USS Thresher

The Nautilus was the first ship that had HY-80 in it, sometime in the '50s. They had all kinds of hydrogen cracking problems, such that some of the first subs they actually welded with austenitic stainless steel, because they couldn't solve the hydrogen cracking problem. It took them about 10 years to really get their arms around that, and then they had the Thresher problem and they had Subsafe. They didn't actually start putting HY-100 into ships until the late '80s. There were two ships before the Seawolf that they put modules — cylinders in the center of the ship — with HY-100. I'm familiar with that because my first student ever still works at Electric Boat as a welding engineer. He was in charge of welding up those HY-100 cylinders. When the Seawolf had all its cracking problems, the two captains who were in charge of the ships came to me and said, well, what about our two ships with the HY-100 that are out there? I said, don't worry about it, just inspect them when they come back in. They're not going to fall apart tomorrow — but they could fall apart if you didn't inspect them properly.

What happened to the Thresher in '62 was, it came out of Portsmouth Naval Shipyard on sea trials. They had a tender right above it, was doing sea trials, and they had a major break in one of their main water cooling pipes going to the ocean. They were doing a controlled deep dive. This pipe just happened to be into the reactor compartment, and they flooded the reactor compartment and they lost all power. When you lose power, you're supposed to be able to take the compressed air in your ballast tanks and blow out the water, or take the compressed air in some of your tanks and blow out the tanks. They had a problem, they weren't able to completely blow the tanks, and they started rising up to the surface. As they got close to the surface they started going down. And the guys on the ship on board were listening to this — the screams of the men as they were slowly going down to their death. This created a major problem in the US Navy. Admiral Rickover was not happy. Congress was not happy. They haven't completely declassified all the information, but it was well known in the papers. I used to live in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and it was all over investigations in the papers, because that's a Navy town.

April 10, 1963 sinking off Cape Cod during first controlled deep dive. Brazed sea-water valve failure; ballast tank freeze-up on emergency blow; men heard screaming on tender's sonar; collapse at ~6,000 ft. The disaster that prompted SUBSAFE under Rickover with W. Edwards Deming as quality consultant.

It was the US Navy in the 1980s that coined the term total quality management and good manufacturing practices in some of their memos in the mid-80s. I think the origins of that went back to the US Navy Thresher disaster on April 10th, 1963. The Thresher sank right off Cape Cod here, about 600 miles off Cape Cod. How did it sink? It was super-classified at the time. I lived in Virginia Beach, Virginia, the world's largest naval port in Norfolk. Half of my neighbors — one of my classmates' father was head of the brand-new John F. Kennedy aircraft carrier. He was a captain, which meant he was one of the top officers in the US Navy at the time. The Navy was devastated. They were on their first controlled deep dive, and the ship had been built in Portsmouth Naval Shipyard up here in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Catalyst for the Navy's mid-1960s deep-sea rescue vehicle (DSRV) program in which Sea Cliff and similar vessels were developed. Tom flags he will return to Thresher in a later session.

They changed the viewing ports. When we were doing this 10 years ago we were looking at three ports, but when they finally did it they decided to put two more ports on the side. You can see how people kind of have to crawl in there. Whether you're talking the Sea Cliff — the Sea Cliff and other DSRVs were built by the Navy after they had the Thresher disaster. They had a rush program in the mid-60s to develop deep-sea rescue vehicles, and they built some deep diving submersible rescue vehicles that you can look up.

Closing case. Built at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard; lost on first controlled deep dive in the mid-1960s. Tom names the failed-braze-joint theory on seawater piping penetration. Detailed in-class explanation from a (Navy-trained) student covers ~30% inspection failure rate on seawater joints, reactor scram, ice in emergency MBT blow air system, failure to surface, breakup at test depth. SUBSAFE program and modern quality-management practices came out of this disaster. Tom alludes to a recording of the sub captain narrating hull collapse.

Henry Petroski, a guy at Duke University in the civil engineering department, wrote a book called To Engineer is Human. He's gotten famous off it, elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering. The book is about how we learn to engineer new structures from failures. We learn from the Sea Wolf problem — expensive lesson to learn, but we learned a lot about welding high-strength steels we didn't know about. We learn about process control from the Thresher — the whole SUBSAFE program came out of the Thresher disaster.

Cited twice — first (§5.p7) as the perennial student-paper topic Tom warns against repeating without bringing one's own thinking; second (§8.p5) as the origin point of the SUBSAFE program and, by Tom's account, the beginning of total quality management in the US.

I would like you to tell me something about what you think. I teach these Navy students during the summer, and I don't know how many times I've had the Thresher disaster or the British carrier the Sheffield in the Falkland Islands war, and the variations on those themes. The Thresher disaster — the submarine sank off Cape Cod, which was a major catharsis for the US Navy. They basically shut down submarine production for three years, and the Navy instituted a new program which they called SUBSAFE, which actually is the beginning of total quality management. The Navy did it in the 60s, American industry picked it up in the 90s, the Japanese picked it up in the 60s, 70s and 80s. But it was actually developed because of the Thresher disaster. The Sheffield got hit by an Exocet missile in the Argentine-British war over the Falkland Islands, and this one little missile destroyed the whole ship because the aluminum superstructure caught fire and just became a great big flare.