Spy Sub: A Top Secret Mission to the Bottom of the Pacific

The problem with the Fish was the cable and its assembly design, which brought together many strands of wire. Each wire was constructed with extraordinary tensile strength and flexibility to withstand the many flexings associated with wrapping it around the spool, but when two strands were welded together, a weak spot was generated. As the long cable was rolled around the spool, some of the strands broke, which created a snarl of wire that prevented us from pulling the Fish all the way back into the boat.

Having an immovable long cable, extending from our belly, attached to an extremely sensitive and expensive device jammed with electronics was a disaster for the testing program. The civilians and Special Project officers grappled with the dilemma but told the rest of us nothing. Finally, they removed the cable from its attachment point on the spool, and the entire assembly, including the Fish, was dropped to the ocean floor thousands of feet below the Viperfish.

Although there were no announcements to the rest of us, the glum demeanor of those associated with the Fish left no doubt as to the outcome of their efforts. The Viperfish had been budgeted for a total of five Fish, and we had carried two; the $55 million allowance for our backup Fish suddenly appeared to be money well spent. We turned and headed in the direction of Pearl Harbor.

On watch two days later, I was sitting in front of the reactor control panel as we dropped down about two hundred and fifty feet and steamed along at full power. I logged in the initial set of reactor readings and then sat back in my chair to scan the meters showing everything of significance about our nuclear plant.

Suddenly, the shrieking noise of multiple reactor alarms blasted me from my seat. As I always did when the reactor control panel turned into a maze of flashing red lights, I stood up, kicked over the coffeepot near my foot, and started hitting various switches across the panel. One of the nuclear machinist mates, Billy Elstner, sitting below us in his tight corner of the lower-level engine room, knew instantly from the rain of coffee on his head that a major problem was developing in the maneuvering room.

'The reactor is shut down!' I hollered. Searching the flashing red lights across the panel for any clue as to what had happened, I felt certain that this was another damnable drill. Admiral Rickover's crew of 'NR boys' from the Naval Reactor Division in Washington was scheduled to test our knowledge after we returned to Pearl Harbor, and I figured Captain Harris was throwing another nuclear test our way to prepare us.

After announcing the shutdown to the control center, Lt. John Pintard, engineering officer of the watch, yelled from his position behind me, 'What is the cause of the shutdown?'

'No indication, sir!' I hollered back, searching for any abnormalities. 'Initiating emergency reactor start- up!'

'Very well!' Pintard said, watching the start-up process begin.

I began flipping switches to bring the reactor back up to power. Donald Svedlow, sitting next to me, raced his hands back and forth across his electrical panel and opened circuit breakers throughout the engine room as the steam pressure feeding his turbogenerators began to drop.

'Rig ship for reduced power!' crackled out of the ship's loud-speakers. The crew ran around the boat and turned off power-consuming equipment to conserve energy. As the air conditioner compressors were de-energized and the cool air in the ventilation pipes became humid and warm, the engine room began to heat up.

The reactor fission level finally started to increase as I continued the effort to restart the plant. Meanwhile, everybody scouted around the compartment and searched the engine-room electronic systems for any clue as to why the shutdown happened. Just as I brought the reactor power back into heat-producing capability again, Rossi showed up in the maneuvering room.

'What shut us down?' Pintard asked.

'No clue, sir,' Rossi said. 'The instrumentation showed no abnormality. Nothing in the-'

He was interrupted by another blast of alarms from my panel. The reactor had shut down again.

'Reactor shutdown, sir!' I hollered to the EOOW, as I kicked the empty coffeepot.

I immediately initiated the emergency start-up operation, while the chief of the boat from the control center announced over the loudspeakers, 'Surface! Surface! Surface!'

'What the hell is going on?' Rossi exclaimed, as he spun around and left the maneuvering room to search our electronic systems for some indication of why we kept shutting down.

Our engine-room loudspeakers carried Captain Harris's voice: 'This is not a drill! Repeat, this is not a drill!'

The Viperfish, angling steeply upward as we thundered to the surface, finally broke through and immediately began to roll heavily in the turbulent ocean. The temperature in the engine room quickly climbed to more than 100 degrees, and our uniforms became drenched in sweat.

'Starting up, again, sir!' I called out, as I flipped more switches and turned the levers controlling the reactor.

'Moving to battery power, sir!' Svedlow called out as he slammed open more circuit breakers throughout the engine room.

As the fission level began to climb, we heard Rossi hollering from the passageway that nothing was wrong, that all instruments showed normal reactor operations.

The alarms suddenly fired again, with red lights pulsating all over the panel.

'We're down again, sir!' I yelled.

'What the hell is this?' Pintard roared, his eyes darting back and forth from my panel to Svedlow's panel in search of clues.

Before I could even think about trying to start the reactor again, numerous changes within the pressurized- water reactor system showed that I was rapidly losing all control of the reactor.

'She's shutting down more, sir!' I called out.

'Goddamnit, she's shutting all the way down!' Pintard hollered.

I grabbed my levers and tried to stop the accelerating shut-down. I hollered 'Mr. Pintard!' and, standing in front of the panel, pointed speechless at the rapidly changing indicators. At that moment, I clearly had no control of the systems that determine the reactor fission levels.

Although I had once thought I would never be required to take the next action, I reached over to the panel and grabbed the large steel protective guard enclosing the biggest switch on the board.

'Permission to SCRAM the plant, sir!' I yelled as loudly as possible, and Pintard immediately hollered back, 'SCRAM the god-damn plant!'

I clutched the black switch under the guard. With a quick flip of my wrist, I snapped the switch to the right, which caused the circuits controlling the power levels of the nuclear reactor to initiate a total and complete emergency shutdown.

'The plant is scrammed and we are totally shut down, sir!'

'Very well, Dunham,' Pintard answered, grabbing his engine room microphone. 'Now, the reactor is scrammed, the reactor is scrammed!' he announced.

For the next ten hours, we rolled around on the surface, the hangar containing the remnants of our lost Fish system and the engine room holding the broken electronics that controlled our reactor. The Viperfish seemed to be falling apart in spite of our best efforts to make everything work properly.

Rossi and the other men in the Reactor Control Division tore through the circuit drawers with voltmeters and flashlights. They dripped sweat into the circuits and pored over pages of schematics as they tried to find the source of the problem. Most of this time, Captain Harris sat on the steps of the steaming upper-level engine room and watched his men struggling to find out why the Viperfish no longer had a functioning nuclear reactor.

After several hours of testing and intense thinking, Rossi finally found the problem. A diode, a tiny piece of electronic equipment, worth about forty-nine cents in any Radio Shack store, had burned out. As its internal electron-controlling capability failed, intermittently at first and finally permanently, the cascade of erroneous electronic messages caused the shutdown of circuits in a manner that left no clue. This flawed diode was the sole reason for the strange reactor shutdowns that had brought us to the surface.

Rossi tore the offending piece of electronic junk out of its soldered connection and replaced it with a new one. A half hour later, the reactor worked perfectly. The prolonged start-up went smoothly, no red lights flashed, no alarms blared, and the machinist mates below the maneuvering room experienced no further dousing of coffee. The turbines were soon screaming, and we were churning up the Pacific. The captain took the