Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 261 - The USS Thresher

Episode Date: May 21, 2023

The story of the most deadly submarine disaster in American history. Support the show and get episodes like this a week before everyone else, plus bonus episodes! https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Sources: https://www.military.com/daily-news/2021/08/14/questions-about-infamous-lost-sub-thresher-resurface-navy-releases-new-documents-tied-decades-old-mystery.html https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2023/april/what-killed-thresher https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/atomic-submarine-sinks-in-atlantic https://www.naval-technology.com/features/featureperil-in-the-depths-the-worlds-worst-submarine-disasters-4191027/ https://www.secnav.navy.mil/foia/readingroom/HotTopics/Forms/AllItems.aspx?RootFolder=%2ffoia%2freadingroom%2fHotTopics%2fTHRESHER%20RELEASE https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/rip-how-mechanical-problem-led-uss-thresher-its-eternal-patrol-92421 Norman Polmar. The Death of the USS Thresher

Hey everybody, Joe here from the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. If you enjoy what we do here on the show and you think it's worth your hard-earned money, you can support the show via Patreon. Just a $1 donation gets you access to bonus episodes, our Discord, and regular episodes before everybody else. If you donate at an elevated level, you get even more bonus content. A digital copy of my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar, and a sticker from our Teespring store. Our show will always be ad-free and is totally supporter-driven. We use that money to pay our bills, buy research materials that make this show possible, and support charities like the Kurdish Red Crescent, the Flint Water Fund, and the Halo Trust. Consider joining the

Legion of the Old Crow today. And now back to the show. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Lion's Head by Donkeys podcast. I am Joe, and with me again is Tom. What's up, buddy? I'm good, Joe. I have suffered some brain trauma last night. I'm very happy to be with podcasting's Rich Piana to talk more about the dumbest guys in military history. I feel like you had to go and seek out brain trauma just so you could fit in with me and Nate here.

I mean, look, me and Shox have dedicated most of our adult lives to getting kicked in the head by big bald men at gigs. We don't kink shame here on the show. But it was so funny because yesterday while while we were i was recording my other show um there's a band that was in town i didn't get a chance to buy tickets when they were released and it sold out and i was like shit i'm gonna try and get one so i like responded to the tweet that they put up and then someone tried to scam me and i'm always really skeptical of when people respond to like your tweets saying like oh i have tickets so i like went on their twitter profile and looked at the replies and they replied the exact same text to loads of people looking for tickets so for like a wide array of gigs so i like i had already dm them and said

like oh can you show me proof of proof of purchase which um for anyone that is buying tickets that is like number one thing is always ask for proof of purchase so you don't get scammed and also so someone doesn't take your money and then show up and like try and use the ticket and i was then looking through the replies and responded to their tweet to me i was like scammer don't interact and then they dm'd me flying off the handle it was like what's this shit you're putting on my page i'm like you're obviously a scammer fuck off but managed to uh they released tickets like last minute and i someone else responded to it um right after i finished recording i was like shit got tickets went to it and there's a band called military gun i'm wearing their t-shirt i bought last night it's a a pig getting stabbed

in the head um take take the meaning from that whatever you will and uh really really cool gig um but on one stage like i was right at the front and i you know i came out of mosh retirement um because i am 28 now and i was haven't been to gigs in like three years where there's like activity like that so i was like you know what i'm gonna see if i can still throw down i still got it i still got it i threw it the dash dash dash uh shout out to stanley sievers but at one stage and this is how i got the brain trauma because like it was tiny tiny venue it was a pub pretty much and uh people were like crowd surfing everything and i looked to my side and there was a dude who's beside me for the whole gig he looked at me and you know that one screenshot of private pile with the like creepy look on his face the dude looked exactly

like that real sweaty and i was like okay go on he got like the stage is maybe like four inches off the ground and we like he jumped and we all caught him and he kicked me straight in the jaw with steel toe boots oh god this is the way i This is why I keep my ass out of the pit. I'm a little bit older than you, but I can't see myself putting... I can't see me putting myself in the situation where I'm, like, getting kicked in the face is a real possibility.

I mean, to be fair... Anymore, I should say. Like, military gun, we're like, oh, you know, we're not going to do spin kicks, we're not that type of band and stuff, you know, we want you to have a good time. It's just people, like, two-stepping and, like, normal moshing, and then, like, not going to do spin kicks, we're not that type of band and stuff, you know, we want you to have a good time. It's just people two-stepping and normal moshing and then people started crowd surfing.

And the thing is, it's always really tall dudes that try and crowd surf first. And it's like, okay, this dude is simultaneously touching the bar and the stage at the same time. Yeah, as someone who is 6'3", I mean, I crowd surfed when I was younger, but I could not, I mean, those are much, I went to a lot of smaller venues in the Detroit area as well, but like, those aren't for you. Like you, you wait until it's like a bigger show.

So you don't just like absolutely plant some, cause like, I remember when I, this is a long fucking time ago, I was probably 16 or 17. And I went to crowd surf. And you have that moment of realization as you're flying through the air, getting ready to get caught. And I look below me, and it's just like this small emo girl with her arms up. And I'm like, I'm going to completely fucking devastate you. And I did. Her head landed center mass in my chest. And everybody else caught me, but she got fucking smoked.

Like a tungsten rod from God. Like, big guys know where you belong, man. That was my lesson. Like, I shouldn't do this anymore. Stay on the ground because, like, I don't crowd surf because I'm built and weigh as much as a Toyota Corolla. So I'm like, nobody wants to try and catch my ass yeah i mean i also uh had a musical evening uh watching my first eurovision uh which by the time this episode comes out will be the finals will have passed and everything but uh i will say it's it's interesting every once in a while, because like,

obviously Eurovision artists are very big in Europe. I'm not kind of in Europe. I'm kind of not, but like, they absolutely will never, no matter how famous they get, they're never going to like be popular in the United States. Right.

So like, I've, I've never heard of any of this shit before in my life. But I will say that like the next contestant is Serbia. And the guy standing there is like, yeah, that's Serbia, alright. I don't know how else to put it. But it was very interesting. I don't want to say what songs I liked, what songs I didn't, who I think is going to win.

Because by the time this episode comes out, it's going to be decided. But it better be Croatia. Because that was a fucking acid fever dream of a performance. Because I was talking about it on the discord and i was like because we uh we were talking about armenia's entry and like i love eurovision and like ireland has won eurovision i think like eight times i will say ireland's entry this year was fucking awful yeah no it sucks that band sucks they're uh i'm not gonna say anymore but um it looked like they tumbled out of like elvis's closet yeah there is so there's this division in europe when it comes to your vision of the people who realize it's like camp and gay

and it's like incredible like it's you know high camp everyone is serving cunt and then there is the other half of Europe that think it is you know the straightest thing possible if you're enjoying a your vision chat go back and listen to a corner spades series Mr. Only God knows

that Kieran's doing talking about your vision even after the fact listen to it because it's very funny he has a theory about the fuckable grandson uh i'll leave you to go listen to that but it's like there's five songs that you can do really contemporary pop there's like a ballad there is like weird horny stuff then there's traditional folk and then there's weird stuff yeah so like your traditional folk seems to have died off yeah like um like ukraine's entry last year was kind of like a mishmash of like traditional folk stuff and then like some rap um and generally what happens is like the ballads should really follow a certain formula like a formula for a good ballad

I talked about this on the discord this is my special interest, Nate isn't here so I have to go on a 5 minute tangent about something, is ideally you want it in a minor flat key so then you can have two key changes in the song so you have a key change in the second chorus

then during the bridge you can alternate to a third or fifth relative minor and then go in another key change up. So then you have that kind of rising motion. You have some drama to the actual music and the instrument instrumentation can complement it. Arminius is just, oh, it's all one key, but there's a little bit of rap in the middle. I like Arminius entry, not as much as last year's um but like i do have to say i don't think she's gonna win i mean the best armenia's ever done i think is fourth but uh i will say sitting on the outside again my first time ever watching eurovision i'm sitting there and they're like

up next is israel i'm like what fucking map are these guys going off of? And Australia as well. Is it the competition of like, okay, this is a bit much. You might as well just let like Canada compete at this point. See, next year they need to send you to Eurovision because I know you love doing karaoke. I do. Yeah. Anybody who's known me in Eurovision knows that you can catch me drunk singing karaoke.

And we're recording this on a Wednesday, so probably tonight. And, you know, speaking of something that has absolutely nothing to do with anything we've just talked about. No, it is. Speaking about completely tanking and sinking. That is also something I do at karaoke.

Yeah. Submarines. We hate them. We've talked about submarines a few times on this show before. And we have kind of come to a unanimous decision that it is the worst fucking job to have in the military, especially back in the day. But even now, I knew one guy. I don't know many people in the Navy because I wasn't in the Navy. I knew one guy who was a submariner, and he was the weirdest fucking guy I think I've ever met. And he explained to me, submariners will either do one contract, which is a minimum of five or six years, and get the fuck out because of how miserable it is, or they stay in forever and the Navy has to kick them out and retire them. Because it's just such a shitty job. It appeals to a very particular kind of guy.

And the reason why they get you in such a long contract is the Navy kind of knows that you're not sticking around and they got to get their money's worth out of you. And today we're talking about a very famous American submarine disaster of the USS Thresher. And we've talked about other submarine disasters, namely like the entire Kriegsmarine during World War II, how awful it was to serve on a Nazi sub, which like, don't be a Nazi. a nazi um i was i was gonna say when you were introing this i couldn't think of another form of vehicular transport that you were less suited to than a tank until you said submarine i would say i'd probably i mean because like the u.s i'm i'm 99 certain only fields like pretty large nuclear subs nuclear subs maybe people stop making fun of me how i say that word um so there's certainly more room in them in those than there are in a fucking uh m1a1 uh abrams m1a1 i'm showing my fucking age

i know um those motherfuckers are sold now we're not even sending them to ukraine for aid um but you know like a modern sub is quite large like They have gyms and stuff in them. I mean, it's still like... Oh, hell yeah. Do they have hack squats? Probably. Fucking heathens. I can't imagine them having a regular squat rack in a sub gym. It sways gently like,

Oh, like semen first class. Smith's knees exploded because the submarine moved slightly. Yeah, the one power lifter causing a breach in the hall and suddenly everyone's drowning because he had to hit like 7 30 before he went on shift i know maybe if there's submariners listening they could tell me what their gyms look like i know i had a friend who was on an aircraft carrier and they had just a completely normal gym set up because it's an aircraft carrier it's fucking huge yeah um and you know life and time in a submarine is all around bad uh and we've talked about disasters a lot we haven't talked about the kursk disaster maybe we will at some point in the future

our kind of cousin show well there's your problem did an episode on a long time ago so i try not to step on people's feet when it comes to that um And we've talked about other Soviet sub-disasters because the Soviet Navy, much like the Russian Imperial Navy before it and the Russian Federation Navy currently, didn't have much of a safety culture. Safety was more of a vibe. And that goes for more than just their Navy. That's just kind of Russian, Soviet, and now again Russian military culture, and that has bled into a lot of the post-Soviet states who have yet to reform their military away from that attitude.

Armenia included. You know, if it works, it works. Why change it if it is not broken? Right. Blyat! And, you know, one navy we've talked about quite extensively on this show is the u.s navy which does have a very stringent safety culture and i'm not saying that as defending the u.s navy

at no point should you ever can accuse me of defending literally any military on earth especially the one that I served in. We've done a couple episodes talking about how they once upon a time invented a torpedo that would sink the sub that shot it. There was a bit of dragging of feet to fix this problem, but that was also one of the rigors

of war, which makes it very, very stupid but also slightly understandable. They're like, well, fuck it. Deal with the problem. We got to sink Japanese subs and boats and whatever. But they did eventually fix that. And the US Navy, as of now, at least from what we can tell, has the largest submarine fleet in the world, which is maintained and regular, uh,

regularly at sea in both combat and peacetime operations, because a lot of the subs did see combat in the global war on terror. It not obviously in direct ways that you fired missiles and things like, you know, uh, we weren't exactly sinking any ISIS subs or anything, you know, um, uh, ISIS sub aquatic technical

yeah and like you know I mean well to be fair drug cartels kind of have those which just a Toyota Hilux that's completely sealed which my personal feelings about you know large scale drug use aside that shit whips if you invent your own submarine

and you know and they also deploy like seal teams Drunk use aside, that shit whips if you invent your own submarine. And they also deploy like SEAL teams and stuff from like specially made underwater vehicles. But over this time, between the end of World War II to today, the U.S. has had shockingly few submarine accidents for fielding such a large fleet of them so consistently uh and i should stop and point out before someone else does i say largest submarine fleet i mean largest modern submarine fleet by that i mean nuclear subs um clear uh because there is a lot of smaller like diesel powered subs diesel electric subs that are still used for For instance, North Korea technically has the largest submarine fleet per number. However, those are mostly diesel subs that absolutely no one should ever get into, ever. It's probably safer to play Russian roulette.

It's probably safer to charge a Tesla than it is to be in a North Korean diesel sub. It is probably safer to drive a Tesla than it is to be in a North Korean diesel. It is probably safer to drive a Tesla into the sea. Most of these are so goddamn old. They're not even seaworthy by North Korean Navy standards, but they claim to have 70 of them. The US has around 67 nuclear powered subs, and the Russians have maybe two more, maybe two less. Nobody's entirely sure how seaworthy a lot of them are. But the same goes for the U.S. because submarines, by nature, clandestine.

And some of those may or may not be in refit for years at a time, shit like that. So anyway, how did American submarines become comparatively safer than all of their counterparts throughout the same timeframe in history? This is a process known as SUBSAFE, which is an acronym. And we're going to be talking about a lot of very, very stupid US Navy acronyms, because I don't know if there's a branch of the us military that likes acronyms more than the Navy. Holy shit. There's a lot of them and they're very stupid. Um, but sub safe is a submarine safety program, which is honestly such a simple process that it's kind of shocking that it didn't exist before it existed it is just a quality assurance and certification program when it came to construction maintenance so before this it was mostly based on vibes um which is why we're talking about the uss thresher because i mean like if you

have if you have like a 19 year old tig welder who like is just after like getting in from a night on the beer and it's running off like just marlboro reds and vibes i don't think your safety standards are going to be that high which is still kind of crazy because we're going to talk about how many accidents they suffered before sub safe and after in a little bit but the reason why we're talking about the uss thresher is because no military ever changes without something terrible happening and that terrible thing is the fate of about the USS Thresher is because no military ever changes without something terrible happening. And that terrible thing is the fate of the USS Thresher.

Now, the Thresher was part of the permit class of American submarines, which was actually a class originally known as the Thresher class before they changed the name because of what we're talking about today. You can't have an entire class of submarines named after what is

effectively an underwater tomb. Now, the Thresher evolved from the previous Skipjack class, which is a high-speed submarine hunter armed with the most advanced anti-submarine missile at the time called a SUROC. Again, another acronym.

This was a rocket carrying a 250 kiloton nuke that would act as a depth charge because it was the 1960s and everything is like a cartoon from one of the Fallout games, right? Like, put a nuke on it. Fuck it. Nuclear depth charges. Nuclear...

Fuck it. There's all sorts of incredibly stupid ideas what to do with nuclear weapons at the time. All of them rule because we never use any of them except those two. Sorry. Sometimes it makes me think, you know, no wonder

the environment is so fucked because 60 years ago we're like, yeah, let's just put shitloads of nuclear material under the water nothing bad can happen well actually um go back and for people who are unaware go back and listen to our episode on our testing process in the in the marshall islands uh but testing them underwater is actually the safest thing you can do and i'm not saying that's a good idea but like the salt water and the ocean helps absorb and dissipate those things.

Assuming it's not like, you know, a disaster of an uncontrolled release. And I'm saying this is not a good idea, but it is the best case scenario because for above ground testing, you see what happened to us territories in the islands or, or what happened to some of the Soviet States where even today there is, uh,

incredible amount of contamination or parts of the united states as well not even the territories nuke the living shit out of the southwest um now that this was the fastest sub in the world at the time being able to go 33 knots and for us people who you know stay on land that is 40 miles per hour. I don't know what that is in kilometers. But, you know. I think it's like 68 kilometers an hour. I live in a country where I have to learn these things and I still haven't. So, sue me.

Now, for comparison, the fastest reported sub in the world ever so far was the Soviet K-222, which could go for short bursts 44.7 knots around 52 miles per hour. So this sub is fucking fast because the Thresher was built in 1958 and the K-222 wouldn't come for another decade. So for its time, the Thresher was very, very, very, very fast. And that was its job. And we often make jokes on this show about how fast ships, vehicles, weapons, or whatever used to be able to be built, developed, and built compared to how they do now. So listen to this. The contract to build the Thresher was awarded to the Portsmouth Naval Yard on January 15th,

1958. Its keel was laid on May 28th that same year, and it was launched two years later, July 9th, 1960, to start undergoing testing, which was then commissioned the year after that, so 1961. So around three years from a piece of paper to an actual sub in the water and not to mention this is the this the class like this is the first of its class with all of the the kinks they have to work out um not that if the sub likes to be gagged or whatever but like the mechanical and engineering problems that come with designing something new and something so fast and, at the time, revolutionary. We can't do that anymore. Also, if you flush the toilet when someone's in the shower, you don't scald them.

Or like the Nazi sub during World War II, flush the toilet and nearly kill the entire submarine. Of course, because the Thresher was the first of its class, it was packed with new technology and weapons, which would require it to go a further year of sea trials. From there, Thresher took part in the nuclear submarine exercise known as NUSUBEX, because acronyms. Did Stan Lee name this program? Well, there is nuclear power involved, maybe.

It might turn someone into a mutant at some point. During this entire time, this is where normally, because this thing ends with over 100 people dying, you'd expect there to be small problems along the way. But there's not. Zero problems. Everything seemed to be working as intended.

There was a problem when it pulled into port in puerto rico because at the time in san juan there were no shore power connections for nuclear powered subs so like to run auxiliary power so they could not shut the power down things like that because you know so it's like it's like when the ava disconnects you know like shin, you've got three minutes. Yeah. And all of the crewmen in the sub are breathing liquid. Much like Shinji. And they also were emotional teenagers who probably didn't want to be there.

Get in the sub, Joe. And during this point, the reactor had to be shut down and diesel generators were used to keep all the auxiliary systems functioning so the reactor could be shut down. A few hours later, the backup generator broke down, so this meant all of that electrical load that was being built up to keep the auxiliary power going was transferred to the ship's battery. Now...

This is not cool. As most of the battery power was needed to keep vital systems operating, and most importantly, to restart the reactor and keep the air conditioning going, everything that was not immediately necessary for safety was shut down. This included the air conditioner.

Now, as you can imagine, this is a metal tube with a active nuclear core in it off the shore of Puerto Rico. It gets fucking hot. So there's loads of dudes on the beach blasting reggaeton. That's like shaking the sub under the water. All you hear is... It's generating the heat.

Yeah. And by nature, a sub is not well ventilated because a well-ventilated sub just sinks um okay so without air conditioning temperature and humidity in the sub began to skyrocket hitting over 140 degrees oh my god which you know again hardly surprising for a metal tube packed with just incredible amounts of energy, right? Oh, that's just like me watching my breakfast burrito turn around in the microwave. Yeah, except you are the breakfast burrito. I am the burrito. And instead of beans oozing out, it's your insides coming out of your mouth.

My beans are spilling out my nose. Oh no, my beans. Why'd you have to spill your beans? So obviously for the technology inside, this is not good. Computers shouldn't get that hot, especially when sensitive enough to control and use a nuclear core for power. However, for... This is like the old 2010 MacBook Pro that I used to edit this show on like six months ago. Just like all the

fans spinning up. I had to constantly have it on power because it would take like 15 minutes to mix down an episode and all yours and it would be scalding my knees. I think that was also the last Mac laptop that I owned, but it was a MacBook Air, so that's really bad. And, you know, for the humans inside, the experience was awful. They eventually had to jumpstart the generators to get them working again from a nearby diesel electric sub,

which is kind of funny. And that saved them from any real problems. There was no meltdown, nothing like that. Outside of some moderate heat exhaustion or possibly some heat stroke amongst the crew crisis averted this sucks but they worked around i was just gonna say like did they have to jump start the engine by you know giving into its praise kink you're such a good engine you're such a good engine startup for me come on baby or like uh go to emergency plan c

and it just like an old penny farthing bike hooked up to a fucking generator. Because the Navy has some very old timey backup plans, which we will talk about, which are kind of surprising. There was no tropical paradise Chernobyl that happened in San Juan. Nothing like that. In the grand scheme of things, this is the least bad thing that'll occur during the next 30 odd minutes of podcast

after this the only real bad thing that would happen before our fateful day which we'll talk about uh was a tugboat ran into the side of the sub while i was in port in florida um and you know bonk and it's it's a sub so then it had to be brought back to Connecticut for overhaul. This process took nine months, which doesn't mean it had any glaring technical flaws or damage or anything like that. This is apparently a normal time for the first-in-the-class sub to undergo overhaul. The process hasn't been streamlined, though it was only supposed to take six months. Now, there were no problems that the navy reported they found that required it to take any longer nothing no evidence suggests that anything could have been done under the current normal procedural overhaul that would have fixed

what's about to happen um essentially they were like like, oh, it's structurally sound, we can't see any obvious mechanical problems in terms of the propulsion, so it's kind of like, we can't figure out what's wrong, we'll slap it on the roof and send it out the door. I can fit so many dead sailors in this thing, but

the problem is, and one of the reasons why SubSafe will become so important is there was no universal checklist of what to do it was all based on like this then the naval yard being like ah it's good but that's how things had been since subs had been a thing so it wasn't considered a problem now that's very fucking stupid as we will see um because like i said i'm going to explain exactly what sub safe is at the end of this and everyone is going to groan in the fact that this did not already exist because we had been packing dudes into a tube and putting them

under the ocean for generations at this point without this being in place yeah and now subs are just sealed in a vacuum cube yeah now after this the thresher was considered good to go and they were going to conduct post overhaul trials to make sure everything was working well after so much time in dock

subs ships whatever they go like on a shakedown run like trials after repairs and overhauls before they go back into active service. Very normal thing to do. And for us on this story, the most important part are the dive trials, which were to begin on the 10th of April, 1963.

Oh, I'm going to trot out the line line i feel like it gets much worse it does you know it gets worse because i gave you a date oh god and this is one of the few times uh that we have exact times down to the second uh of how bad things get oh god things obviously get so bad so quickly I can say with comfort that only 50% of this dive trial works as intended oh no as was standard for the time during

dive trials a submarine rescue boat was stationed directly over the area where the sub would be diving in this case it was the USS Skylark rescue from submarines back then was much like it is today, grim and probably impossible. In the early days of submarines, people generally thought the crew was fucking dead. So there was no rescue and said it was just a salvage operation. Now, this evolved over time, thanks mostly to a guy named Charles Momsen, who first invented the Momsen lung to help submariners rescue themselves.

And this did work. He also invented the McCann rescue chamber, which was kind of a salvage equipment carried by a ship like the Skylark that could lower a pressurized chamber down to a stricken sub and save the crewman before air ran out inside because all submarine rescue depends on the fact that air is trapped inside the submarine yeah um otherwise everybody's just dead um so you know air essential to live big if true um i'm a big fan of breathing yeah it turns It turns out in sub-mariner school, you do not get injected with like the liquid from the boys and grow gills. Um, so you still need air.

The whole rescue operation pertains upon the fact that there's an air pocket trapped somewhere. Famously, this happened in Kursk. Um, and there is like, they like okay best case scenario this much of the sub is going to be compromised there'll be this much air at best we have three days that's what the the calculus in their head was um yeah and just a just a technical question like

is the problem less running out of clean viable air or is it a problem if the air filtration fails as well of carbon monoxide build well that is the problem because it generally any situation where a sub fails and sinks i guess is a term despite the fact submarines by nature sink but um you know like the kursk is the best example of this where you know there's a complete failure of all systems on board. There's no filtration or nothing. So depending on how much air is trapped in the sub, where in the sub, how big the space is also depends on how many people survive. They're packed into this small space and pumping out carbon monoxide and polluting the air. Also, the air could be polluted further from smoke or other things

that could occur within the sub while it fails. So this whole thing's kind of a wing in it. Okay, okay. Also, I'm going to correct myself. I know it's carbon dioxide before any chemistry nerds get out and say it's carbon dioxide.

Yeah, they're running an indoor heater in it as well to really fuck things up. Now, the McCann worked like a miracle. First being used in the late 30s and in various forms, it's still in service today by several navies, including the US Navy.

However, because subs have continued to advance, they can dive further, longer, etc. They're bigger, they have more people. The McCann can't go as deep as modern subs. Today, there are much more advanced rescue vehicles like the Avalon or the Mystic, which are made for deep submergence rescues, as they're called. Now, you can tell from the fact that those are two things and they have very specific names, there is not a lot of these to go around. Famously, during the Kursk disaster, the Russian Federation did not ask for one of these to respond until it was too late.

Yeah. Safety, it's a bitch. But unfortunately, because there's only two of these Um, yeah, safety. It's a bitch. So, but unfortunately, you know, because there's only two of these and they're not always around. If you're very large advanced 21st century submarine has a failure and you sink in the bad way, sink in a sub,

you're still probably likely to be dead before it arrives to save you. Um, I guess what I'm getting at is rescue was possible under very specific circumstances, but chances were still not exactly great. And one of the best circumstances is having a submarine rescue boat directly overhead like the Thresher did.

But like we already pointed out, submarine rescue only works under very specific circumstances of submarine failure and emergency. Like, you have to be trapped inside with air. Bare minimum. Yeah. So, at around 11 a.m. on the 10th of April, 1963,

Thresher began its dive trials under the command of Lieutenant Commander John Wesley Harvey around 200 miles off the coast of Massachusetts. The dive trials were a series of different things that went in different stages, starting off like, dive a little bit, dive a little bit more, dive a little bit more. Because as they go deeper, they test everything, make sure it's working, dive a little bit further, test everything, make sure everything is still working. And they dive to their maximum depth that the sub is rated for, test everything, make sure there's nothing going wrong. They resurface. everything make sure there's nothing going wrong they resurface right um i believe this whole process is going to take over a day uh best case scenario because they do not come up during this

point and some of the tests that they're running take time so you know they're going to be submerged overnight or after two of these dives they went to half of its 13 foot test depth and stayed there. They did make contact with the Skylark at 6.30 in the morning telling them everything is okay and everything is working. After this Thresher slowly started to go deeper

going in a circle around the Skylark as they went staying within communication range and as was standard they stopped every 100 feet as they went to within communication range and as was standard they stopped every 100 feet as they went uh to do a systems check before continuing they're doing fucking donuts in the submarine flipping uh flipping shitties in a sub i forget i forget who told me that the slang term for donuts uh was flipping shitties or ripping shitties but it's now what i don't know what region that comes from i assume some weird place in the midwest but i love it hey bud we're going ripping shitties outside kmart

now the thresher got closer and closer to its final test depth and its communications got worse and worse now this was expected this is through a process known as a thermocline, which kind of just means water temperature fluctuations as you go deeper makes radio communications harder. Now, they also have what is called an underwater telephone, which I like to think is just two cups attached to a string going out the periscope. and at this point the skylark is no longer in contact with the thresher calling them repeatedly over the radio asking for an update this is at about 9 13 a.m finally skylark tries to contact them using the underwater telephone it gets a very very badly garbled response from harvey saying quote experiencing minor difficulty we have positive up angle and attempting to blow this means blowing that's just that's just that's just me when i'm really hung over and i wake up we're experiencing some minor difficulties me after i ate this

falafel the size of my arm the other day that made my stomach very fucked up i have an i have up angle and i'm going to blow. That means they're having an emergency and they're going to blow their ballast tanks to emergency resurface. It's noted by officers on the Skylark that they could hear the hissing of compressed air over the Thresher's loudspeaker during the call, which is this is bad. This is very, very bad. Skylark tells Thresher that they have gotten out of the area so like because obviously the thresher is under them and if they just do an emergency resurface to save their own lives they cannot check to make sure the skylark is not immediately over them uh and you know get like ripped in half by this fucking thing yeah

so the skylark tells them, hey, we're out of the area. Resurface whenever you can. Everything is fine. They do not receive a response. Of course. At 9.15 a.m., about two minutes later, Skylark radios Thresher again.

Quote, my core is 270 degrees, interrogative range, and bearing from you. But again, they get no response. At this point, the commander of the skylark lieutenant commander hecker realizes something is probably pretty bad and asked them quote are you in control still no response the final radio call from thresher comes two minutes after that at 9 17 a.m It's only partially understood, and the only thing they could make out said simply, quote, exceeding test depth. After this,

USS Skylark detects a high-energy, low-frequency noise, which... This is not good. Sounds an awful lot like an implosion at 9.18am, a minute later, on April 11th, 1963. Just like letting a fart in the bath.

That would be an explosion. An implosion if you somehow managed to fart inwards. Well, that's what happens when you fart, the water goes in. Agree to disagree. I quit the show. Now the Skylark continues making contact with Thresher until 11.04 a.m. This is quite a bit time later.

Though, there is really no question aboard the Skylark what happened. The captain, the commander, lieutenant commander, immediately says that that was an implosion. Now, an implosion of a submarine is unsurvivable. This is because it is being crushed there's there's no way that there's going to be any chambers within this sub that is going to survive um and

they make i can't i can't imagine how terrifying this is just like for a regular crewman this is why man was not meant to go below the water we need to leave the sea alone. You know, we've gone to space. Fine.

Let's leave this shit alone. I don't want to see a weird fish. I don't want to be in a metal tube underwater. You know, I can swim pretty good. I won't swim out past the sandbank. Leave that shit to Poseidon. Leave that shit to Poseidon. Yeah.

I guess the one bit of good news, if you want to call it that the the implosion happens so quick nobody knows it's happening it's like less than us it's so fast that humans cannot perceive it happening though at this point i mean that that three minutes or so where things are an emergency to just being blinked out of existence i'm sure it's absolutely terrifying because they knew they were losing, they were probably losing power. There's compressed air hissing. They know that they're losing control of the sub

before it implodes. So yeah, it's an awful way to go. Now at 11.04 a.m., the Skylark files a report to Commander Submarine's Atlantic Fleet, which is what this is called, or the handy acronym, Cum Sublant.

Good job, Navy. Oh. Now, 20 minutes after that, Hecker, the commander of the Skylark, initiated a loss of submarine call, which is an all-hands-on-deck emergency. Everybody needs to get to the fucking area and help try to locate this sub.

Or the handy acronym, Sub Miss. The real creative with these acronyms, you know, we're missing a sub, we need to find it. Let's call it Sub Miss. I really feel like that one doesn't need an acronym.

Yeah. Sub Miss sounds like a beauty pageant for submarines. Who's the prettiest submarine? You are. However, bad communications meant that, come sublant did not get this message until 1 p.m and by 6 30 p.m i should point out here yeah there's a lack in communication that sucks they could have gotten there 30 seconds later it would not have mattered um yeah so yeah lack of communication, bad communication.

They don't get the report until 1 p.m. And by 6.30 p.m., at least 15 different ships are either already in the area or on their way there to help search for the downed sub. And word was given back to the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard,

which is where the sub was stationed, to start telling sailors next of kin that the sub was missing. Now they say missing, they do not mean that there was hope of rescue. It's kind of a baseline understanding that when a sub goes missing, everybody's dead. Of course,

of course, everybody hopes that that is not the case. Maybe their radio stopped working. Maybe there's some emergency that's stopping them from resurfacing. Something. The reason why it's missing is because they haven't found it yet. That's all it means. Not because they actually think it's alive.

So when they tell the next of kin that it's missing, it's because they haven't confirmed that they're dead yet. That's all that means. However, they knew it was not coming back because the next day on the 12th, the Pentagon announced that the sub was lost with all hands, 129 sailors and technicians in total, making it the first nuclear sub to be lost at sea, as well as one of the deadliest submarine accidents in history so far. For comparison's sake, the other well-known sub-disaster, which we've referenced a few times,

the K-141 Kursk, killed 118 people. So there's a lot of people packed on this. This is because, from what I understand, they were still undergoing tests and trials. So there's technicians on board from the shipyard. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So there's extra people on the crew that wouldn't otherwise be there. So what happens from here on out is a little muddied, mixed with first-hand accounts, which are deeply flawed in a lot of cases, official investigations, and a dash of conspiracy

theory and a whole lot of fuck if we know. So, I'll do my best to tell this story in the way that it makes sense. The most contrary report to the public story put out by the Department of Defense comes from one of the responding ships, another submarine, the USS Seawolf. The Seawolf nor other responding submarine, the USS Owl, were equipped with any

kind of rescue equipment, which shouldn't shock you. It's a submarine, but they were there to help locate the Thresher. The Seawolf's account of what happens is what tends to fuel some conspiracies around the loss of the thresher. I do not mean to make this sound like this is the Seawolf's fault or the crew by any stretch of the imagination. First-hand accounts are always deeply flawed. Eyewitness accounts are notoriously flawed

due to countless reasons. They reported what they saw and what they heard. And this is only a day after a submarine possibly imploded, and it could be chaotic and tinged with panic as one sub attempts to locate the other. Not to mention, the submarine world is very, very small. The possibility that people aboard the Seawolf knew people aboard the Thresher.

So there's a lot of personal things at play as well. It's a bit like podcasting. We all know each other. We're all one big family. When one of us implodes, we all do feel it. For starters, the Seawolf, while on its way to the scene, reported seeing life vests and debris on the water's surface via a periscope. This was later discounted as being from something else entirely

different from the Thresher, which is confusing. How many other ships could have sank in the area? But, you know. Now, at 10.30 a.m. on the 11th, the Sea Wolf finally began diving on the area where the Thresher

was last reported. An hour later, they reported finding an object that wasn't moving around 2,000 yards away via sonar. However, since they were moving and using sonar, they lost contact with it.

Once they sailed over it, floated over it. I don't know if I can consider a, a submarine underwater sailing, whatever. Yeah. Then two hours later, they reported hearing a distress signal.

This is something known as a pinger, a term, which sounds like a, like a racial slur for penguins. Also, it's a slang term in Australiaralia for ecstasy really yeah and something new every episode i was gonna say maybe like a slang term for like a nice nitrous oxide container because you live in the uk if only um this is considered a good sign as pingers had to be operated manually, meaning that someone had to be alive on board the wreck of the thresher to turn it on. After hearing this, the Seawolf used their underwater telephone

to request that the thresher turn its beacons on and off, further confirming that someone was alive in there. A few minutes later, the Seawolf reported, quote, we hear what may be interrupted keying now, suggesting that someone was keying now suggesting that someone was keying the beacons on and off deliberately now the seawolf could not confirm this is actually the thresher because the water above them was now full of over a dozen ships activating their sonar as well as attempting to communicate with the downed thresher so there's

a fuckload of interference going on at the same time also as well because it's after imploding that the signal is probably even if it is still going it's probably like being disrupted by a mechanical or technical malfunction that's after happening after the thing has been eviscerated maybe and but also remember that the seawolf reported finding a single object that That'll become important later. And because of this interference, every time the Seawolf wanted to send a message to the other ships, they had to resurface, send their message, and this means breaking contact with what they believe to be the Thresher,

and then going back underwater again to continue their search and reestablish contact with the Thresher. So there's a lot of moving parts here that make a search virtually impossible, honestly. Seawolf reported to have heard at least five emergency beacon tones from the Thresher. To Seawolf

and many other people, this meant that there could not have been an implosion of the Thresher because the hall would have had to have been intact, trapping enough air for someone or a group of someones to survive and manually activate this. But if that wasn't enough, since Seawolf also reported hearing the main sonar of the thresher, it meant that there was still power on board the submarine. They also claimed to have heard a faint human voice

over the underwater telephone, but it was too garbled to be understood. The easiest answer here, ocean ghosts. Ocean ghosts. Ocean ghosts. It's Cthulhu. They found Cthulhu. They found the old ones.

Now, this call and response went on for a full day, but ceased by the second. After a naval inquiry, the Seawolf's account of that day was immediately made classified and only recently released to the public. So this is a massive conspiracy, right? What is the government hiding?

I have the white papers. That's the best Alex Jones I can do. I got nothing. I got nothing. My voice isn't as fucked up as his. Well, no, there's no conspiracy it was classified because how wrong it was really um acoustics experts are brought in to determine that the noises recorded by the seawolf were all simply called caused by interference from the

dozen plus ships above them and the other sub circling around it, firing off their sonars and sending radio calls and all looking in the same general area for the same thing. Now, the reason why, because like, for instance, a lot of people tend to believe there's some kind of conspiracy because nobody wants to believe that the Navy left, say, a couple people alive,

trapped in an air pocket to die for days at a time without being able to rescue it. Like, for instance, the curse covered that up for a long time as well, because it makes the government look bad. And also, it makes the fate of the sailors just even worse. That they sat down there,

slowly being strangled, writing love letters to their family. It doesn't do wonders for the confidence in recruitment for new submariners. You're going to have a chance to either slowly asphyxiate to death or get crushed

under massive isobaric pressure under the water. You can't put that in a succinct motto on a poster. So Uncle Sam needs you to die under the sea. Under the sea.

Now. Who dies in a submarine under the sea? Some poor bastard. This is why we don't freestyle, Tom. Now, more evidence of this point. It points to the fact that the remains of the Thresher were located on the seafloor at a depth of 8,400 feet. This is known as fatal.

Furthermore, the Seawolf reported finding one object they believed to be the thresher. The thresher's hull was found broken apart in six different pieces. No fucking way. Now, the max dive depth for the thresher is thought to be somewhere around 2,000 feet. This meant by the time it came to a rest, a full day later when the seawolf showed up, it would have been absolutely annihilated by the pressures of the ocean around it, killing anyone that was not killed by the instantaneous implosion that is generally thought

to have occurred. I have to say generally thought to have because in a situation like this, you'll never fully know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the most likely situation is everybody on board died so fast their brains cannot perceive it. Not to mention broken into six different pieces due to a catastrophic implosion, the likelihood of any one piece remaining survivable with air is zero. This they survive theory is, like I said, oftentimes compared to the fate of the Soviet and later Russian Kursk, where several crewmen survived a long time, a depressingly long time after the submarine had gone down. However, the two incidents are completely different. The Kursk did not implode, meaning they had hull integrity. And this integrity was capped after the initial explosion from a faulty torpedo and later a second explosion.

There was still a small part of that hull that was airtight. There's also the fact that the Kursk had a much deeper crush depth than the thresher, which you might expect since it's built three decades later. As for why the Seawolf reported all of this, it's because they reported what they thought they heard. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't think it was... I'm sure there's a sprinkling of wishful thinking that as submariners themselves, they want some idea that they could survive something going catastrophically wrong.

However, they aren't acoustics experts. They know what the sonar is telling them. They thought they saw all these other things that were interference because there's so many goddamn ships in the area. It's not like they lied. It's not like they were trying to make themselves seem better. They were,

it's a firsthand witness account full of electronic interference that shit happens yeah so shit happens yeah and so after all of this what killed the uss thresher now we actually fully know the best we're ever going to know only as of 2020 due to a naval officer suing the navy to declassify the the documents um because of course naval officers are big enough nerds where of course they would do that and i also the guy involved in the lawsuit has also involved someone else that bullet that believed that the navy was covering up what really caused it um aliens which to be fair they kind of were because this at first the navy originally said they're going to release this report in the 90s but released fewer than 20 pages

when the report was over a thousand pages so they were covering it up like their their full report but it's not like there's anything nefarious going on other than it made them kind of acknowledge that this simplest safety fuck up, not only killed the thresher, but was a serious threat to the entire submarine. Um, now this same report that was classified is where the Seawolves account is in.

So it was classified along with everybody else. So the report showed a cascading amount of failures due in large part to the rush to get the Thresher out to sea in order to counter a new class of Soviet submarines. This was combined with an expansion of the U.S. submarine fleet, which created a demand for more sub-trained crews. And the panel, the government panel, suggested that this meant that crews were sent out to sea and adequately trained. Now, crews themselves who are already under-trained were found to be completely overconfident in the systems that they were using, believing that they were impossible for there to be some catastrophic failure in a nuclear-powered submarine that would cause them to lose power. So if something like this did did happen they wouldn't have been prepared for it and even if they thought it was possible and prepared for it they didn't have the training

to be able to restore power on the fly yeah so you can see this is the small domino big domino problem now yeah these are all the things that make what happened next really bad the knife to the ribs that brought the thresher down was something as a shitty welding job yeah see i i was very prescient when i talked about 19 year old tig welders running on cigarettes a bad weld in a sea seawater pipe broke under the pressure of the dive causing seawater to rush into the engine room this seawater eventually hit the electronics, shorting them out and killing power to the reactor. Now, at this point,

they could have still blown their ballast tanks and got themselves out of the situation. They should hypothetically be able to do that under a virtually no power situation. This ran into another problem of bad welding and bad training. So because of those two things, when they went to blow the ballast tanks, ice had formed in the high pressure pipes that would have allowed them to do so. No.

Yep. No. that this maybe wouldn't have been the death blow if the crew had adequate training as they could quickly discover the problem and respond to it fast enough to save the Thresher from dying, but they didn't. There's also another possibility

running along with this, which is one of the theories that the guy who sued the Navy and another guy had, which was an electrical fire. Now, a fire aboard a submarine is just about one of the worst things that could happen outside of a fucking

implosion. This theory was brought up in 2013 by a former acoustic analysis of the Office of Naval Intelligence, a guy named Bruce Rule. His theory doesn't really seem to be taken seriously, mostly because a fire was never reported aboard the Thresher, and

the last thing they reported that they were exceeding test depth, they were on fire. They reported aboard the Thresher. And the last thing they reported that they were exceeding test depth, they were on fire. They probably would have said that instead. Yeah. Now this brings us back to SubSafe, the system that was put in place. Now, this program was rolled out quickly

in the aftermath of the Thresher disaster in the same year, only a few months later. So what is it? In essence, what SubSafe did was create a standardized inspection and certification process for each submarine in order to ensure that their hull

would simply stay watertight and they could recover from flooding that's it what i mean it's like testing welds um testing everything uh like the the high high pressure air pipes, seawater pipes, all those things for quality welds. It's testing the hull for water tightness, and it's simply testing the safety procedures in place that would help ASAP recover from a flooding

incident. That is all it is. It is shocking that this did not exist in the world of submarines before this. And do you know what? This is why it's important to join that is okay all it is it is shocking that this did not exist in the world of submarines before this and do you know what this is why it's important to join a union because if my life depends on a single weld i want to make sure that welder well paid well looked after and uh yeah so unionized u.s navymariners. Good luck with that. Now, this didn't exist.

So how well did the system work since 1963? You want to bet how many subs have been lost since then that were SubSafe certified? Zero? Yeah, not a single fucking one. I mean, at least something good came out of it. So between 1915 and 1963, the U.S. Navy lost 16 sub summ raids to non-con combat accidents obviously combat something else entirely yeah since 1963 it lost one the uss scorpion in 1968 now you're probably asking me joe but you said that no

subs that were subsafe certified have been lost since 1963. Well, the Scorpion wasn't, it was not sub-save certified due to an extended deferral on inspection. You want to guess since that, that inspection deferral had been going on. Tell me 1963, the year it started, it had never been inspected. It had never been certified.

And the fleet commanders are worried that if they put it in for the certification process it would simply take too long for god's so it's it died in 1968 for reasons that nobody's entirely sure of honestly um i assume something to do with one of these systems that should have been certified and tested whoops yeah whoops quality control is very important you know like there's as someone who used to be in the military granted it was a long time ago and certainly not in a submarine but like you expect things that like a catastrophic there's there's no coming back from a catastrophic failure of a submarine so you'd expect there be

some kind of quality assurance testing and certification process like it would be like finding out if there's a helicopter crash tomorrow like a black hawk goes down or something and which tends to happen a lot because you know they're black hawks but like you find that one of the problems is is like oh we actually didn't have a certification process in place to make sure this could fly like Like, you'd be fucking baffled. Yeah, we've no process to make sure that the rotors are, like, properly fixed in place. Yeah, so that is the fate of the USS Thresher.

And the birth of the subsave system, which works, assuming you are not stationed on the USS Scorpion, and if you were, hello from the afterlife Tom Sea ghosts are listening to the show

what we have learned Sea ghosts coast to coast see what we've learned is check your wells and use a safe word always use a sub safe word Tom we do a thing on this show called questions from the Legion.

If you'd like to ask us a question, donate to the show. You can ask us on Discord where I occasionally ping everybody. You can ask us on Patreon and we will answer it on the show. Today's question probably comes from last week's episode where we kept talking about

horses dying. If you could replace horses with any other animal on Earth scaled up to be the size of a horse for military action, what would it be? It could be anything. Hmm. Cats.

I want to see people riding into battle on a giant cat. Okay, so I have two. A person, first of all. But is the person running like a horse? Their bodies have been morphed into some kind of werehorse. Like, they have to go get shoes put on, like, get Nikes nailed to their feet. Joe, you're really not beating the furry allegations.

Can I confirm or deny anything and the other one Komodo dragons for sure yeah I was gonna say like a real big lizard you know some Conan shit that sounds cool I just went with cats because I just wanted to see someone like riding into battle on a giant cat not like a tiger or a lion but like

a giant dumb orange house cat yeah what if Garfield was huge battle Garfield was huge bottle Garfield like both of these work really well and by really well I mean terribly because a cat will like see I don't know maybe the enemy has

left a precariously placed glass cup on a counter immediately making a beeline to knock that shit over. Or some lasagna. Or maybe they're going to get mailed to Abu Dhabi. Where the Komodo Dragon mounted

cavalry here that I've created, which is, to me, in my head, looks like something to be spray-painted onto a 1980s metal band's touring van, would stop after 10 minutes that goes just sit in the sun yeah also that i only i only learned like a couple of weeks ago about like the insane necrosis that like sets in after a komodo dragon bites you yeah yeah that's

not good yeah they just like stalk you while you like try and run away until your like limbs and organs just fail and then it eats you to be fair that's the same thing i do if i get in a bar fight with someone is i bite them and i cause their their skin to start rotting off and i stalk them through the city so i could feast upon them later yeah the armenian werewolf yeah exactly armenian werewolf and yirovan uh God. That is just me. I don't even have to transform into a werewolf. All I have to do is not shave. You're born a furry. You just have to wait for the hair to come in.

Look, my culture is not your costume. Thank you. Tom, thank you so much for joining me on a not so lighthearted episode of the lines up by donkeys podcast and you can use this area to plug

your shows yeah listen to beneath the skin it's a show about the history of everything told through the history of tattooing and yeah we talk about history we just put out an interview with Ed Hardy by the time this comes out we actually have another episode where we talk about the legacy of ed hardy clothing line oh boy that's

gonna be a good one uh russian russian criminal prison tattoos coming out soon so yeah we also had a kim kelly uh labor journalist to talk to us about her experience being in a freak show so and the history of the freak shows and you can listen to my other show beneath the hair um i don't have another show i cannot possibly do another show um everybody thank you so much for listening if you like what we do here consider supporting us on patreon you've already heard us bring up the discord quite a few times you can you know all the hosts of all of our various shows hang out in there. You can talk to us about Minute Bullshit or Eurovision now, apparently. You get five years worth of back bonus content.

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And until next time, don't be in a submarine.