WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Navy said Monday it will release previously undisclosed information on two nuclear submarines, the USS Thresher and the USS Scorpion, that were lost decades ago.
Navy spokesman Cmdr. Stephen Pietropaoli said the Navy has told families of sailors lost on the two boats the release of additional information is forthcoming. No date was given for the release.
Spencer Stephens, 33, who lost his father on the Scorpion, said he hopes the new information will provide another piece of a puzzle he has been assembling about his father's death.
'What I ultimately hope to get is a definite answer about the sinking,' Stephens said.
Stephens said he was 7 years old when he and his mother were told by the Navy that the USS Scorpion was 'delayed.' The vessel was due April 28, but it wasn't until June 5, 1968, when the family was told the ship was lost at sea.
His father, Lt. Cmdr j.g Daniel Peter Stephens, head of sonar operations, was among the 99 crew members who were lost at sea.
'We have been reviewing this material for more than a year to determine what we can appropriately release,' Pietropaoli said.
The end of the Cold War is easing the release of material previously classified, Pietropaoli said.
The USS Thresher with 129 men aboard was lost on April 10, 1963, after a deep dive off Cape Cod, Mass. The USS Scorpion, which had a crew of 99, was last heard from on May 21, 1968, when it was south of the Azores islands in the Atlantic.
The information to be released will largely confirm the findings of earlier Navy investigations of both accidents, Pietropaoli said, although it will add considerable detail.
The information will deal with the nuclear plants that powered both submarines. The Navy periodically monitors the waters where each boat went down for possible nuclear radiation.
'A lot of the material has to do with environmental data,' Pietropaoli said.
Both lost nuclear submarines were attack boats designed to hunt down and sink other submarines with torpedoes or antisubmarine rockets.
The Thresher was the first nuclear attack submarine of its class. It was then the fastest and deepest-diving in the U.S. Navy.
At the time of its loss on a test dive, the Thresher had been accompanied by the submarine rescue ship USS Skylark. But the water in which the Thresher went down was 8,400 feet deep, a depth where rescue would have been impossible.
'There is no radioactive hazard as a result of this unfortunate accident,' the father of the U.S. nuclear Navy, then Vice Adm. Hyman Rickover said at the time.
'Reactors of the type used in the Thresher,' he said, 'as well as in all our nuclear submarines and surface ships can remain submerged indefinitely in sea water without without creating any hazard.'
A subsequent Navy investigation concluded that the 'most likely' cause of the Thresher's loss was a piping system failure that allowed flooding of the engine room.
The Navy made numerous searches of the ocean bottom with a deep- diving bathyscaph (a submarine-shaped float filled with a fluid lighter than water, and a steel observation cabin used in deep-sea exploration) and an oceanographic research ship, but only parts of the missing submarine were recovered.
The Scorpion, launched only months before the Thresher, was known for speed and maneuverability. It was on a Naval exercise when it disappeared.
A massive search by 55 ships and 35 planes failed to locate the missing sub. The sunken wreck was located months later by an oceanagraphic research ship.
The Scorpion, which had a maximum safe depth of 1,200 feet, was found under 10,000 feet of water. Its hull was broken open, apparently been crushed by water pressure.
