Note to the Membership on an Upcoming Posting That – Hopefully – Will Interest a Few
With the approach of the 10th of April, which will mark the end of the 53rd year since the loss of the USS THRESHER (SSN 593), the writer has been working on a summary assessment of that event intended primarily - and hopefully - for use in the far future by any naval historian who makes the major effort required to separate what is known or can be reliably confirmed from - on the other hand - the mass of erroneous conjecture and misinformation extant in the public domain from both official and unofficial sources.
As such, this posting will reprise some THRESHER material previously archived on this site including the multiple independent lines of evidence that confirm THRESHER experienced NO flooding before collapse of the pressure-hull at a depth of 2400-feet.
It took the Navy 76-years to acknowledge that the US Battleship MAINE (ACR-1) sank in Havana harbor in 1898 not because of a Cuban or Spanish mine but because of an internal explosion, and then only because ADM Rickover took an interest in the event and funded a review of all available information including photographs of the wreckage.
The upcoming THRESHER posting will be the second of three summaries that discuss all that can be derived from acoustic detections of the losses of the K-129, THRESHER, and, on 22 May, the SCORPION, a posting that should be very short because all that can be said about that event from acoustics already has been published in book form.
For the K-129 summary, go to the archived article of 20 Feb 2015: “Advancing an Understanding of Why the Soviet Submarine K-129 Was Lost” or go to the link which also can be accessed at http://www.iusscaa.org/articles/brucerule/advancing_an_understanding_of_why_the__soviet_submarine_k-129_was_lost.htm
