SILENCE FROM THE SEAMOUNTS

SUBMARINE duty in the U.S. Navy is known as "the silent service," and for grim reason. In two 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.

An 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 that might permit nearby Soviet trawlers and hydrographic vessels to calculate for possible future use the nuke routes of the U.S. Navy. The Russians, of course, are well aware of those routes anyway, since their own subs travel them frequently.

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. The great-circle track in the vicinity of the Azores has never been systematically surveyed in detail."

Hendrix, who by ironic coincidence published an article in the current issue of U.S. Naval Institute 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 mounted on floats. These drift about at the whim of wind and tide broadcasting in Morse code for only about six hours the ominous message: "S O S--sub sunk."

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 in 1965 in the wake of the Thresher tragedy two years earlier, has been delayed until late 1970 by technical and budgetary problems. When it is completed, the Navy will have two vehicles that can extricate 24 submariners at a time at depths of up to 3,500 ft. Four more DSRVs will be added later, to be flown to a point near disaster scenes, then piggybacked atop "mother" nuclear subs or catamaran-hulled rescue vessels.

Though a radio message using Scorpion's call sign, "Brandywine," and the discovery of a 250-ft.-long steel hulk in 180 ft. of water off Cape Henry, Va., raised hopes that the missing sub might be found, by week's end she was still silent. The radio signal, Navymen bitterly concluded, had probably been a hoax; the hulk proved to be that of a World War II sub.

Though the search--by as many as 55 ships and 35 aircraft--continued at a diminished level, it seemed most likely that Scorpion had gone to the bottom in the depths beyond the reach of sonar, divers or the McCann chamber. Unlike the loss of Thresher with 129 men aboard, Scorpion's demise appeared to have nothing to do with inadequate shipyard maintenance: she ostensibly got a "Four 0"--i.e., excellent --rating in an overhaul only last summer, and had performed superbly in the Mediterranean. Had she not remained incommunicado in transit but been required to signal her position every 24 hours, the Navy might at least know approximately where Scorpion lies and how she foundered. That information could at least benefit submariners of the future.

*Located by a yellow telephone buoy at a depth of 240 ft., Squalus ultimately relinquished 33 of her crewmen to safety; 26 others had been drowned in a flooded aftercompartment.

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