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

Viperfish down to two hundred feet. The air-conditioning systems were turned on, and cool air blew once again. We finished our trip back to Pearl without further problems.

Keiko had returned to Los Angeles to continue with her studies, so nobody was waiting on the pier for me. I had no time to feel lonely, however, because another group of visitors, the 'NR boys from Admiral Rickover,' awaited all of us who worked in the nuclear field. We were scheduled to take a Nuclear Reactor (NR) Board examination soon after our return, a regular occurrence on all nuclear submarines of the U.S. Navy. The directive for the examination came from the man in charge of naval nuclear propulsion operations, the man we called the Great White Father.

Admiral Rickover was widely regarded as the 'Father of the Nuclear Navy.' Most of us, however, considered him less impressive than did the general public. We were in awe of the man, not so much because of his many accomplishments during the early development of the nuclear Navy but as a result of the raw fear that he engendered in the men working in this field. Our engineering officers often related stories of their interviews with Rickover. They said that he threw chairs across the room, screamed orders not to talk when an airplane was flying overhead, seated the interviewees in unstable chairs, and exhibited enough strange actions to fill a book. Each engineering officer had a different set of stories to tell-the Viperfish's file of interview stories was voluminous. Although they were a source of entertainment during our long patrols, the stories conveyed to us a sense of instability. Further, many of the men on board the Viperfish felt that Rickover had a disturbing tendency to destroy brilliant naval careers without remorse.

His defenders struggled to justify this seemingly irrational behavior as the admiral's way of prevailing against dissenting opinions, as well as a means of creating stress in order to test the worth of prospective engineers and commanding officers. Although there might have been some element of truth here, we felt that other methods would have been more effective and less destructive to the careers of men who suffered at his hands. When the admiral's substantial political power base was unable to prevent Secretary of the Navy John Lehman from retiring him in the early 1980s, a large number of men whose naval careers had been damaged or terminated felt some measure of satisfaction that his reign was finally over.

For those of us responsible for the Viperfish's nuclear propulsion system, however, there was the immediate need to pass Admiral Rickover's NR examination. The men sent by Rickover were lean, crisp, and very bright, and I knew that they would ask every conceivable detailed question about our operation of the nuclear plant. There would be no sliding by; as Bruce Rossi warned us, we should answer their questions briskly and present an appearance of having substantial knowledge.

The three examiners took us, one at a time, into a small conference room in a quiet corner of the submarine base. I was called first and seated on the far side of a large wooden table holding a stack of the Viperfish's reactor plant manuals, while the examiners stared at me in a manner that stimulated raw fear.

'You are Petty Officer Second Class Roger C. Dunham, right?' the leanest and most intense of them finally asked after an indeterminate period of time.

'Yes, sir,' I answered, bracing myself for the first question.

'You are one of the Viperfish's nuclear reactor operators, right?'

'Yes, sir.'

The officer folded his hands on the table in front of him and stared at me again.

'Good,' he said, his face showing a glint of eagerness as he moved in for the kill. 'Tell us what your immediate action would be if the reactor's electronic shutdown banks generated an emergency condition from the activation of the CR-389 circuit, causing a sudden loss of reactor power.'

I stared at the man, his words tumbling through my brain, while I tried to remember anything on the Viperfish that resembled a CR circuit. Taking a deep breath, I considered a variety of responses and finally said, 'Sir, would you please repeat the question?'

The man glanced at his NR colleagues and stared back at me as though I were the most stupid human being he had ever seen.

'I said, tell us what your immediate action would be if the reactor's electronic shutdown banks generated an emergency condition from the activation of the CR-389 circuit, causing sudden loss of power. Can you do that for us?'

Rivers of sweat began to flow from my armpits as I realized I didn't have a clue as to what he was talking about. I had never even heard of a CR circuit or anything like it. I had been spending most of the past six months studying shutdowns, dreaming shutdowns, experiencing shutdowns, and his question rang no bells. Three pairs of eyes glared at me from across the table.

'I believe, sir,' I said, struggling to sound intelligent, 'that the CR-389 circuit is an anomalous system installed since I last reviewed the reactor plant manuals, and whatever its intended action may have been at the time of its installation, it is not now operational on the Viperfish.'

If my answer was wrong, I was dead. The Viperfish would be zapped of its newest reactor operator. I would be sent to Adak, Alaska, where the frozen tundra and the Rat Islands accumulated destroyed careers, and Keiko and I would freeze to death. It did not enter my mind that these men might not know what they were talking about-they were officers, they were trained in nuclear engineering, and they were sent by the Great White Father. They designed nuclear plants and invented complex questions based on their detailed knowledge.

They had to know the answers.

None of these considerations made CR circuits any more apparent to me. As I watched them confer, I hoped that they would turn in my direction and say that they had 'the right circuit but, sorry, Petty Officer Dunham, the wrong name.' One of them casually flipped open one of the reactor plant manuals and the other two studied the pages before them in silence. They conferred again, slapped the book shut, and then looked at me.

'Petty Officer Dunham, would you please describe the emergency reactor shutdown system on the USS Viperfish?'

CR circuits no longer on the table, I took off like somebody had ignited my afterburners. I told them about the circuits, I described what would happen inside the reactor as the result of different signals, I told them about forty-nine-cent diodes that could jeopardize the mission of a multimillion dollar submarine, and I provided heaping servings of fission flux talk that brought smiles to their faces.

When I finished, I mentioned that I had not heard of the CR-389 circuit but I would be happy to learn everything about it, if they would like to share the information with me.

The lean one, the most intense one, showed just a trace of uncertainty as he asked, 'Your nuclear plant is an S5W reactor, right?'

Stunned, I stared back at him. Almost all of the submarines in the U.S. fleet carried the S5W reactor. British submarines carried it, and our government had even offered the French an S5W reactor.

But the Viperfish was different.

'Actually, sir,' I said politely, 'we have the S3W plant on the Viperfish. It is a weird system, and it has some technology that is a little out of date, but it does do the job.'

The interview came to a rapid close a few minutes later, following a couple of final cursory questions. I thanked them and left. They remained in the room with our reactor plant manuals as they studied and puzzled over what the Viperfish was all about, including its strange S3W reactor. We were later told that we did well on the exam, and Admiral Rickover indicated to Captain Harris that his crew of nuclear-trained men were a credit to his submarine. The other men and I speculated over cold brews at Fort DeRussy later that night what the response of the Great White Father would be if we were to send the Pentagon a letter suggesting that his NR boys also undergo a board exam.

We loaded a new Fish, jammed with the same electronics as the one lying somewhere on the bottom of the Pacific, and headed back to sea for a final series of tests. All of us felt certain that, somewhere in the back rooms of the Pentagon, a decision had been made not to try to find our lost Fish. There would have been no way to recover it, and there was little value in knowing where the device, with its miles of cable, had come to rest.

When we flooded one week later, the depth of the ocean was about three times the crush depth of the Viperfish.

The flooding resulted from yet another broken system, this one located at the top of the snorkel mast. Because our submarine was without fresh air for prolonged periods of time, the air was regularly contaminated by