USS Scorpion

1968

SW of Azores, the torpedo theory, unresolved Location: Atlantic Ocean, ~400 nmi SW of the Azores · Coordinates: 32.90°N 33.30°W · Casualties: 99 · Survivors: 0 · Depth: 3,050 m · Cause: unknown · possible torpedo malfunction — Vanished on 22 May 1968 while returning to Norfolk from the Mediterranean. The U.S. Navy's internal acoustic evidence is consistent with a Mk 37 torpedo activating inside its tube and detonating against the boat. She imploded at approximately 460 metres. · Fate: abyssal · located 1968 · protected · Type: submarine · nuclear attack · Skipjack class · Tonnage: 3,500 tons · Crew: 99 · Flag: United States · Launched: 1960 American Skipjack-class nuclear attack submarine, returning to Norfolk from the Mediterranean. Vanished somewhere southwest of the Azores on 22 May 1968. 99 dead; the wreck was located five months later at 3,050 metres. The most supported theory is that one of her own Mk 37 torpedoes activated inside the tube and detonated against the inner door, though alternative explanations involving Soviet retaliation for the March loss of K-129 have never fully faded. The Vessel USS Scorpion (SSN-589) was a Skipjack-class nuclear attack submarine, the fifth of six built to the original Skipjack design between 1957 and 1960. She was commissioned on 29 July 1960 at the Electric Boat yard in Groton, Connecticut, was 77 metres long, 3,500 tons submerged, and powered by a single S5W reactor driving a single seven-bladed propeller on a single shaft: a simpler and cheaper configuration than the Permit-class that succeeded her. Her class had been the first American submarine design to combine the Albacore teardrop hull with nuclear power, a marriage of speed and endurance that set the template for every attack submarine of the following forty years. The Skipjacks were as fast submerged as the previous generation had been on the surface, perhaps 30 knots, and they could maintain that speed for their reactor life rather than for a battery charge. They were also relatively noisy by the standards of the Permit and Sturgeon classes that would follow; the single-shaft seven-bladed propeller was a characteristic Skipjack sound signature that Soviet intelligence eventually learned to recognise. Scorpion served through the 1960s in the Atlantic Fleet, based at Norfolk, operating in the Mediterranean, the North Atlantic, and the approaches to the Barents and White Seas. Her 1967-1968 Mediterranean deployment, her last, included an intelligence-surveillance patrol shadowing Soviet naval units including the May 1968 loss of the Soviet submarine K-129 in the Pacific; Ame The Disaster Scorpion failed to make her 27 May 1968 arrival at Norfolk. The U.S. Navy declared her missing on 27 May and initiated a large-scale search in the western Atlantic over the following three weeks. The search was concentrated in the wrong area: the Navy did not know on 27 May that SOSUS hydrophone data from five days earlier had captured the sound of her sinking. The SOSUS acoustic review, conducted in early June 1968 under Dr. John Craven of the Navy's Deep Submergence Systems Project, identified the 22 May transients as consistent with Scorpion's loss at the corresponding position. The Navy redirected the search and located the wreck on 29 October 1968 by the oceanographic research ship USNS Mizar at a depth of 3,050 metres, 700 kilometres southwest of the Azores. The cause of the loss has never been officially established with finality. The Court of Inquiry's 1969 classified report concluded that the evidence "did not permit definite conclusions" and offered several possible scenarios: a hot-run torpedo (a Mark 37 that activated inside its tube and detonated); a hydrogen explosion in the battery; a seawater leak in the trash disposal unit; a collision with a Soviet submarine. The hot-run torpedo hypothesis is the one most supported by the acoustic evidence and by the investigation of the wreck's configuration, and it is the unofficial consensus of the American submarine community, though the Court of Inquiry declined to make this an official finding. 99 men died, including C