USS Scorpion

RetiredUSNChief

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I wore my black ribbon dolphins yesterday in memory of the loss of the USS Scorpion 51 years ago.

Just ran across this article from the Navy Times today, well worth the read:

https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2019/05/22/the-last-secret-of-the-scorpion/

The article makes a big deal about a Navy cover up as to the cause of the loss, which the article claims was the result of a deliberate Soviet attack.

This may, or may not, actually be factual. But even if it is the article totally fails to put this in perspective with respect to the geopolitical and military/technical realities of the time.

Flash back one month to March 8, 1968 when the Soviets lost the K-129.

The evidence evidence after the fact very heavily points to the K-129 having gone rogue and probably attempted a covert nuclear missile attack on Hawaii, with the assumed cover of acting like a Chinese nuclear missile submarine.

The K-129 was WAY off her assigned patrol area and, when presumed lost, resulted in a massive search for a missing ballistic missile submarine way far away from where she actually was.

The Soviets, needless to say, never found their lost sub. We, however located their lost sub to within 5 miles not long after we analyzed the Soviet search activity as probably for a lost submarine.

NOW... why didn't we say anything?

Several reasons, and national security being foremost among them.

To have revealed we found their missing submarine so readily would have meant revealing the top secret existence of the SOSUS network... and the fact that it enabled us to track virtually each and every one of their missile submarines from the time they left port to the time they returned.

Also, the evidence strongly pointed towards an attempted launch of at least one nuclear missile on Hawaii. If you thought the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 brought the world to the brink of nuclear war, think how close this information could have taken us.

Analysis of the Soviet activity indicated that they had no idea their missing sub was anywhere else other than where their search efforts expected it to be. Therefore it was likely they had no part in the theorized attempted nuclear launch.

So we said nothing about it in the interest of national security and the likelihood of escalating the Cold War to a hot one.

This, however, may have lead the Soviets to believe the loss of the K-129 was due to an attack by a US submarine.

Flash forward, now, to April. The Scorpion was directed to detour from their homeward bound course from the Mediterranean south towards the Canary Islands to investigate increased Soviet activity in the area. April 22, the Scorpion failed to send their daily radio message back to the States, essentially an "all's well".

We didn't say anything about the K-129... and the loss of the Scorpion MAY have been the price we paid to avoid a nuclear war as a result.

HOWEVER... the evidence and artifacts we gathered with respect to the K-129, presented years later, appear to have been instrumental in several major events.

When Brezhnev became the "leader" of the Soviet Union, the KGB was very much the dominant political power pulling the strings of control. In otherwords, he was a sock puppet. Evidence pointed towards their being responsible for this potentially rogue act. This gave Brezhnev what he needed to yank a knot in the scrote of the paranoid KGB and wrest political power directly into the hands of the leader of the nation.

The evidence, in the hands of Nixon, may have been instrumental in opening up China, resculpting the unstable three-way nuclear superpower balance to something significantly more stable.

It's apparently been said by a Soviet diplomat that the losses of the K-129 and Scorpion submarines are topics politely avoided.

SO... while the actual loss of the Scorpion MAY have been due to a deliberate Soviet act and there MAY have been a cover up of this, that does not necessarily change the correctness of such a cover up, tragic though the loss was.

Regardless of the cause or a potential cover up, the ship and crew served, and died, with honor, doing what they were out there for... protecting our nation, and by extension, the rest of the world from a war that everybody would have lost.

Fair winds and following seas, crew of the Scorpion. I have the watch.

20190522_173349.jpg
 
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I was privileged to work both with a man who worked on the Scorpion investigation from one key aspect, and the man who headed the Thresher investigation. Needless to say, there is much that will probably never be revealed and much that has been revealed that will always be "unofficial".

Excellent insights on the K-129 link, @RetiredUSNChief !
 
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