I recall, after the Scorpion was lost, there were newspaper reports about the Navy's bungling of fixes for its problematic torpedoes.
Also “On 10 April 1963, Thresher sank during deep-diving tests about 350 km east of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, killing all 129 crew and shipyard personnel aboard.”
As I understand it she sank because of a faulty hull repair that failed. And if I remember correctly she hung up on a thermal layer for some amount of time before her final dive.
That must have been a thrill for the crew.
>> The article does not offer a conclusion or even a discussion of the two major competing theories of hostile action by the Soviets or a fatal malfunction with a hot torpedo.
Ah, you didn’t read the article, did you? Because the article does, in fact, discuss (in a fair amount of detail) the hot torpedo theory as well as the hostile action theory.
I wonder if we’ll ever see truth out of our government -and if the Soviets did kill our men, did we ever even up the score?
Sometimes the subtle things can trip up a Tom Clancy wannabe. Good catch.
Being a geeky kid I remember this event well. Shrouded in silence.
He says the evidence indicates they both sunk each other, and rather than start a war over the incident, the leadership decided to keep it under wraps. They got one of ours, but we got one of theirs.
Which is exactly why it was kept under wraps.
"Well, boys, I reckon this is it — nuclear combat toe to toe with the Rooskies. Now look, boys, I ain't much of a hand at makin' speeches, but I got a pretty fair idea that something doggone important is goin' on back there."
“If I recall correctly, they considered torpedo loop-back as a possible cause.”
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You’d be believing the false story they put out.
The article goes into great detail about what happened.
A fairly long read though well worth the time spent.
>> A very interesting read is Blind Man’s Bluff
Thanks for the tip; I’ll look into it!
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