Somewhat tangentially, I've been wondering why the Soviets weren't able to locate K-129. From what I've read, they searched in a location hundreds of miles away from where SOSUS detected an implosion - why didn't the Soviets pick it up? Surely they had a hydrophone array?
Well, one answer is that US hydrophone technology was probably superior at the time - but that's not necessarily a well-established fact, mostly an assumption. Still, it would stand to reason. SOSUS benefited greatly from cutting-edge research into acoustics that Bell Labs had been performing for other reasons, the Soviet Union probably didn't have the hydrophone technology or the undersea cable technology it relied on.
There's a more interesting answer if you want one, although this is decidedly a conspiracy theory with, I would say, "medium" credibility within the realm of conspiracy theories. Some believe that both K-129 and Scorpion were sunk by enemy action, K-129 having been sunk by an accidental collision with the Swordfish and Scorpion having then been torpedoed in retaliation. The story goes that the admiralty of both countries, agreeing this situation could rapidly escalate into an undesirable war, agreed to suppress information on the cause of both incidents. The Soviet search for K-129 and American search for Scorpion could both have been cover operations.
Yeah, it doesn't make total sense, and the evidence supporting this theory is a combination of circumstantial and recollections of people in their 80s. Besides, in the later sinking of the Kursk, Russian leadership immediately blamed a collision with a US submarine. But obviously the Russian political climate of 2000 was very different from 1968. It's a fun conspiracy theory.
A more interesting conspiracy theory is that K-129 was on a rogue mission to launch nuclear weapons on the US and was torpedoed by the US (once again perhaps by Swordfish, it was in the right place at the time) to prevent this after being tipped off by by the USSR. If that sounds a bit like the plot of The Hunt for Red October, well, it does. The evidence for this story is not nonexistent but it's pretty limited, and no one takes it very seriously.
Still, it gets at one of the oddities of K-129: the Soviet Union searched for it in its assigned patrol area, but the wreck was ultimately found far away from its assigned patrol area. I don't think anyone has a really good explanation for this. It was not at all typical for Soviet submarines to go off on their own, Moscow kept very tight control of them. So it seems that either Moscow didn't know where K-129 was (perhaps suggesting some kind of plot, whether of defection or rogue attack who knows), or they knew where it was and searched elsewhere to avoid showing their hand (suggesting K-129 was on some sort of very secret mission). I tend to suspect the latter is more likely, K-129 may have been ordered to leave its patrol area and approach the US as a show of force (this happened at other points in the Cold War) and when it was lost the search was conducted in the normal patrol area to avoid revealing that had happened. All indications are that SOSUS was successfully kept secret from the USSR for quite some time, although certainly not all the way until 1991.
Tom Clancy seems to have based The Hunt for Red October at least in part on rumors about K-129. Yeah, I watched too many submarine movies and read too many submarine books as a kid. What can I say, I had a middle-aged father.
I think maybe I'm underestimating the complexity of the technology. It seems like it shouldn't be that hard, I'm kinda imagining something like a weather station or a seismometer. But one thing you've helped me realize is that, at minimum, that comparison fails to account for the complexities of operating in a marine environment.
And the undersea cables operative to passive sonar? Or are they more to prevent the stations from being identified and their signals intercepted, as would be the case of if it were over radio?
> The wreck was ultimately found far away from its assigned patrol area
Maybe I'm just naive to submarine stuff, I know very little, but this doesn't seem that weird to me. If everyone died onboard from, say, a fire, the vessel might keep steaming for a long time. Presumably, the CIA has a good idea if that's the case, for all the good that does us.
I think one of the big challenges at the time was how to install the hydrophones, although as I recall there was also a novel type of hydrophone being used. AT&T had invested a lot of effort into figuring out how to not only build long cables that would survive in undersea conditions, but also deliver power on those cables to active equipment (repeaters in the case of undersea telephone cables, hydrophones in the case of SOSUS). This involved putting several-kV (I think into the tens of kV on long cables) DC onto elements of the cable, and it was hard to design a cable that was reasonable to lay but could take that potential without dielectric breakdown. Remember this was in an era where paper was still a popular insulating material on communications cables, if not lead. DC had to be used instead of AC because on these extremely long cables the capacitance between the two current-carrying elements would end up eating up most of the power you put into it.
Between Bell Labs and Western Electric, AT&T had a lot of practical expertise in designing and manufacturing some really complex cable bundles with high voltage and sensitive communications pairs nearby. This pretty much all became obsolete as soon as fiber started taking over in the '80s, but it was pretty incredible how many coaxial pairs AT&T was cramming into a buried cable (along with power for all the en route equipment!) in the '70s. Hell, AT&T famously held off on fiber for years because they had a plan to bury long microwave waveguides like cables!
I kind of wanted to say Sewell but I wasn't sure I remembered the name right and I guess I was too lazy to look it up---but that's the one. Sewell is a big advocate of this theory but I think most people, even conspiratorial ones, think of him as kind of a crank. I haven't read the book so I won't judge too harshly, I just know that the rogue nuclear mission theory sort of hinges on a lot of political currents within the Kremlin and KGB that aren't in evidence elsewhere.
Re: Scorpion, I’ve been persuaded by the argument put forth In Blind Man’s Bluff, that a faulty torpedo battery overheated and kicked off a sequence of events ultimately resulting in sinking and implosion.
When I say that these are conspiracy theories, I guess I'm saying that I don't intend to convince anyone. I mostly just provided them for entertainment value. To my knowledge only the first has ever had widespread interest, and does potentially explain some of the odd circumstances around the loss of the Scorpion and K-129, but it doesn't explain all of them. For example, one of the most materially odd things about K-129 is that it had something like a dozen crew members on board who were not part of the normal compliment, and in some unrelated event the crew manifest was lost, so we don't know who they were. That certainly fits with a general pattern of Soviet behavior, suggesting that there were intelligence officers aboard (besides the routine intelligence officer included as part of standard compliment). But that doesn't mean there was some kind of rogue KGB plot or something as some believe; it's more likely that K-129 had some kind of special but relatively routine intelligence assignment. It could support the idea that the USSR searched in the wrong area to conceal a secret assignment for K-129, perhaps close-range observation of US naval exercises. That makes some good sense in the political context as, both before and after the loss of the K-129, the Soviet Union had been extremely critical of the US and UK for performing close-range submarine surveillance of Soviet exercises---they wouldn't be keen to admit they were doing the same.
But these are all just theories. The evidence doesn't provide an especially conclusive explanation for the loss of K-129 or Scorpion, and it is doubtful that we will ever really know what happened. But there are theories to explain both losses that are more likely than KGB schemes or dramatic events of secret military history. Both may have been lost to malfunctioning torpedoes that armed and detonated in the tube or were even fired and targeted their own ships---both known hazards at the time, and in fact something that the Scorpion had survived once before. There are possible mechanical failures that could have caused either sinking. Extensive investigation of the Scorpion incident lead to design changes in later submarines to address some possible factors in the loss.
This is all good to keep in mind in the case of the Titan. Undersea losses like this happen very dramatically and the evidence is difficult to recover and analyze. We may never have anything but speculation as to the exact failure chain.
One of the reasons these theories exist is because four submarines were lost in 1968. That's a substantial portion of the total noncombat submarine losses ever. It's obviously appealing to come up with some kind of unifying theory, but as far as anyone knows it was just a coincidence.
If you want them to provide sources, just ask nicely.
They made it very clear that these explanations weren't to be taken very seriously and were mostly just interesting to think about. There's not a whole lot of value in enumerating the evidence of a conspiracy theory that isn't worth taking very seriously (in fact, I'd argue it's not very responsible to do so).
And let's just not agonize about whether HN is "becoming Reddit," it's a conversation so overwrought it's discouraged in the guidelines.
