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.
>> 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.