Word: scorpions
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...world wars, combat subs have cloaked themselves in quiet while stalking enemy prey, and even in the deepwater missions of peace, their nuclear-powered successors maintain infrangible radio silence for as long as 13 days at a time. Last week, with the almost certain loss of U.S.S. Scorpion, that silence appeared tragically unwise and probably unnecessary...
...eight-year-old 252-ft. attack sub of the Skipjack class, Scorpion was returning to Norfolk, Va., from a cruise in the Mediterranean with 99 officers and men aboard. On May 21, just south of the Azores (see map), she filed her last "movement report" before transiting the inadequately charted undersea mountains of the mid-Atlantic. Not until six days later was the Navy aware that anything was amiss-and then only when Scorpion failed to report her arrival off the U.S. coast. The cold-war code for U.S. nuclear subs requires them to cruise submerged without any radio signals...
Over the Rockies. Subs like Scorpion cruise submerged at speeds of up to 35 knots and can operate at depths down to 1,000 ft. There are "sea-mounts"-underwater slopes-charted along her great-circle route homeward that lie only 900 ft. below the surface. Retired Navy Captain Charles N. G. Hendrix, an old "pigboat" skipper who is now a professor of oceanography at the U.S. Naval Academy, likens such subsurface navigation to the plight of "a pilot flying over the Rocky Mountains without knowing how high the highest peaks are, where they are, or even if they exist...
...Proceedings titled "The Depths of Ignorance," dealing with the hypothetical stranding of a nuclear sub on a seamount in mid-Pacific, argues that the Navy not only has insufficient bathymetric data on bottoms in all oceans but lacks adequate communication and rescue devices for subs in distress as well. Scorpion, like more than 70 of her sisters in the U.S. nuclear-sub fleet, carried only two buoys mounted on cables fore and aft to mark her position in the event of disaster, plus a handful of flares that must be fired to the surface and a pair of radio beacons...
Beyond Reach. Even if these scanty signals are picked up somewhere along a sub's disaster course (Scorpion's: 2,500 miles long by 50 miles wide), the device the Navy relies upon to rescue deep-sixed submariners is ancient and inadequate: the McCann rescue chamber, an "undersea elevator" that can remove only eight men at a time from subs in 850 ft. of water or less. Devised in the 1920s, it was last used in an actual undersea rescue when Squalus went down off Portsmouth, N.H., in 1939.* Development of a "Deep-Submergence Rescue Vehicle," begun...