Second Saturday: The Loss of the USS Thresher

[Music] good morning my name is jamie fogo and welcome to the naval historical foundation's second saturday webinar for march 2021. i'm proud to have joined the naval historical foundation board of directors recently and between graduating from annapolis and joining the board i had almost 40 years of service in our united states navy although i had some remarkable duties ashore with some incredible command opportunities my most rewarding tour was at sea in command of the los angeles class submarine uss oklahoma city so right now for personal reasons i want to give a big shout out to the commanding officer chiefs and crew of uss oklahoma city home ported in april guam you guys are doing a great job keep it up underway on nuclear power proved to be a game changer in naval warfare starting with the nautilus in 1954 your navy now had the ultimate predatory weapon system and in developing the capability to launch ballistic missiles from beneath the surface nuclear-powered submarines also became the third leg of what is known as the triad of strategic weapon systems that were deployed to deter a nuclear weapon attack on the united states of america and this leg of the triad remains the most secure to this day and will remain the most secure with the arrival of the columbia class submarine a magnificent design in the next few years so we want to keep that on track admiral hyman g rickover is credited as the father of the navy's nuclear propulsion program he's a man who served as a director of naval reactors where i spent two years of my life for well over three decades with my retirement from active duty the current director of naval reactors my classmate my company mate admiral frank caldwell is the last remaining officer on active duty who had the pleasure like me of being interviewed by the kindly old gentleman the kindly owned gentleman of course admiral rickover he wasn't necessarily always kind when you went in for that interview your heart was palpitating and uh your blood pressure was up but i would not have traded that experience for anything my time with him what made admiral rickover legendary was that he was a stickler for details he was a perfectionist and that was what was required if civilian authorities our congress was going to authorize and appropriate resources money to ensure the operations of our nuclear-powered warships not just submarines but nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and back in the day nuclear-powered cruisers all over the world and these magnificent ships had to show a keen safety record with rickover's emphasis on safe reactor operations we're now approaching seven decades of operating our nuclear reactors at sea flawlessly today approximately half of the nuclear reactors operated by the united states are operated by the navy it's a great legacy that i was proud to be part of now unfortunately during the 1960s when our navy was transitioning from diesel submarines from world war ii and early cold war vintage uh nuclear-powered submarines we lost two of our attack submarines sadly the uss thresher on april 10 1963 with the loss of 129 souls on board and the uss scorpion may 22nd 1968 likewise with the loss of 99 souls on board to afford us a better understanding of the circumstances behind the loss of thresher and to provide additional closure to the families of those we lost during that past year the united states navy has released to the public hundreds of pages of material from the court of inquiry held in the wake of the tragic loss of thresher today we are going to offer an exclusive presentation revealing for the first time in a public forum the events leading up to the loss of thresher as always we welcome your questions and comments and look forward to your participation now i'm pleased to turn over our program to our executive director admiral sonny sunny over to you thank you admiral fogo and congratulations on your retirement after 39 years of outstanding service to our navy and nation you are a most welcome addition to our foundation board of directors as admiral fogo noted today will be one of our more solemn second saturdays as we review the circumstances around the loss of the thresher on april 10 1963 a most tragic day in naval history we're going to open the program with a fast-paced technical presentation given by captain jim bryant a 1971 graduate of the united states naval academy and past contributor to our second saturday program in the past he would take on the task of relentlessly pursuing all the data that existed about this tragedy what he will share with you in just a few minutes is all the new information previously released at the end of his remarks an expert panel has been assembled to take your questions jim over to you welcome to the second saturday webinar the naval historical foundation today we're going to talk about the loss of the uss thresher and we're going to be using material the navy has recently released declassified i'm speaking for myself not an official capacity all the information is from open sources and i can't vouch for the accuracy of these open sources here's some terms we're going to use in this brief let me explain a couple that are important motor generators or rotating machinery that convert direct current to alternating current or alternating current to direct current that's important because the submarine has t down here has uh ship service turbine generators that produce alternating current worth from uh reactor steam we have a naval code of inquiry we call it the court it's convened after you have an accident like this a loss of a of a ship fisher sank in april of 63 the court was convened the next day it was uh the the first truly effective anti-submarine warfare platform the navy had they were very excited about this it sank during a routine route routine scheduled deep dive test after a period in portsmouth naval shipyard it was the first and worst nuclear submarine disaster remains the worst the number of lies lost and in until a few months ago there were only 19 pages of testimony released out of the over 1700. let's thank the navy they've done a good job of not maximizing the reductions we're probably still going to challenge them on a few of the reductions but we found no surprises so far don't expect to find surprises like smoking guns here's some of the of the things that we literally a summary of what we've learned the root cause of this whole uh problem this disaster is the dangers of not of a deeper much deeper diving submarine not being appreciated in the fabrication repair and quality assurance these were all improving uh while professor was being built but they but they were not in place when pressure was being built the deep dive test was not done well there was an emergency repulsion procedure that was not used the rickover talks about admiral rickover and the most important thing is the nuclear power program uh survived repulsion program there were 28 nuclear submarines in service when thresher was lost and 36 more either being built or being planned and many of them were ballistic missile submarines that were our only means of countering the soviet uh nuclear nicbm threat the navy considers some operations of a u.s submarine in her feet classified that includes uh stories about the chopper in 1969 open literature assist went to a thousand feet fresher's test depth uh in open literature is 1300 feet and that's what we use it's important because it's almost twice the test depth of the previous submarines built after world war ii which was 700 feet which is declassified short history of thresher the month that freshers keel was laid the previous class lead ship of the previous class of nuclear submarine was being launched this tells you how fast we were building submarines to counter the soviet threat important point is uh before going into a an overhaul of portland's naval shipyard all lead ships get a shock test to verify their they can withstand combat damage another important factor is about three months before the sea trials both the commanding officer and the executive officer were transferred here here is a picture of the commanding officers of thresher on the right is rear admiral d maxine he's a commander then shaking the hands of his relief lieutenant commander uh john wes harvey testing class depth are important for you to understand the only way you can test the pressure hole of the submarine and the cabling that goes outside the pressure hole for sonar antennas navigation lights is to go to its test depth and for pressure retire 1300 feet the way you test all the internal piping systems the sea water piping systems is by pressing it to collapse them that's a 150 percent of test depth this is an improved skip jack class they had the same great uh reactor system that's 5w reactor it was more powerful it was easier to maintain easier to operate more reliable than the in the previous reactors the navy was operating in submarines in a teardrop shape hull for uh for greater underwater performance it it's the control surfaces were removed from the bow of the ship to the fair water you can see up here in the picture and it was the most effective anti-submarine warfare platform in the world because of these uh these features that were built into it uh sound quality and barriers some reasons before this had a torpedo room in the bow compartment and that would interfere with the first being noisy up near the sonar in a large spherical active passive sonar in the bow in a large conformal low-frequency array it was moved to the center of the ship the these sonars fed the first computer fire control system for submarines they even developed a steam air conditioning plant lithium bromide could replace the r-12 piston driven rock crushers when you spent the time on this diagram you see the sonar sphere in the bow we want a teardrop shape hole for greater underwater speed to do that we've neck down the pressure hall shown in the dark line to allow main ballast tanks to fit in and fair in with the pressure hall around the bow compartment around the machinery space and here back in in the in the stern area the main ballast tanks are open to the ocean there's grates in the bottom they have vent hydraulically operated vent valves on top when you're on the surface they're full of air when you want to submerge you open the vents and you you fill the main ballast tanks with water and the submarine loses its 760 long tons of reserve buoyancy in order when the submarine submerges it tries to keep at a neutral buoyance that means when the submarine slows it will not go up will not go down it's the closest possible to being neutral will stay in the same place the red are tanks called the variable ballast tanks they are served by this trim pump in the machinery space the trim pump pump pumps water from sea to them uh from them to see in between them and the tanks at either end keep the the submarine on a neutral trim that sure was heavier than the previous skipjack class to fit in all of and heavier and bigger to fit in all the sound quieting features they wanted to be fast too that was important so they looked for ways to reduce a pennies drag primary was that reducing the size of the sale very small sale and you can see the torpedo tube outer doors coming out instead of the bow they're coming out in this in the toward the center of the ship a lot of configuration changes made during uh this nine-month overhaul period they made the pressure hole stronger that's because nuclear submarines went to test depth more times than diesel submarines did they replaced a lot of things including a very nasty synthetic hydraulic oil called sail loop used to melt the shoes of sailors put in regular petroleum-based oil there's a lot of damage from the shock test it was it was kind of a severe shock test and they were finding that up to just a couple of weeks before she went on sea trials this is a picture of puffs installation on the uss pogey pogey is a it's the next class of submarine the 637 class the seven blade screw you see here was not on thresher previous uh usher's day submarines used five blades they call them speed screws okay what i've got circled here is the the puff sonar array attached to the horizontal stabilizer that also has the stern plane controls on it another uh plus hydrophone array was in the midship's ballast tanks that i that i showed you in order to do this required a lot of rearranging stuff i mean for all the rearranging of piping and airflash it made it the most the biggest job the shipyard had the court did not have any survivors of course and there were no electronic recordings the sound surveillance system that recorded the sounds of thresher during her deep dive and implosion were all recorded on paper underwater telephone communications were not recorded by tape it was all witnesses in a very poor log and lots of other people testified here's a picture of skylark the escort ship a submarine rescue vessel and on the left it's underwater telephone both on skylark and thresher this is not radio this is much more harder to operate than radio the ocean provides reverberation uh distortion it uh you get noises of sea life noises of of the other ships it's a difficult thing lots of repeats back bruce rule is important because he was the the so this analysis officer in norfolk and he was assigned to brief the navy court of inquiry on the detections made by sources and after he did that he had a long career in acoustic intelligence for the navy and in 2017 he finally decided to to write a book i've known bruce for a long time we talked about thresher for a long time and finally decided it was time to tell all uh information this book uh at the time was classified now much of it has been released he told us things like pressure collapsed at 2400 feet imploded and that she didn't go above 12 knots uh or touch her celsius would have detected it here's how celsius work you spread the hydrophone arrays in the continental slope they're at the right depth to receive sound from submarines that information is cabled up to a naval facility where it is processed here's a picture of all the needle facilities processing celsius array data in the east coast you can see up here in shelburne nova scotia in an array that was very close to where uh thresher was uh sunk uh antigua and it recorded uh fast speed main coil pumps more about that later antigua array down here got the the best uh recording of the implosion of thresher that was 1300 miles away fischer came out of portsmouth naval shipyard on the morning of 9 april she went out and met with a skylark in the gulf of maine the gulf of maine is a good place to do a shallow dive which they did be in some initial testing because it's it's less the depth that that skylark can recover the crew from uh they did a a shallow dive testing and then proceeded out uh across the continental shelf into the water greater than 8 000 feet for the deep dive test uh the celsius we uh recorded thresher coming down this canyon just to the uh northwest of the of the array and when fresher uh imploded and sank uh the that site was only 30 nautical miles from the array and that's a very short distance for sosus lots of things contributed to the loss of thresher a lot of it was they were still designing submarines like they did diesel submarines there were long runs of sea water piping when you flushed the toilet you were using sea pressure directly from sea that could be really exciting if you've got 600 pound water at test depth uh of a very good crew an excellent crew but they lacked operational training the first the first bullet you can see the officers were not well experienced the new commanding officer and executive officer have been trained by naval reactors in the classroom on the new s5w reactors but they had not served on on a submarine with those reactors uh fast crew is a very important thing to get ready for sea trials what you do is you uh you're supposed to do this a simulated cruise hooked fast and fast to the pier that means you uh take all the shore power off you take everything off you rig the ship for dive you operate on the reactor and pretend like you're at sea well this didn't happen on this fast cruise there were shipyard workers on board for part of it there were lots of problems that they couldn't do a lot of the training the material things breaking they had to stop the fast crews after two days because they had a major failure in the in an air in air reducers one of the problems they had was unfamiliarity with systems they had a simulated flooding from an auxiliary seawater system it took the crew 20 minutes to find and isolate that primarily because they were not familiar with the way the valves had been distributed after the puff installation the chief engineer wanted to extend the fast cruise a bit to do some more engineering drills for engineering people that did not happen they had limited training tools they didn't have a chip control trainer or the damage control trainers as you can see on the right and there are present today the information books that had the the changes during the overhaul were not provided yet there was no guidance on the safe operating envelope if you're going very fast and you're at test depth and you have a flooding problem being fast is good because you can get up quickly but if you have a stern plane jammed and dive then that's not good and you know the same if you're going very very slow and you have flooding it's hard to recover so there was no guidance on what the proper speed would be for safety at various steps there were lots of failures in silver braze piping we could hydrostatically test it but that did not check to see if there was the bonding was correct and and it was going to uh not leak on you uh an ultrasonic test was developed in early 62. remember she went into the overhaul in august of that year could measure the bonding they uh tested all those joints that were open but they only a few of the joints that were not worked delays some of this required you to remove interference cut open uh installation on the piping and you can see the lower bullet you know there were about 400 joints that would have failed that bonding test the class uh was not really designed uh with it with the idea that had to recover from a casualty deep that's that kind of study did not even start until the summer that thresher went into that that overhaul period this study learned that we had a very short time to react and that's why the blow rate was more important to get water out of the ballast tanks so that you could be keep the positive buoyancy but the blow rate had not changed just since uh the nautilus they didn't understand that that was an important design feature and they even found out that a jammed and dive was with a more dangerous casualty on the picture on the left is an air flask on the bottom from thresher after after she sank these air flasks were combined into banks in the ballast tanks the design the capacity of these air banks was absolutely world war ii the center bullet shows that that is just not what you you know not not designed for for a casualty air bank pressure was increased but because they wanted to stay with the same 3 000 pound air system they've been using all submarines since world war ii they had to reduce that pressure down to 3 000 pounds the big issue here is if you had a negative buoyancy problem at test depth near test depth from flooding you you were too heavy you if you needed to get up you you had to use nuclear propulsion because there was no backup now the two of the two uh most common ways of losing propulsion would be a stern plane's jam if the stern plane makes you go down and you go any speed at all you're just going to go down further with a deeper angle and if you have an automatic reactor shutdown that's because the procedures at the time after a scram as we call it is to secure supply steam supply to the engine that loses your ability to produce ac current through the steam turbines and you lose propulsion to compensate for a small leak but it was not even tested below very shallow depths and not tested for long blows the way that system was used was to surface uh do a short main ballast tank blow periscope depth get up high enough use a low pressure blower to blow all the water out of the main ballast tanks the navy has given us a lot of new information and they tell us that the main column pumps were in fast speed during this deep dive that was not a good idea this is a graph of depth versus time time across the top in minutes and depth on the left in in feet developed from the underwater telephone lock this is a two hour depth they had a two hour and a six hour deep dive schedule uh the question is why do both this was a quick hydrostatic test well the six hour deep dive you tested a lot more things you went down much slower uh and a much better chance of finding a problem before the problem finds you there was not a lot of time spent on this on on this deep dive uh the main the navy has finally told us that that main column pumps have two speeds fast and slow they tell us that the uh the flank speed the maximum speed the submarine requires fast speed main coolant pumps but fast speed main coolant pumps also require a lot of power they require steam turbine jet generators and if those turbine generators stop and the pumps are not shifted to slow in time then you have a reactive scram slow speed pumps are more reliable you can't go as fast but they're powered by either the steam turbine generators or the ship's battery which produces direct current through the motor generators ac current because they require less less power there was no guidance on how to do uh a deep dive back then in uh first testimony uh he said that he had to be had main column bumps and fast speed because he wanted an immediate acceleration to get up shallow but by his third testimony he he was telling everybody the slow speed pumps were preferred it sounds to me like somebody talked to him uh slow speed pumps are more reliable and they have very little advantage they have their little advantage over fast speed main cooling pumps because the slow speed pump provides you enough enough speed to get up get shallow quick quickly and the court uh record did a recommendation ashley on what what the guidance for the first guidance for a deep dive a moderate speed which we talked about earlier uh these bullets and most dependable lineup which made coil pumps in slow speed everybody now agreed with that rules uh 2017 book so there's a slow variation in main cool pumps over this this time period for two minutes uh that looks to us like uh they're isolating leak water spraying from a main sea water system and in doing that they're limiting the flow to the main condensers which causes a drop in vacuum which would decrease the speed of the turbine generators and decrease the speed of the directly coupled main coil pumps main coil pumps stopped at zero nine eleven uh rule is sure they stopped the court appears to have bought that they stopped there was a scram and there was no effective backup they tried a 90-second blow right after 0.909 which looks to me like that that even though they the court did not talk about that in open session it looks like that that happened that couldn't means the slow speed make cold pump could have been talked about without the recorder present and right after that main ballast tank blow was started the community officer changed course to skylar's course as a standard safety course standard servicing procedure if you're on the same course as the escort vessel there's very little chance of of you having a collision the commanding officer expected the submarine to surface some interesting statements here at 913 minor difficulties i don't really think so and i'll show you that have positive up angle attempting to blow we agree with that because the blows being interrupted there's another 30-second blow and then i'll comment underwater telephone that might have been exceeding test depth that's probably not correct and then at 900 north they believe below 400 feet all the references to depth a reference to test depth so this appears to be 900 feet above or below test depth but it's got to be the physics say it's got to be below test temp 2200 feet and then hulk collapse at 0 9 18 24 seconds 450 feet below collapse depth purpose build is a very strong hole there's here's a another depth first time graph concentrated this assumes that the propulsion was lost on a scram here you see at 9 13 we're going deep uh i don't think it's a minor difficulty is when you've lost propulsion in your sinking and then we talk about passing test depth well that if that was true they had to really go really fast downward in order to get to the implosion depth that that very well could have meant passing collapse depth uh in 917 900 north 2200 feet works for that 400 feet does not work with that here's a different calculation this time we take a look at we assume 2200 feet and 917 is correct and the implosion time and depth are correct and you work that back into a curve and it ends up joining the uh test depth at a few minutes but before the actual uh scram uh so that indicates she was below test depth that could have been a jam dive that's just my my guess we're working on these on these graphs and these are just an initial uh cut atom thanks to fred best uh why the blow didn't surface well tenosa was a new construction submarine getting ready for sea trials the court ordered a test of the of the glow onto nosa uh but we don't have all the data on that we don't have the exhibit on on that uh the testimony we see is that the blow test ran for 30 seconds and then stopped because of the freezing of these strainers axing testified that deep malice had 10 of the main ballast tanks obviously that means you had to to equalize pressure uh on the air banks with the main ballast tank pressure and obviously this amount of water was not taken out of of the ballast tanks the streamers on the right are from captain zach pate he was an auxiliary division officer and lieutenant at the time on tenosa uh he he blamed these for for freezing up and preventing air flow uh and we know that that and he did not know these existed well the fresher didn't know they existed because they kept filling up with debris and they kept destroying the these air reducing valves there were two of these air reducing valves in parallel and they did not want these strainers removed before sea trials as they were supposed to be because they consider the system still too dirty and in multiple failures remember one of these failures of these valves causes the stopping of of the of the fast crews and they although we don't have detailed testimony on it the main ballast tank flow was interrupted and failed due to restrictions and flow and freezing admiral rickover was the director of naval nuclear repulsion he was a vice arm of the time he talked about some interesting things here uh the court president another vice admiral asked ask him of course you know the reactor had no problem with the with a loss of pressure this is a political public affairs because no one really knew that i mean you you had no real data on on that but it was important because we had to maintain the nuclear power program right he was asked there was no radio contamination right admiral rickover and of course he said no and he had a public statement that's because the public have been inundated for years about how radiation caused uh made monsters like godzilla my favorite movie was them about the giant ants in arizona these are quotes from rickover on the right uh the finding testimony he's talking about an emergency repulsion procedure where you leave the steam to the engine room and you use it to run the main engines for a few minutes long enough to get yourself to the surface when a reactor shuts down you don't lose all the all the heat from it the fission products continue to decay and produce some some date decay heat after the reactor is shut down and he says that ship could have got to the surface if they had done that also rick over here appears to admit that there's a lot of unofficial communications not being recorded by the court recorder that talked about this this problem this issue i've talked to a couple of lawyers and if it goes into the court record you can't remove it i suspect rickover would have wanted that information removed information on the uss george washington comes to me from a good uh source he was a junior officer on george washington and he became a squadron commander and uh commanded a prototype unit he says that the commanding officer went before professor was lost on george washington had a standing order and this commanding officer was captain jim osborne and he is on the naval court of inquiry and he says they had the procedure and the rickover knew about it and rickover said it was okay there was no explanation of why thresher or all submarines did not have a similar washington george washington 700 foot boat the thresher class was a 1300 foot boat but i i'm sure rick over explained this to the board but we don't know what it is because it was not captured by the court recorder rickover promised a faster recovery from a scram and uh by just keeping steam to the engine room you can see by the first book it creates a lot of shortcuts cuts out a lot of time recover also mentions a faster reactor startup procedure does not describe it rickover did defend his program nuclear submarines were critical in national security during the cold war the fiercest competitor fiercest critics of rickover were the diesel submarine guys the diesel submarine mafia diesel submarines had a great part defeating japan uh the through very daring courageous uh almost foolhardy means they they did a lot of damage to the japanese now these officers were not being taken into the nuclear power program of only only a few of them uh you had you had uh canadian officers like lucky flucky on the barb who set up shore party ashore to blow up a japanese train rickover did not want these risk extreme risk takers not procedure following people to operate his reactor plants because he knew a major reactor accident or radiological incident could very well cause the loss of the program uh rickover does some of his rick over magic and diverts attention away from his program he he looked at blaming the steel hye for cracking uh and wanted to go back to the old steel uh experts were brought out that showed that was not really right that steel was correct uh the court report actually mentions the main column pumps could have been shifted to slow even though that report is written like they were stopped that appears to be to us a rick over ploy to again shift attention uh if they we know they had an up angle at 0 9 13 if the pumps were in slow they wouldn't have scrammed they would have gone to the surface uh rickover's statement on the left is very true you listened to to all the witnesses and talking about it they were proud they were skilled technicians they were dedicated but the court documented that they just didn't have the procedures fabrication quality assurance they had a hard time proving in the court that the auxiliary seawater system had been hydrostatically tested there were obviously concerns to delay because they wanted to get this best asw platform is already anti-submarine warfare platform out to sea and the base cause is much deeper diving submarine was not appreciated rico promised a faster recovery from a scram and uh by just keeping sting to the engine room you can see by the first bolt it creates uh a lot of shortcut it cuts out a lot of time recover also mentions a faster reactor startup procedure does not describe it rickover did defend his program nuclear submarines were critical in national security during the cold war the fiercest competitor fiercest critics of rickover were the diesel submarine guys the diesel submarine mafia diesel submarines had a great part defeating japan the through very daring courageous uh almost foolhardy means they they did a lot of damage to the japanese now these officers were not being taken into the nuclear power program uh of only only a few of them uh you had you had uh committing officers like lucky flucky on the barb who sent a shore party ashore to blow up a japanese train rickover did not want these risks extreme risk takers uh not procedure following people to operate his reactor plants because he knew a major reactor accident or radiological incident could very well cause the loss of the program uh rickover does some of his rip over magic and diverts attention away from his program he he looked at blaming the steel hye for cracking uh and wanted to go back to the old steel uh experts were brought out that showed that was not really right that steel was correct uh the court report actually mentions the main coin pumps could have been shifted to slow even though that report is written like they were stopped that appears to be to us a rick over ploy to again shift attention uh if they we know they had an up angle at 0 9 13 if the pumps were in slow they wouldn't have scrammed they would have gone to the surface a rickover's statement on the left is very true you listen to to all the witnesses and talking about it they were proud they were skilled technicians they were dedicated but the court documented that they just didn't have the procedures fabrication quality assurance they had a hard time proving in the court that the auxiliary sea water system had been hydrostatically tested there were obviously concerns of delay because they wanted to get this best asw platform has already anti-submarine warfare platform out to sea and the base cause is much deeper diving submarine was not appreciated as you can see from my bullet above i have experience on fresher glass submarines and i've been studying the loss of pressure since about 2017. steve walsh is going to be on the line to answer questions he uh spent a lot of years as a naval architect working for the navy on submarines fred best helped us with some calculations on some graphs we'll show you those in part of the presentation and nick is a master of slides and helping me correct errors pictures of 129 lives lost here's the harvey family here's a picture sent in by some of the families that we that we talked to ben schaefer was a was the master chief electrician's mate he and his brother were lost he was the most senior enlisted uh nuclear train listed person on board and this is the from the family the bottom one this is walter nunes chief radioman and this concludes my brief i wanted to thank our event sponsors general dynamics and applied mathematics for their generous contributions to this program you made it possible and we thank you very much uh i guess my question the first question goes to uh to the panel which includes uh steve walsh a lifelong nuclear engineer from both nav c08 and other nuclear-centric codes from uh from nav c and the noted author norman friedman who has written on nearly every topic uh including uh a synopsis of of naval submarine development from from world war ii to present so uh just asking you all three kind of in a free form and we have a lot of questions to address uh was there any surprises given that uh the previous releases of documents were only 19 pages and they're now you know several thousand uh we'll go to steve walsh what do you think steve one of the uh one yes there were surprises um when the abuse ships uh personnel testified commander wilson and lieutenant commander brian their testimonies uh were quite surprising in that they had never done uh recovery studies uh on thresher or any deep diving submarine until the year after thresher had uh had been uh commissioned as a result of that they really had no good damage control bills or anything else to give them any insight as to how to deal with a casualty when they were at threshers much deeper uh depth so yes that were to answer your questions admiral uh there were surprises and now what were your thoughts on on this uh revelation uh mr friedman dr friedman well the thing that that struck me actually was the extent of the uh of the overhaul and uh the way in which uh post-overhaul works seem to be rushed for example the determination of the fast crudes uh you would have thought after uh the fast cruise didn't work very well that there would have been a second one after some training and it's obvious that it was very urgent much more urgent than i would have thought to get thresher out to do technical exercises um thresher had new equipment on board new asw equipment puffs was most obvious she also had an underwater communication system she had the first digital fire control system and you can believe that it was urgent to arrange her presence as some exercises before she went up north and and saw some real soviets so i knew about the sense of urgency i didn't realize what it meant uh the other thing is that mr walsh looked back at the crew and i think he was the one who discovered just how much the crew had been changed now i hadn't realized that neither the co nor the xl had any experience whatever with uh very fast nuclear subs so what you have is uh a sudden need for training which is not met now i don't know what the conclusion will be about that but i i'm i tend to look at ships and other things in in more mechanical terms and this dramatizes the human aspect uh the mechanical terms make you think that oh well everyone has roughly the same training but no they didn't and that's rather important i don't know that anyone appreciated just how how dangerous that was going to be um normally the navy is very good about you have to worry about this you have to worry about that you have to worry about what will happen if and it's as though that had been lost somehow that sense of things can happen and this this was a horrible example of things can happen and and really that's what everyone has brought out we don't do recovery studies well well what's going to happen to a nuclear subject has all this power it can always get to the surface well and if the power goes out for some reason now that there had been talk about how the deeper diving gave you a greater margin in the event of some emergency in in 1959 um there was a good deal of uneasiness the submarine community about what they thought was a lot of our new technology impression and there was a special meaning of which the transcript exists in the national archives well they go through the changes in the sub and they point out that they're really not as radical as you might imagine and then there's a comment well if something goes sour at high speed at operating depth you have a lot more time to recover from it with thresher with a much deeper crush depth than with the previous class and that was sort of interesting to see but the the assumption that's buried in that is and you'll have your power to get you out of trouble and nuclear power plants have proven remarkably reliable up to that point jim brian any thoughts well the backup the training issue uh they just um they were pushing to get that submarine out and a large part of the testimony was people saying no there was no pressure but it was obvious that they wanted the submarine out or they would have for example uncovered more of the silver silver braves joints and tested them and they spent a lot of manpower on puffs if if that manpower had been spent on going back and correcting some of the deficiencies they they knew would build in the that submarine uh i mean that's a 2020 hindsight that it could have been avoided uh there was a question about uh the the fact that within 24 hours we have this uh this panel and we're doing an investigation did we bring in the right people should we have included thresher family members there was some uh there was some words out there that you know some sailors were going home at night saying ah you know i don't know you know i think i've got a couple of doubts or i'm i'm um i'm just wondering how this is going to work out and and i don't think anybody especially in the submarine force why you know comes to work every day with some sort of fatalistic um mentality but but the sophistication of the crew however untrained they might have been was such that you know they would might have had concerns what are your thoughts you know they they quickly have a board that's convened did the right people show up for the board and did they not invite all the people you should have invited uh and uh over you uh steve walsh uh avril the the the court of inquiry actually did take testimony from the brother of uh of of uh master chief schaefer and um apparently there was some concern on his part on the readiness of the ship both materialistically and possibly uh training-wise to get underway um but um most of the questions you could tell by the nature of the questions that were being asked of of people that would have been familiar with the crew um was the crew adequately trained the court of inquiry kind of left that hanging they said that they were a good crew which they certainly were but they didn't come to a bottom line because they didn't have much to go with as far as whether or not the crew was sufficiently trained and when i was reading the testimony of the ceo of the dogfish which was a diesel boat that was in in at the yard at the time he was the uh the subplant rep and the crew certification process back in that particular time frame struck me as being a lot less robust than it is now so basically it looked like all he really needed to do was make sure the ship had put together a sea trial agenda which they did and then asked the ceo was did he feel the the crew was adequately trained which apparently the co indicated in the affirmative uh that's not really as you well know how things are done these days but things were a lot more lacks back then and i do believe that uh as dr friedman points out that training uh was uh crew training was probably uh not as robust as it could be and i wouldn't be at all surprised if some of the feedback that some of the the sailors were observing was were along those lines sir yeah there there's uh there's kind of an aggregate question that has been asked by you know three or four different people and it and it's simply this um you know if you look at studies about shipbuilding and you look at names of ships that were billed after people who were alive and not deceased you know you look at carl vinson john c stennis elemental rivers scoop jackson or henry m jackson and you go down the line jimmy carter and you go down the line and down the line and down the line well who are these people well they were they were um heavy heavily invested in the government of our united states who heavenly haven't heavily funded our shipbuilding efforts and so we we really got to the precipice it appears that we're cranking out ships and we're in and what are we looking at in the schedule that that that uh jim showed earlier every 90 days we're commissioning a new a new boat uh so what was this tension you know what is there is there some sort of connection to that i think we all shake our heads and go yeah there had to have been but what are your specific thoughts on it uh jim bryant first and norman friedman second rickover was very clever uh he he would take a congressman out to sea he took him out on the enterprise he took him out on sup on submarines uh when he went on a sea trials run he made all the first sea trials of new construction submarines he always demanded to have uh a number of letterhead for the uh for that submarine because on the way back in what he would do he'd write notes to all the congressmen telling about how great the sea trials was and he advertised that that fully he understood he needed funding for his program because it was a very expensive program so that was part of of rickover's basic philosophy that's why you all started naming uh 1688's after after cities because you know fish don't vote roger that norman what are your thoughts that's certainly true um you've got to remember the time um quite quite aside from the fact that the program had a lot of political horsepower behind it it was a very important national program um once we had the ballistic missile surge it wasn't as though some individual thought suddenly oh well this is a good thing to push and i'll get a lot of congressmen to help me those ballistic missile subs were a terribly important part of the national deterrent and also there was a sense within the navy which was quite reasonable that once the soviets had nuclear subs we had better be able to sink them and that nuclear submarines were probably the best way to do that so thresher comes at a time of great urgency and also this uh the creation of the the ballistic missile subs places enormous stresses on the navy personnel because each ballistic missile sub requires two crews so it's not just a matter of a lot more suds it's twice as many more crews that have to be created i would bet you that a lot of the personal transfers out of thresher between the first uh co and the second one had to do with the the ballistic missile program that was incredibly urgent and there have been people talking about how they had to grow the program much more rapidly than anyone would have liked um the and the attack shows were terribly important also you of course you named major ships after congressmen who helped the navy by the way they didn't used to uh that that's a phenomenon of the last say 20 years 30 years before that uh the navy thanked people but they didn't name anything after them so for example uh there must have been chairman before vincent who are incredibly helpful you've never heard of them they certainly didn't end up on the names of ships but that's a failing modern phenomenon what caused the loss of speed control of the sstg prior to the full speed ms mcps going away and that'll be for jim well this is only a guess we are guessing it's uh the the governors on those turbine generators are very solid uh and if you get a breaker opening up you have a short water sprays into a breaker panel and you get a breaker you gotta shorten the breaker you get a small spike in in the uh on the on the on the voltage uh but you know to get a slow variation uh you need something like a change in the vacuum in the condenser and uh and again uh this slow variation did not show up in testimony it it could have you know bruce rule says he's very positive that was just discussed but it could have been discussed and now we know that rickover was talking to these people and we only have very small portions of what he said so this could have been done in a situation where uh the court recorder was not there they were in court maybe but they didn't have the court in session and so that's the only thing i i can uh come up with is with the cause a slow variation and then you ask well why would the main coolant pump shift it from fast to slow where you would not have gotten the scram we don't know so paul asks the more direct question and and uh you know i think it's the right one you know you were talking april 10th 1963 what took so long okay i'm that that was my editorial you know part but uh he he asked is the story of the failed pipe and seawater spray in the auxiliary machinery space compartment between the reactor compartment and engine room an official navy cover-up you know did we was that a mistake that you know we're just not going to admit to and your thoughts on that all of you really i'm not sure i understand the question steve you understand the question i i think paul is asking uh the navy court of inquiry uh indicated that they felt that the leak was in the engine room um paul paul seems to indicate that um it looks like it might have been in the ams and jim you and i have had many discussions about this uh my my personal feeling is is uh looking at the wreckage pictures of the ship on the bottom i think uh the problem uh originated in the ams as well um but that doesn't mean that the court of inquiry is wrong it just means they didn't have the forensic evidence to go by because their report was released in in june and they didn't actually start finding uh the ship until late uh in calendar year 1963 and and more specifically in 1964 when tries to was making its dives on it during the the summer of 64. so basically um i don't know if there was a cover-up and the other thing that has been explained to me is the navy very sultan if ever goes back and revises a court of inquiry report so they didn't have the forensics to uh as far as the pictures go to come to their conclusion but i think paul uh boyne seems to ask a reasonable question i i don't have an answer other than what i just articulated that way i have seen nothing looks like a cover-up uh uh and that's that's the key that's the key right there yeah i i think people are being protected which which navy people do in courts of inquiry and and things kind of being uh de-emphasized but i don't see a cover-up steve you ought to tell the harry jackson story about the trim pump piping and machinery space lower level yeah i took a submarine design course in mit in the summer of 88 and harry jackson who'd been the design superintendent fourth rusher at portsmouth back up to the time she was lost was mentioning that he did a tour of the boat on the evening of the 8th before the boat got underway the next morning and when he dropped down to the ams lower level he noticed that there was an elbow on the trim pump that was misaligned and he told the class that he was really concerned about that and enough so that if the if the ship it had time in its schedule he would have had that elbow cut out and realigned properly but there was no time to do that and he often said during the class and later on when i got friendly with him that he often wondered if that hadn't perhaps been a source of their problem but you have to recognize too that they had underwater telephone communications up to the last 30 seconds before they imploded which means they had ac power so you could not have flooded that that that space and then and the the motor generators sit right down on either side of the trim pump so you know if there really had been a lot of water running around they would have gone away and you would have had ac power because the reactor was scrammed and more than likely the steam valves were shut yeah uh we we've got a pretty austere audience today among our our minions that we have and we love you all uh we've got three former secretaries of the navy we've got the ninth mikpon of the navy jim hurt we've got uh you know folks who've dedicated their lives uh to the submarine service and to the love of the navy and to finding out the tragedy of these souls that are on eternal patrol uh but uh we've got a couple questions uh there's a gentleman doug radoski asks are there any plans for more forensic examination of the wreckage or under underwater archaeology that you're aware of i do not know of any and also that you get a high sedimentation rate and uh and when when last time you saw pictures of it steve wasn't it pretty much covered thresher was uh threat both thresher and scorpion were covering were getting covered very quickly um some of the assets that i was responsible for in the deep submergence office back in 98 dove on both thresher and scorpion the navy does do periodically does do periodic surveys um on those two submarines and they'll do marine life samples and they'll do bottom samples to see what's going on and um i suspect admiral that the navy will probably continue to do so but as jim articulated i don't know about any forensics or anything of that nature do you think there should be more research on that norman i i don't think you'll see anything more um from the navy's point of view the question is and was uh what sank a sub i think that they will feel that the court of inquiry went into that rather thoroughly um i doubt that they would go again remember that that there are no more s5ws in servers remember that there are no more submarines of this design and service um i you go back and the suggestion there was some sort of cover-up um there may be differences of opinion as to exactly what happened but i don't see that if you if you localize the the initial damage uh to the the auxiliary machinery rather than main machinery i don't see that that shows us some evil presence out there that did anything that has to be covered up that's a difference in interpretation and the differences in terms of interpretation are everywhere uh there are important points that came out very rapidly after thresher was sunk there was a sense that the piping design had been very poorly done and if you add an inexperienced crew to our complex piping arrangement subtly you understand that leaks would be extremely difficult to handle and that was understood almost immediately that was very widely known i've been told that the navy submarine community was furious about that that's why portsmouth never did a detailed design for a nuclear sub again that's why subsafe immediately concentrated on piping within the sub on not only its integrity but the ability to shut off everything rapidly and you see in the board of inquiry the court of inquiry rather are the comment that if you've got a flooding casualty of any sort and people were unfamiliar with how to isolate it things could happen extremely rapidly and rather fatally and that sounds like what happened so it's not as though someone invented some supernatural cause for this in order to absolve the navy yard portsmouth or anyone else i'm very surprised that anyone believes that this has been concealed there are things we didn't know but the biggest thing we didn't know was what steve walsh uncovered which is who was in the crew and how much experience they had that's a tremendous thing and it overshadows whatever news you get out of reading the report of inquiry so it's really that tension between was this a mechanical failure or was it a combination of a mechanical failure meets a personnel training and readiness failure meets a a rapid uh schedule that doesn't you know put some rigor and uh and metrics behind you know when you are ready to go to then that next level i guess the follow-on from that is uh the permit 594 uh was commissioned did it slip did did it it was projected to commission you know 90 days later was that push back as a result of this when thresher was lost admiral um uh permit and plunger were both in service okay so basically three ships of the class including thresher were in service and this gets back to what dr friedman was pointing out and what i pointed out to jim the training infrastructure for the navy for this brand new class of deep diving high performance submarine wasn't really very mature so you had no rotatable pool per se of personnel with a thresher class experience to draw from and as dr freeman pointed out a lot of them were being diverted off of those boats towards the fbm's that were coming online if you remember correctly the lafayette the 616 delivered roughly two weeks after thresher was lost so we were building like crazy at the time and they needed personnel so um yes there was a limited number of thresher class available boats but uh one of the things the court of inquiry did do and the navy did in general was they did put a limitation and depth the lid on most of those boats uh until they could get a better handle and start implementing some of the uh sub safe what ended up being sub safe uh requirements which came out of the court of inquiries recommendations yeah a great point uh so lan keith uh you know calls me out correctly is the am i blaming the crew when it appears the naval reactor procedures or scrams may be the major cause of threshers loss no i'm absolutely not not in any manner shape or form not that i would blame a crew on any vessel uh surface or or subsurface who had a bad day at sea or had something go wrong it was just a was it a contributing factor in a manner of speaking uh we had another uh gentleman he's a real friend of our our foundation george schimel fenig from germany and and his his question is really you know we talked about it before show airtime today who the heck called the champ for the change of command of a co after four months in command and and turn it over to lieutenant commander john harvey you know who does that you know and um you know and and we had a that was a good dialogue one of i think george george george needs a an explanation from you uh why don't we revisit that discussion which you guys are asking the non-operator i'm i'm a naval architect all we were talking about was that the in the um in the desire to role experience and of course the new co did not have any platform experience whatsoever why would he in the first shift but uh the idea was with there was just this urgency to to adjust the mix of the talent as fast as quickly possible and uh anyway it strikes me that you've forgotten that discussion which is okay so uh any any thoughts though uh or i'll go on to the next question jim well the um the the testimony of the chief of naval personnel admiral smedberg has has not been released yet and smedberg and rickover had big fights because smed bird put a whole list of very qualified academically qualified submarine officers up from diesel boats and rickover chose very few of them and and there's uh and and this is discussed in the the rickover book uh rick over in the nuclear navy quite quite a bit but we the testimony should be interesting because i'm sure there will be lots of pointing as to why this happened and that's not really been discussed yet it's noted in the findings of a fact that this happened and it concerned the board we don't have the testimony yet and i suspect they're going to be some fireworks coming up here that's interesting they're also going to give us an exhibit that gives us the personnel and officer listings and ratings if they'll give it to us so uh there's a there's a question by a gentleman named walt haskins never served in the navy he's he's a great american and a champion of our armed forces and he is a stalwart member of our foundation a life member of our foundation and he lives in tulsa oklahoma and he practices law and he asks this very question great question if if blockage of the filters was a known risk which would inc incapacitate a critical system why was there no emergency bypass they just didn't use this system the system was not even considered as a backup yeah if you read testimony uh there was a master's thesis done in the late 80s in which all these players secretary of the navy i know flucky all got interviewed and said everybody knew that this blow system was useless and so it was not even tested at any depth besides periscope depth so you know it was it was not considered to be you know a really viable system so uh when when it was used it was kind of the hail mary you turn the safety course and you blow because you're sinking and you've lost propulsion and nothing else and it just happened badly for them no it was that that system was a terribly designed system that they're using a 400-foot diesel boat blow system you know on a on a 1300 foot submarine and without any studies in place to show the recovery rates and the chance of recoveries or anything and they knew they were taking the risk but they just kind of you know nuclear power was so good they just went with it remember how reliable nuclear power had proven up to this point it never broke you never heard about a nuclear sub that had lost power and had to come home on a the diesel engine that they had as a backup and you never heard about people losing nuclear power and going over to a battery they had backups for the propulsion but the idea that you would lose all power i don't think anyone had really imagined that it was a very very reliable system yeah um we got a note from alan kerr and he kind of gets back at us a little bit and i like i like i like the interplay there uh alan kerr he says uh garner had spent four years on board the skate schaefer was on the skipjack before thresher pennington had been at the david taylor basis and cpos had served on nuclear vessels before how was their training shortage in our minds just wasn't enough or uh does he have experience that's experience they had some experienced people and for picking uh wes harvey as a ceo i mean he was a super nuke he had done lots of great things he put the prototyping commission he was the first engineer on tel aviv but what what we're looking at here is a chance for operational training to actually get the and the the crew was a super excellent crew but they didn't have a chance to get them up to speed that fast cruise is so critical in getting the crew ready to go on sea trials you're supposed to be down there dedicating performing all these these evolutions and all these training and it just didn't it just did not not it happened well uh and and uh and the admiral curtsey who was a under he was a view ships justified before congress on on this uh and he said that you know they had put more time in overhauls to allow for training because they recognized there was not time for off for example when you steam the engine room using shore steam uh you once you do the testing in my day on back in the 70s they allowed us three or four days to just train the crew on that on those systems starting up and shutting down terminal generators starting up you know bringing the main engines on the line warming them up shutting them down getting all the call cards i do not think they allowed that much time during this uh this overall period for them to get up to speed and and skilled what they what what they needed to know thank you so uh robert frick asks a great question was there discussion of flooding emergency with scram immediate actions at that time such as shutting throttles shutting ms-1 and two any thoughts what you see is a long discussion about isolating seawater leakage uh they and and the the philosophy at the time i believe is if you have a leak if it's you know there's a big discussion look over got involved in it too if a wall of water is coming at you you shut the whole system down but if it's if it's uh and there's a lot of discussion about if you shut the whole all the sea water down what happens to the reactor you know you overheat components big discussion on on that and uh the philosophy was kind of the leak's not too bad let's go find it and isolate it and by the end of the discussion it was more of let's shut the whole system down and sort it out later other thoughts steve walsh uh yes the the ship obviously dr freeman touched on it and one of the things that and jim has mentioned it during the testimony indicated that thresher underwent a significant amount of uh configuration changes especially in engineering spaces the entire freshwater side of the main condensate system was ripped out and replaced with a brand new system all uh the hydraulic system was significantly impacted by puffs as was the auxiliary fresh water system and the high pressure air so basically what um that tells you is a lot of key valves were put into new positions or they're outright replaced with some other type of valves for example the asw system had some check valves put into it so that they could isolate port and starboard loops as jim has indicated we saw very little evidence in the testimony in fact we saw evidence that the ship just didn't have time to to train and as a result of that um and i don't want people to think that we're saying that that that was the cause of the loss i approached this as with her critique mentality what were the contributing causes and certainly um crew training was a key contributing cause but it wasn't the only one and as a result of that um you know in my mind the the the root cause of the loss of the boat was because there were so many contributing causes the navy under appreciated the risk of of nearly doubling the test depth of this brand new high performance classes submarine they were going down so fast right steve that they were they were going deep down to test depth so rapidly because they were they were locked into a two hour uh to a two hour deep dive and the captain was going to stay on schedule you know my guess is my thoughts are if they had just taken a little more time and they they'd found the problems before the problems found them that they would have survived that i i tend to agree um i'm going to ask the group to to go through one last time um any any final thoughts that uh that they have you know on on we got this new information what did it mean did you learn anything bottom line does it make this story tell differently i'll start with jim bryant [Music] well we don't discuss substate because that's not really part of the of this part of the story but what i personally hope and i started doing this that now we've got unclassified material that subsafe workers or people interested in studying this can go look at you don't have to go to a classified reading room or whatever you can make up your own own information books out of the testimony take it home and read it and study it and use it in the classroom and i hope that there will be uh graduate students out there in engineering who will write masters and uh phd thesis on this so we can even get more detail and more understanding thank you uh uh mr walsh expanding on what jim just said what came out of this uh court of inquiry was basically the subsafe program and it is the legacy to the 129 souls that were lost on this ship and what this release of information is doing at least for me who's worked in the subsafe background and uh for the last uh you know for the 39 years i was a civilian working for the navy is it provides expanded background and it's very important i i sent al knee an email earlier and i said to him the navy has done itself a huge favor doing this because even people like myself that have done this for 39 years learn new things as to why the sub safe attributes are the way they are in some cases and the importance of things as dr friedman pointed out access to vital as far as key valves you know being able to get to them quickly and all so this this really is as uh as jim bryant says is good training material that should be incorporated into uh the sub safe training and refresher training that we all used to get around the anniversary of fresher every year thank you and norman you have the final word well i don't know how final this is but when you read the uh court of encourage when you read the detailed testimony first thing that comes out is how complicated those machinery systems are uh if there's far more to it than even a very interested layman has any idea uh i had no feeling for the the different speeds of pumps for example that's not the sort of thing you normally discuss and the more you look the more important it is to have a very detailed understanding of what's on board that sub that goes back to the training issue that goes back to familiarity um if you look at the whole range of things that happen to ships a lot depends on how familiar everyone is with the ship itself with the details of valves piping and everything else when there's a disaster you don't sit back and say oh well i understand that but this circuit should go this way instead of this other way no no you have to know instinctively what to close where to jump that comes out of the testimony and it also comes out if you think about it and that goes back to the urgency of the situation um things were urgent at that time because the united states was in a very dangerous situation the navy understood that that's behind all of this that's why polaris existed that's why it was an important thing to get a lot of polaris cementers into service that's why asw assemblies were terribly important and that's a different world than we're in right now it's it's a world we can come back to if we're not careful very easily but under those circumstances people took chances there were a lot of people killed in peacetime operations the crew were casualties of the cold war as much as if they'd been shot down by the russians in a bomber of flying near russia and that's probably the most honest way to put it the cold war was not a benign experience people got killed protecting this country and it forced people to take chances which in peace time in real peace time would be totally unacceptable [Music] there's a reason that that fast cruise was cut short it had something to do with urgent operational needs not with somebody's ego or some kind of stupid cover-up it had to do with what the country badly needed at that time and i think that that bottom line doesn't come across in the court of vancouver because everyone in the court of inquiry knew what that was about they were living it that's the only thing you gained by being a historian you look back and you say oh that was that was in all their minds they don't get up and say every you know every day well the russians are nasty we got to worry about you know they kind of guess that well thank you for that uh thank you for that very articulate final word uh i had mentioned that the final um music was originally composed uh that actually started our show we did not write the eternal father strong to save but but we're going to hear that in an homage to the crew and then one more time the original music thank you panelists thank you sponsors gd and applied mathematics thank you uh foundation members please join us if you like this content join us and um and we're going to send it out to you tomorrow on youtube and you can come go find it and uh we find that within a few days we get about uh two to three hundred more people looking in at our content so please consider being a member uh www.navyhist and just join and um and and stay with us and enjoy our content uh that that concludes our show uh thank you over to you colin [Music] oh [Music] us when we cry [Music] lord god and god the men who fly through all the great spaces of the sky be with them in darkening storms and sunlight oh hear us when we lift our prayer for those in parallel [Music] [Music] [Music] is [Music] praise [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: Naval Historical Foundation

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Id: 4wJQUDOhu-U

Length: 92min 14sec (5534 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 16 2021