Silent Steel; The Mysterious Death of the Nuclear Attack Sub USS Scorpion

Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc, 2006. Second printing [stated]. Hard Cover. Good/Good. xi, [1], 292 pages. Contains vivid photos of the scorpion and her crew. Lists the Officers and Crew of the USS Scorpion. Bibliography. Index. DJ is taped to the boards. This book combines a thrilling adventure story and an intriguing mystery with a cautionary tale about the limits of technology and the high price of failure at sea. Journalist Stephen Johnson (a former Houston Chronicle reporter) has written a compelling and meticulously detailed examination of the Scorpion disaster. Using Navy Court of Inquiry records and interviews with former Scorpion sailors, naval scientists, submarine warfare experts and family members of those who died, he provides possible answers about the sinking and in the process paints a vivid picture of the U.S.-Soviet struggle at sea. We get a guided tour of the numerous technical malfunctions aboard the 1960-commissioned Scorpion. Johnson looks at a 1967 mishap involving a torpedo that somehow activated inside the submarine during a training exercise. Although the torpedo didn't explode, the cause of this potentially disastrous problem, he writes, was never determined. Johnson also examines a number of characters in this drama. He writes that "the crew quickly warmed" to Cmdr. Francis Atwood Slattery and Lt. Cmdr. David Lloyd after they took command in late 1967. "Scorpion sailors who served under the two later spoke well of the submarine's two top officers." We also meet the fantastically lucky Sonarman Bob Davis, who had been sentenced to 30 days' confinement in Norfolk's Camp Allen brig because he missed the Scorpion's departure by 15 minutes. In this book, the author has tried to clear away much of the confusion surrounding the Scorpion disaster by providing the fullest possible story about the Scorpion's final eighteen months. He has also attempted to place a human face on the Scorpion disaster, which has been consistently characterized as the loss of nothing more than a complex machine, rather than a catastrophe that ended the lives of ninety-nine dedicated men. With the passage of years, officers, sailors, and scientists who had long ago retired decided that enough time had passed for them to speak openly about their roles as onetime crew members on the Scorpion or their involvement in the investigations the Navy conducted into the disaster. Derived from a Kirkus review: Dissecting one of the U.S. Navy's most tragic and perplexing losses and the nearly four decades of investigation that have followed. Journalist Johnson, who first wrote about the Scorpion for the Houston Chronicle, deals with this unsolved mystery by exhaustively exploring everything known about the vessel's final year-and-a-half of operation, culminating in its fatal dive in May 1968, about 450 miles southwest of the Azores Islands. The resultant aggregation of events specific to the Scorpion and its crew, coupled with known parallels in the annals of nuclear submarine technology, is a collection of hair-raising possibilities. So shrouded and silent was the Scorpion's disappearance-at the height of Cold War tensions, when the U.S. jockeyed with the U.S.S.R. for superiority at sea-that families and friends of the crew were awaiting its return dockside in Norfolk, Va., some five days, it turned out, after the vessel had been lost. The author spares no detail in linking some of the snafus occurring during various exercises aboard the Scorpion to distinctly fatal possibilities. Prime among them: weapons glitches, including a "hot run" malfunction in which a torpedo's engine started while it was still lodged in its firing tube and the inadvertent release of a dummy homing torpedo that, had it been live, could have returned to kill the sub (still favored by some speculators as the likely cause of Scorpion's loss). Other potential disasters, such as the flooding of a main storage battery with poisonous chlorine gas, can't be totally ruled out. Engrossing documentation of haunting, grisly what-ifs.