Sea Control - Sea Control 249 - Revelations from USS Thresher with CAPT (ret) Jim Bryant

Episode Date: May 13, 2021

Links1. "Navy Release Latest Round of USS Thresher Documents," USNI News, February 4, 2021.

Hey folks, Jared here. I've talked about our feed. I'm going to keep talking about the feed. There are two existing Seat Control feeds out there. If you don't believe me, the old feed sprang back to life last week and suddenly we have 5,000 more downloads. So the current feed, that's the one you want to be listening to, is labeled simply Seat Control and includes the phrase Simsex Flagship Podcast in its description. That's Seat Control, Simsex Flagship Podcast. That's where you want to be. So subscribe, rate, and review the new feed. Andrea Howard has the Khan is host in this episode, and she's discussing revelations from the release of documents related to the sinking of USS Thresher with her guests, retired U.S. Navy Captain Jim Bryant. This episode

was edited and produced by our very own Ed Salo. Please check out everything going on over at the main website, simsec.org. We've released our next call for submissions for Project Trident. If you're interested in contributing to the discussion on law of naval warfare, submissions are due May 17th, so time is running out. For more information, check out our website, simsec.org. I would also implore you to take a look at the main page and see everything that's being published as part of our history of the U.S. Naval Strategy, of the Maritime Strategy from the 1980s. A lot of great guests who submitted to our editor there, Dmitry Filippov, and he's to be commended for putting that together. Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the

SimSec Podcast Network, the Bilge Pumps. You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of iron brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. On that note, I'll turn it over to Kimber's man. Greetings Sea Warriors! Let's dive, dive back into sea control. I'm Andrea Howard and today's topic highlights what we learned from the Declassified Naval Court of Inquiry report on the loss of the USS Thresher. I am so, so lucky to be joined by the retired Navy Captain Jim Bryant, who served on three Thresher-class submarines, including command of USS Guardfish SSN 612 from 1987 to 1990. In 2019, he filed the Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that spurred the release of five waves of documents, the latest on February 4th, 2021. As a reminder,

all opinions expressed are personal opinions and are not representative of any institutions with which we may be otherwise associated. Thank you so much for joining us, sir. Great to be here. Thanks. Fantastic. Before we kick off our discussion, I would love for our listeners to hear a bit more about your career. Well, I was accepted in the nuclear power program by a smiling Admiral Rickover in November of 70. My grades had improved every semester at the Naval Academy, so he was pretty pleased. Even though I had to go sit in the closet for a while, he still told me I was in the program. My first submarine was Sea Dragon, skate class.

Two screws are better than one and bow planes forever. Basically, a nuclear-powered Tang-class diesel submarine. Not terribly impressive, but we were pretty good at periscope depth. And then I went on to be chief engineer of Grant, which has a thresher-style engine room, and then served as ops nav on permit, and then exo-haddock in an overhaul, and commanded guard fish for two deployments. That's a great history. Then I went off to the Pentagon and became a political military officer and dealt with

Naval Reactors. If any of you know of Steve Trotman, I worked for him when he was a 27-year-old reserve junior grade, and I was a captain. And he became the deputy director of Naval Reactors and retired here recently. Thank you so much for that summary. And for our listeners who've been through the prototype program, for reference, going on for this episode the thresher style submarine is the same that is utilized for our more training ships today the 626 and the 635 in charleston so as we're walking through this and you've been

through that program then you might be able to better ingest some of the technical details okay sirs let's dive into it what was your motivation for filing the freedom of information act lawsuit and advocating for the release of these documents well there's a guy called bruce Rule, who was the SOSIS expert when Thresher sank, and he analyzed the data recorded by SOSIS and testified before the Navy Court of Inquiry, and we became friends. He went on to the Office of Naval Intelligence as an acoustic expert for about 42 years. We became friends in the early 90s, and we've talked over the phone for a long time about things he knew about Thresher, and And finally, in 2017, he decided to write a book and tell all.

So I figured I was in a good position to start studying Thresher since I could interview him and I understood him. And he was coming out with information and I started studying it. And I found out that even the Freedom of Information Act, you could not get the unclassified sea trial agenda for Thresher. And we fought with that for almost a year. So I said, well, I mean, this is a major historic event. for the Navy. It's the first nuclear submarine disaster. It remains the worst submarine disaster, number of lives lost. So, might as well do something important in my life, maybe, and just try to, you know, and try to get the Navy to provide some more information. And what the Navy

has done, and they've done a really good job of that. Certainly. And, you know, part of the hesitation involves just the context in which the Thresher was lost in the future of the nuclear propulsion program at that time. So can you describe for us the number of submarines that were in service at the time of these testimonies, as well as the status of the Naval Nuclear Power Program? There were 28 submarines in service and about 36 either planned or bought and either planned or being built. And so it was a very important program. Then you have the Thresher who's sinking on a routine deep dive test depth after a nine-month overhaul period under very controlled conditions, and that kind of shocked everybody.

And so there was a lot of effort made by Admiral Rickover and actually the court to defend the nuclear power program. So given the future of the boats at this time, why was the USS Thresher considered the most advanced nuclear submarine in the world? And this was outlined by Commander John Woolston, the Bureau of Ships Project Officer for SSN 593 and 637 Class Submarines. Woolston's testimony is very key. He learned a lot of things from that. But the submarine, when Thresher was laid down in May of 58, that was the lunching date for the first Skipjack submarine.

So they were building overlapping submarine construction. So they had figured a way to make the fresher class quiet to make it a real anti-submarine warfare submarine because the skipjack class was anything but quiet. It was very fast. It was very noisy. It had lots of electronics antenna. It was real good at collection, but it was not very good. It had basically a BQR2 Bravo, which is a German balcony-type sonar used on their Type 21 back in 1945. and and thresher had a big spherical sonar array conformal arrays was sound quieted and was within

a very effective anti-submarine warfare platform thank you appreciate that summary of the revolutions that were made and applied on this platform so rear admiral then commander dean axene was the first commanding officer of thresher and he testified three times before the court of inquiry. What did his testimony reveal about pressure's design with regard to a flooding casualty? Well, he basically said that the only way that that class of nuclear submarine and previous nuclear submarines could recover from a negative buoyancy problem when they're really deep was nuclear propulsion. The blow system was woefully inadequate, both in capacity and blow rate and as the as a shipyard expert in dnxing said the drain system was useless at

test depth they weren't designed that way the air system capacity was designed on probably the balo class and roller war ii to surface twice from from periscope depth and to shoot all torpedoes there was no concept of well you might need to blow from from test depth back in those days They didn't even test the blow system in anything deeper than periscope depth, and then only for a few seconds to get up and then use a low-pressure blower to surface the submarine. Yeah, absolutely. And Rear Admiral Eckstein further outlined the preferred main coolant pump speeds while at test depth. Can you tell us about that and what the testimonies revealed? There was very little guidance on things back then.

There was no guidance on what you do with main column pumps or how you rig the ship to go for a deep dive test. Axene, from his first testimony and from his executive officer and from an officer who did not go to sea on sea trials because of a wife issue, said that you had to be in fast speed pumps because you wanted immediate acceleration because you didn't have the capacity to save yourself by blowing. So you want to meet acceleration to get up a little shallower, at least, so you could put more air in the ballast tanks and pump more water overboard. His second testimony, he kind of waffled on that and said, well, you know, slow-speed main coolant pumps are more reliable.

But by his third testimony, he was very clear that you want to begin slow-speed pumps. And for the first time, the Navy has recognized that they're actually declassified the fact that main coolant pumps have two speeds, at least the fresher class. It had two speeds, and if the fast-speed pump required steam-driven turbine generators to operate, the slow-speed pumps could be run off of either the steam-driven turbine generators, or they could be run off of motor generator sets from using converting DC power to AC power from the battery. And that's a big thing, because before that was all naval nuclear propulsion information. And now this allows the public to understand much more about this disaster. And I appreciate the Navy for doing that, because it makes it clearer to the average person as to what happened. Admiral, then Vice Admiral Hyman Rickover, was the director of the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program that you've been discussing and that we're appreciative of for their cooperation with these release of documents. This is also sort of colloquially known as Naval Reactors, and Admiral Rickover had the tricky task of defending Naval Reactors at the time.

What question was asked to him first during his testimonies? Well, the first question asked by Vice Admiral Austin, who was president of the board, was, of course, the reactor had no consequence in this accident, the loss of fresher. Well, the big thing there is he didn't really know. So this was obviously a public affairs defense of nuclear power. Rickover went to the chance of making sure that the report had that the main coolant pumps were shifted to slow, but it's pretty clear they were not. SOSIS clearly had them at fast speed, and they stopped and did not shift to slow. So Rickover was being very careful because he had made lots of enemies,

especially among the diesel boat submariners. And just 18 years previously, the diesel electric submarine had virtually, you know, got a lot of credit for winning World War II against the Japanese. And now those officers who were daring, courageous, I mean, very brave. Look at Lucky Flucky on Barb sending a shore party ashore to blow up a train. I mean, but Rick Orr didn't want those kind of guys because he knew that a reactor accident or a major radiological incident could be the end of the nuclear power program. And look at how many submarines that we already had.

and the Russians were much better at long-range rockets. We had to park our short-range submarine-launched ballistic missiles off their coast in order to be a real threat to them. So Rickover did a good job in funding this program. Absolutely. Can you talk about his discussion of HY-80 for the whole versus the use of high-tensile steel? You know, one of Rickover's main things, he didn't like really going deep.

He didn't like having to use the HY-80, the better steel, to go deep. He liked the high-tensile steel, which, of course, was developed for the BALO and TENCH-class submarines during World War II, which gave them the ability to go down 600 feet, which saved them from depth charges. That's a whole other story if you want to hear that one. He claimed that the HY-80 had a lot of problems with cracking. and and he he used that both you know during the testimony at the board and also for the congress he claimed that hy he would tell stories about cracking on the on the teddy roosevelt and mayor island and those kind of things but they uh but it was really a much better steal and and the

naval sea systems command back then it was bu ships trotted out a couple of experts we went through much detail showing that hy80 was much better than high tensile steel high tensile steel had major cracking problems before and that if they made it thicker to go deeper it would not it probably would not have been possible so it was another defense by by rickover and i mentioned earlier rickover also got somehow that the the main coil pumps could have been shifted to slow the report the way it's written does not really endorse that it was put in there as a political cover for Rickover, a very clever move. The report clearly understands that the main coolant pump stopped.

It's what Bruce Rule said, and I've asked Bruce Rule many times. If the main coolant pump had been shifted to slow, he would have heard them because the Sosis array foxtrot was only 30 miles away, and that's nothing for a Sosis that can detect at thousands of miles. roger so outside of this discussion on high tensile steel and main coolant pumps admiral rickover was also asked about scram recovery and the use of main steam stops what did he say on these subjects rickover had promised the board that he was going to and promised the congress too that he was going to make a faster recovery from from a reactor scram he got caught in

testifying, actually talking about the emergency recovery procedure, which we all know today, when you leave, back in those days, when you had a reactor scram, you shut the steam stops. Unless you were on the USS George Washington, the CO standing orders on George Washington, and this is not from the testimony, this is from a witness that served as a junior officer and later became a squadron commander and prototype commander, et cetera.

But they had that procedure to leave the steam stops open and use residual steam, and they practiced on it before Thresher was lost. Well, that procedure was not approved until after Thresher was lost, but Rickford talked about it a bit. He was captured in testimony, in closed testimony, and I've talked to trial lawyers, and once that goes into the record, the court record, cannot get it removed. So he was stuck. He's caught on record saying that he had a procedure that could surface a submarine using propulsion, using the decay heat from the reactor core residual heat. And in fact, he also admitted that he was talking to the board, not through official channels. So he was clearly briefing the Navy Corps of Inquiry on what he was doing and he satisfied them. So they left a lot of recommendations out, but he kept his promises. He made the fast scram recovery procedure a reality and made it much faster.

Thank you for that explanation. Before commencing sea trials even, there were a number of concerns regarding proper training for the crew of the Thresher. Can you describe why? Well, the Thresher had a very good crew, a very smart crew. They were the best of the best. During the testimony, you had testimony from a chief petty officer who was being interviewed by Rickover during the sea trials and another officer I've already mentioned who had a wife injury issue and didn't go. And they both testified that the fast cruise, I think we all know what fast cruise is.

You close the hatch, you start the reactor, take off shore power, you pretend like you're at sea, you operate all the gear, you drill, you go through all the evolutions. Well, they had a four-day sea trials, and this air reducer, the 4,500-pound, the 3,000-pound air reducer crapped out day two. So they had to stop the air. They had increased the air bank pressure to 4,500 pounds, but they still used the legacy system of 3,000 pounds that had been used on all previous submarines because it was cheaper, obviously. They didn't want to introduce a new system. so and that was a problem that was also a problem uh because the the air system was dirty there have been strainers installed and they did not want to remove those strainers because

the air system was dirty so that would also affected the main ballast tank tank blow can you talk a bit about the aft oxy water flooding drill that occurred during fast cruise yeah that's a good one the key thing during the testimony was to show this was they they ran a flooding from the auxiliary seawater system common drill we all know and love that one it took them 20 minutes to locate the source of the leak they had rerouted a lot of the auxiliary seawater piping to make room for puffs which was a very early passive ranging system i believe you've got better nowadays but i don't know anything so about modern day stuff and it took them 20 minutes to find it now that was obviously way too long that's because they just weren't

familiar with the valving arrangements and the and the configuration changes they had done which is a good example of they could have used more training uh it was in testimony it was said that the the uh chief engineer wanted the captain to do more training more engineering drills especially and the captain said we don't need to they did all the drills that were scheduled but for example as chief engineer and captain if we had that did that badly on a footing drill i would go back and run that drill a couple more times to make sure we had it after we walked through the system moving beyond this discussion of training and drills which certainly had some room for improvement, what challenges were there in the area of quality assurance at

the time of the Thresher incident, which ultimately led to the foundation of the submarine safety or colloquially the SubSafe program? The record keeping was pretty terrible. A lot of testimony to figure out that in fact the auxiliary seawater system had been properly hydrostatically tested because they just didn't keep very good records on these critical piping systems especially so you couldn't tell which worker did what to whom and the inspectors it was very um very loose and when fresher was being built the quality assurance system was just being motivated for example ultrasonic testing fresher was built with no ultrasonic testing of silver braze joints one of the things that rickover did he he banned all silver braze

joints in the reacting department and in reactor systems he made it all welding so in fact you had like six submarines including ethan allen that had a had a leak from a silver braze joint on sea trial deep dive that resulted in a scram and and that's right out of the testimony so you had a lot of these problems but when you went back into the into the uh the psa but post shakedown availability or this nine-month overall they they only worked ultrasonic tested 145 joints that were not reworked during that overall and out of that he had about 14 so of almost three failure so out of the 3 000 joints silver braze joints you have on board that submarine you'd say that you know about 400 would be unsat now that's bonding now whether the bonding they're looking at bonding

You know, 40% or 60% kept changing back and forth. And some of those joints had, you know, had withstanded the shock test that they went through. But still, they were not very good. And instead, you know, 2020 hindsight, one would think that, you know, you might go back and do some more testing. But the major work item during that entire post-overall shakedown availability was an installation of the passive ranging, the PUF system.

Guess if they spent more time on checking those joints and checking QA, it probably would have been better for Thresher. Can you talk about the efforts that were required to verify when pressure testing occurred of the after auxiliary seawater system? well they had to recall a bunch of they had a bunch of leading shot people and they were group supervisors and they had to bring a lot of records in and they and there were different parts of the system were hydrostatically tested at different times and so they had to do a lot of work to making sure that they got the entire system tested

but remember that hydrostatic test that does not uh certify really certify a silver braised joint you need the ultrasonic testing because they can last for a long time and it's it's likely there was some leakage during that test dive the final uh dive that there was there was some leakage for silver braised joints bruce rule says there was no flooding because SOSIS did not detect it. He didn't figure that out until about 2009. But he had experience with flooding on other people's submarines. I won't say who, but you can probably guess. And he recognized that SOSIS did

a major display on that because as that high pressure water stream hits a stanchion or a pressure hole member, it vibrates that and sends out a nice signal. Thank you for that summary. We submariners, I think, very much appreciate the cooperation of the Navy in releasing these documents and the revelations that have been declassified. What can we expect from future releases of these documents? Whose testimonies are you still awaiting? Well, we're waiting right now that they're giving us not testimony that the last two dumps have been on. We asked for a seaborne anti-submarine warfare history between 1940 and 1977. It's not really what we ended up wanting, but I mean, if you're a naval historian, go to the SECNAV rereading room and read it. It's pretty interesting stuff.

That does the document that declassified Thresher's test depth back in 1990 and remained declassified for about 20 years and reclassified in about 2009. Being a senior member, hopefully with a question, I get off on a tangent. No worries. I was just asking what you should expect from future releases, so if you can talk about future releases. The most exciting one. Or Skylark. Yeah, we're really looking forward. Yeah, the chief of personnel is going to talk. And Vice Admiral Smedberg and Rickover were in big fights, primarily over submarine officers.

Smedberg went out and found all the submarine, you know, what he thought were really top-performing diesel submarine officers, put them up to Rickover, and Rickover only selected a few of them because he just didn't like their attitudes. He didn't even interview some. That's going to be a very interesting testimony. Also, they recalled a bunch of Skylark, the escort ships, officers, and crew. So it's interesting to see what they're going to do with that.

There's about 600 more pages of testimony and many hundreds of pages of exhibits. We especially want the exhibit on the main ballast tank blow test on Tenosa. Pre-commissioning unit Tenosa was ordered to do alongside main ballast tank blow test. We have hints of it in the testimony so far that obviously the strainers installed caused freezing and interruption of the blow. Fantastic. Lastly, I wanted to provide the opportunity for you to offer advice to submarine officers today. I'm on video with Captain Bryant here as we're doing this discussion. He's got a ball cap on that says 594 tough for the permit class.

And certainly the submarine force has morphed and changed over the past few years. But we aspire to be as tough as your generation was in the leadership that you provided and the technical guidance that you continue to reaffirm and reflect on with this case and many others. So, sir, do you have any wise words to pass along or plugs for the Submarine League? You've probably heard this before, but you're going to screw up and you're going to screw up badly. And everybody does it. And even if you screw up really badly, as long as they don't stick a stick in your heart with like a really bad fit up or a court martial, just go back and try it again because everybody screws up. The Naval Submarine League is a really good

organization, especially here in San Diego. We meet before COVID and after COVID, we meet on the base down at the Ocean View Room overlooking the entrance to San Diego Harbor. And we had some very interesting people. We had Sub Pack a couple of, I think, last month or You know, month before last, it was very interesting. And we had ladies in submarines last month, which was very interesting. I pointed out that you probably would not appreciate such-or-class submarines because the main passageway is on board ship. Two skinny guys would have to turn sideways,

and you'd still get full-body contact if you passed. And I don't think you have that problem on Ohio. No, Ohio is a little bit larger. sir do you have any other closing thoughts or you know burning questions that you'd like to answer for us before we we wrap it up well there's there's going to be a naval historical foundation is going to do a second saturday some uh webinar on march 13th it's going to include what we've learned from thresher that will be in a lot more detail and a lot better organized than my thoughts here. Getting old is not fun. It is not for the weak. That's when your eyes go and your memory

lags sometimes. Be prepared for it. Fantastic. Do you know if there will be a recording available for that presentation that you're doing on the 13th of March? I do not know. I suspect so. Okay, great. So we'll make sure that we link that for our listeners as well so that they can check that out and get a little bit more detail from your presentation. You shared some of the slides with me beforehand, and it certainly looks like it's going to be even more enlightening than our discussion that we had. Sir, thank you so much for the gouge, for all of your technical insights, and for your time and dedication to the submarine community. I understand that you've been doing a lot of this work independently and with the

assistance of an entirely volunteer research team, your legacy will continue to live on in the lessons learned that we've taken from the USS Thresher. Unfortunately, that's all the time that we have for today, and I'd so like to thank my guest, Captain Jim Bryant, for joining me. Thank you. © transcript Emily Beynon