Word: nuclear
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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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...
...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...
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...
...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...
...inhospitable, isolated, mosquito-plagued Kili Island, the 300 or so Bikinians have huddled in a beachfront slum, longing for their beloved strand of islets around a life-sustaining lagoon. They still cannot go home. The U.S. Defense Department wants to keep Bikini for a test site should the nuclear-testban treaty ever break down...