Posted on 02/11/2020 6:16:15 PM PST by bkopto
A U.S. District Court judge ordered the Navy to start releasing unclassified documents related to the sinking of USS Thresher (SSN-593), 57 years after 129 officers, sailors and shipbuilders died in the nation’s worst nuclear submarine disaster.
Retired Navy Capt. James Bryant, a former Thresher-class submarine commander, sued the Navy in July to force the release of unclassified investigation documents detailing Thresher‘s operation during its final dive. The Navy previously rebuffed Bryant’s request for records under the Freedom of Information Act.
During a Monday court hearing, Judge Trevor McFadden ordered the Navy to start releasing the requested material. Bryant, while pleased with McFadden’s ruling, shelved his excitement until he sees what the Navy starts releasing and whether the documents are heavily redacted.
In his retirement, Bryant has taken to investigating the cause of Thresher’s sinking because, even six decades later, he thinks there are valuable lessons to be learned. Thresher never resurfaced after conducting a test dive on the morning of April 10, 1963. Mechanical failures or even Soviet interferences have been cited as possible reasons for the sinking.
However, the Navy has kept a close hold on roughly 3,600 Thresher-related documents while saying a classification review occurs. The requested documents – more than 50 years old – should be unclassified and releasable by now under federal declassification rules, Bryant’s attorney, Robert Eatinger, said during Monday’s hearing.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.usni.org ...
The (redacted) boat (redacted) sank (redacted).
YAY! We finally have The Truth.
(PS: Submarines are “boats”)
Labor strife sabotage?
USS Thresher-1963
USS Scorpion-1968
I remember them both very well.
STP.
I was on 652.
No.
Well past time.
I don't take a position on whether this information should be declassified, but I want to correct the above statement. Naval Nuclear Propulsion Information is excluded from the general declassification schedule.
The “puffer fish”!
>> PS: Submarines are “boats”)
We use ship and boat interchangeably. Tradition calls it a boat, but a nuclear powered warship that can take out a fleet or a small nation without missing a hot meal is definitely worthy of being called a ship.
I was on 652 too for my last 6 months in the Navy. I was on 616 and 588 before that.
Well, there’s a piece of history to explore.
>> he thinks there are valuable lessons to be learned.
Fortunately for me and the rest of the crew of the Scamp, the right lessons were learned. We had the exact same casualty in 1986 with the same plant failures and also at test depth. Our boat was older than Thresher so it had very few Subsafe systems, but we did have the Emergency Blow modifications that came out after Thresher’s sinking. The second blow worked and we lived.
Something to think about- there were 17 civilian contractors—experts in their field, aboard to observe the sea trials— and they were lost with the crew. And, our listening net (no longer top secret) picked up the sound of the failure of an electrical buss that shut down the reactor coolant pumps, causing it to scram— shut down. And from there— no control and the boat could not maintain buoyancy and exceeded crush depth and imploded.
blind mans bluff
https://youtu.be/qGGSJEp0cXA
Many many years ago, I came in contact with a guy
who said his background was Naval Intelligence...
(who knows if it was true???)
Anyhow, I asked what he knew about Thresher and Scorpion,
and he said something like
“they went somewhere they should not have gone”.
At the time I thought that meant:
they were messing around with the Russians.
After a while I realized that meant:
they were messing around with new technology and water depths.
Went too deep and crushed their hulls...
maybe because of a lot of things...
bad gauges, bad piping, bad information...whatever...
Many a good man lies in Davy Jone’s Locker.
The reactor scram didn’t doom it. That happened late in the casualty.
When I worked at the Naval Underwater System Center in Newport, one of my co-workers was supposed to ride Thresher on that last dive. He was bumped by a “VIP”. After that, he would never ride again.
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