The Scorpion was on assignment to spy on Soviet submarine excercises around the Azores in the Atlantic.

Upon completion of its mission it set sail for the Norfolk Navel Base.

Last contact were radio signals tranmitted on the 20th and 21st of May, intended for a listening post in Spain, but which were instead intercepted by a listening station in Greece, which forwarded them.

Six days later the Scorpion was overdue, and a search was launched. After three days of that with no success, the loss was made public in order to expand the search to public help.

The public search centered around applications of Bayesian search theory, a new mathematical application of search-and-sort algorythms developed by Dr. John Craven, and first used to search for a lost hydrogen bomb off the coast of Palomares, Spain, in 1966.

Things were proceeding methodically, but with no fast results, so the navy released tapes of it's underwater SOSUS listing system, recording the sound of the Scorpion hull imploding.

That infomation enabled Gordon Hamilton to narrow down the Bayesian search zone, such that pieces of Scorpion hull were seen by the the Navy's oceanographic research ship USNS Mizar about 740 kilometers southwest of the Azores.

The final bullseye was done by Chester Buchanan, who designed an underwater camera sled (which was built for him by J.L. Hamm of Naval Research Laboratory's Engineering Services Division) and after six months of towing it back-and-forth behind the USNS Mizar along the narrowed-down search zone, they finally got pictures and an exact point of ocean-floor impact.

Q: What are the theories associated with the USS Scorpion disaster?

A: There are lots, ranging from espionage to sabatogue to just dumb engineering maintenance, but the basic death of the sub was caused by it sinking into lower deapths with greater water pressure than it's hull could withstand.

There's acoustic evidence of an explosion having happened about 20 minutes before a second large explosion that was the implosion of the hull, and there's lots of things that could have caused that: It was a spy sub, loaded with spy gear, and this was the peak of the cold war, so, being in international waters and under a state of secrecy, the Soviets *might* have taken a pot-shot at it that hit a sensitive spot, but that sub was also known to have cantacerous problems with a freon compressor and some pressure pipes that were leaky and which weren't properly refitted because it was the peak of the cold war, and navy brass was under pressure to keep up pressure on the Soviets and so didn't let it spend as much time in dry dock as maybe they should have.

If it was the result of a skirmish with the Soviets, then unfortunately, given the nature of its mission and where they were, it has to be written off as one of those things that can happen to a spy sub when fighting a cold war in international waters, and if it was because of lax maintenance, then again, it has to be written off as a known possible consequence when under pressure to choose to take a risk because of the state of cold war that the US was engaged in with the Soviets at that time. It's knows that the sub was under pressure from on high to perform because the two surviving crew members, who had reasons to skip that last voyage, talked about how stressed crew moral was getting. (Some used to think that it had been caused by a faulty explosion of an on-board torpedo, but analysis of the wreckage has discounted that).

In other words, whether it be because of a skirmish with the Soviets, or if it was because of lax maintance because of a need to keep the sub at sea because of the Soviets, it and it's crew of 99 were casualties of the cold war.

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