Why Did the USS Thresher Sink? Finally, the Navy Is Being Forced to Tell Us
The submarine mysteriously went down in 1963, killing everyone on board. Thanks to a lawsuit, we're about to learn why.
A retired U.S. Navy submarine commander has won a lawsuit forcing the Navy to release its report on what happened to the USS
Thresher, a nuclear-powered attack submarine that sank during diving tests in 1963. The loss of the submarine has never been fully explained, and the Navy has never released the report on the sub’s sinking.
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Capt. Jim Bryant, a retired Navy submarine officer, wanted to see the Navy’s 1,700-page report on the
Thresher’s sinking, but the Navy refused to release it. So Bryant,
Stars and Stripes reports, sued the Navy, and last month a federal judge ordered the service to release it in 300-page chunks.
The Navy has long been extremely protective of the report. The Navy submarine force is notoriously tight-lipped; submariners say the nickname “the silent service” not only applies to the quiet nature of subs, but the secretive nature of the sub community as a whole.
The service first said it would release the
Thresher report in 1998, but released only 19 of 1,700 pages, claiming that keeping it classified was to protect serving submarine crews. The problem with that explanation? The accident happened during normal dive tests. More than 50 years have passed since the sinking, and the submarine’s technology is obsolete.
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The Navy will begin releasing the
Thresher report in segments on May 15 and will continue until Oct. 15.
Entire article:
https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/navy-ships/a31351061/why-did-uss-thresher-submarine-sink/