my dad wrote a song about the thresher... wish i could find it.
Was this nuclear powered or nuclear armed? Just curious about the usual dis ingenuous scare mongering use of the terms nuclear submarine.
My Dad was the disposal officer at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard and was suppose to take a ride on the Thresher that day but a surprise inspection kept him home...
One moment you're the cat, next minute you're the mouse.
My info is from the IIRC The History Channel that happened to be on last week.
My understanding of what happened in brief was they were attempting an Emergency Blow and the Valving for the air froze over blocking the air from getting to the Ballast Tanks to displace the water in the Tanks. Then for whatever reason they had no Propulsion and sank to Crush Depth and imploded.
There were more problems that added up to the Emergency Blow I don’t remember exactly.
My Condolences to Families of All lost in the Thresher incident.
It was a lesson learned that the Navy took to heart and which generated the SUBSAFE program. Since the Threasher not a single new U.S. boat built or existing sub certified under SUBSAFE has been lost.
A shipmate of mine’s father died on that boat. Sad event.
I hope Capt. Bryant is successful in his quest.
I lost a 1st cousin, Electrician’s Mate, First Class Roy Denny, Jr., in that disaster.
I eventually got to know the officer in charge of that operation and he confided to me that each of the surviving subs of the Thresher class was being recalled to have the hull weldings inspected by X-ray or some other technology and reworked if necessary.
Those boats were built in a New England shipyard (Grotten, CT??). At the time of construction the welders were paid on a piecemeal basis to speed up construction. In other words, paid by the inch of welding rather than by an hourly rate.
It seems that a few welders were placing a number of welding rods into the joints and just welding over the rods to get more inches per day. The deception and criminal action could not be detected by visual inspection.
The Thresher sank because of a crushed hull in a deep dive caused by defective welding!
What is remarkable is that this massive cover-up has been successful. Many, many people must know these facts. Maybe finally the truth will be revealed.
My understanding of the the Thresher tragedy is this. A reactor scram caused a loss of propulsion. An emergency blow was initiated but was unsuccessful because ice formed in the lines leading to the main ballast tanks due to the cooling effect of the rapid expansion of compressed air.
This is what I learned when I attended submarine school in 1971. I went on to serve on a diesel boat not a nuke. If it was a problem that was with the reactor coolant system then its quite possible that the information is still considered classified today.
Was this the sub that sank about a year after a Russian sub was accidentally sunk?
A dark day.
Would, um, say, a country like, oh, say, China have any interest in reading a deep technical report, previously classified, of what went wrong in a deep sea diving nuclear submarine?