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On conspiracy theories...

PRB

PRB

Administrator
Staff member
Here's a good one: What was the deal with the Soviet Golf-II class strategic missile submarine K-129? She sinks at LAT 40 N, LON 180 (or so some say...) in March 1968. In 1974, the CIA ship “Hughes Glomar Explorer” tries to lift the wreck from the ocean bottom. But why? Was it for the code books and Russian technology, or was it to determine whether or not the sub “went rogue” and attempted to launch her nuclear missiles at Hawaii, and failed catastrophically? We do know that US Air Force sound detection systems (not SOSUS) did record two “acoustic events”, each or 96 second duration, which is the main engine burn time of the Soviet R-21 missiles carried by the K-129, and spaced at an interval consistent with the automatic missile launch system on board the sub, at the time the sub sank, and in the same location. And the photos taken by USS Halibut, CAI spy sub of the time, show destruction around the “sail” where the two aft missile tubes were (were) located.


Me? I'm going with Norman Polmar's analysis in his book “Azorian”, on this subject, which is that a missile firing drill went very (very) wrong. Still, much about this incident is still classified, of course...
 
Rgr Dain. Saw that one.

John P. Craven, chief scientist for the Polaris missile program, and director of the Deep Submergence Systems Project (DSSP), which, in addition to being a real project to develop technologies for deep sea diving and rescue, was also a CIA cover story for the real goal of recovering Soviet “stuff”, like warheads from ballistic missile tests, from the ocean bottom, published a book in 2002 called “The Silent War”. As he says, if you want a cover story to work, it has to be true... Anyhow, he, being “plugged in”, as it were, to all the CIA secrets, claims the real reason for the huge recovery effort of the K-129 was to establish whether or not it was really a “rogue” event. Apparently at the time, there was enough acoustic data to support this theory, and it was important to try to figure out what happened, by finding and investigating the wreck ourselves. Over the years, many books have been published, and they read exactly like every other conspiracy theory book (lots of claims, little evidence). Polmar's book, "Azorian", was released in 2012, and bursts many of the conspiracy theory bubbles, like the exact location of the wreck. Still, Polmar's work establishes that two of the K-129's nuclear missiles did in fact fire, and in a manner consistent with the auto-launch system the K-129 had on board. But he thinks that they fired while still inside the launch tubes, something that would have been almost instantly catastrophic to the ship and crew, and that the only reason the third, and last, missile didn't fire was that the sub, by that time, was a dead hulk, on her way to the bottom. Even if you go with Polmar's non-conspiracy version of events, one has to wonder, what on Earth happened? How could such an accident occur, with all the "Fail-Safe" features?
 
kinda off the main topic,but i remember seeing the Hughes Glomar Explorer while it was in Susuin bay with the mothball fleet,i hated going to the bay area for any reason,even the 49ers games i hated going to (enjoyed the game,hated the drive)but when we got to cross that bridge that had the view of the mothball fleet...i was a happy kid...


 
Those systems may be "fail safe" by Russian standards of the time, but they sure weren't by US standards. I'd bet alongside Mr. Polmar on a material failure that caused the missile motors to fire inside the sub. I'm not so sure it could have been due to human error, although that's always a possibility. The reason here is that in the Soviet Navy of the time, the enlisted men were for the most part conscripts doing their three years of service for the Rodina; they handled the very mundane tasks involved in running the ship. More senior enlisted men (few in number) and officers (fewer still) wound up doing things a third-class petty officer or seaman would do in the USN, since they were long-service men with more training behind them. For this reason it is likely they were running the actual release of the missile from the sail when the incident occurred. Training doesn't always cover every contingency - which leads to the material failure hypothesis, as Mr. Polmar said an apparent firing of two missile motors while still in their tubes. I've read one book on the subject that described the HGE's mechanical cradle that recovered the boat - initially more or less intact - from the seabed, only to have about one-third from each end break off and sink. Even then, it was a most impressive technical achievement. An offshoot of your conspiracy theory subject is what was felt in the Soviet Navy at the time (and is still felt by many of their sub community retirees) - that the sinking was caused somehow by the presence of a US attack sub shadowing the Soviet sub.
 
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