NRPA_Swine Presents: “The Tale of the Submarine That Burned Down An Aerodrome”
The following is a transcript of the MeCast.com video “The Tale of the Submarine That Burned Down An Aerodrome” by MeCast user NRPA_Swine.
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The United States Navy has done many grand and impressive things. Nuclear-powered ships. Put men on other worlds. And conceived a veritable Bond villain’s arsenal of unbuilt orbital death machines. (Which I have an entire video on! Go watch it. I’ll wait.)
But never forget: It is a military bureaucracy.
Which means it makes
titanically stupid choices as a matter of its routine operations.
Like the U.S.S.
Gar.
Now, I’m sure some of you are confused. When I was but a piglet – when I first heard the tale of the
Gar -- I too was confused. “What is so strange about a submarine striking an enemy airbase?” I wondered.
I – like you – was so young and naïve as to think this was a recent incident involving guided munitions.
Oh how stupid I – and you – were for thinking that. As that implies an iota of common sense being involved. And remember, the U.S. Navy is a military bureaucracy. So that’s tantamount to treason.
“So then maybe an accident aboard a berthed submarine started a fire at an adjacent airfield,” I can hear you thinking. Stop being logical. These are the same people who gave Robert Zubrin money in the Eighties to build a rocket based on a throttlable continuous nuclear explosion. (Which I
also have an entire video on. Go watch it. I’ll wait.)
Oh no. Only the United States Navy has the combination of grandiosity of vision and institutional incompetence to have a submarine burn down an aerodrome in Kansas. And now, I’m just a British pig who makes silly videos about militaria, but I’m pretty sure
Kansas is nowhere the bloody
ocean. Unless
The Wizard of Oz has been lying me to for decades.
The story began in early 1956. The U.S. Navy had just agreed to work with the Army to develop an intermediate-range ballistic missile. The Navy really wanted a missile with which it could rain atomic death upon those pesky Soviets. But it also needed to be able to actually, you know,
fit onto a submarine to be of use. Which was a problem.
As the Navy had a very good rocket in development at the time! But Tethys was not a ballistic missile. Not really. Except it kinda was? Because it was not per a 1954 agreement with the U.S. Air Force that the Navy wasn’t allowed to operate intercontinental ballistic missiles but the Navy pitched Tethys to the President as a backup ICBM should the Air Force’s ICBM fail? Look, this shit’s entirely too complicated and we’ll get back to that in a minute.
But for
right now what matters is that Tethys was big. Like,
really big. Not quite Douglas Adams big, but still four-and-a-quarter meters wide, which is like 150-some-odd Freedom Units or something? (I don’t speak Jibberish.) The point is that the actual submarine-launched ballistic missiles adopted by the U.S. and Royal Navies had diameters between a third and two-fifths of that. Everyone even remotely familiar with what needed done to accomplish what the Navy wanted knew Tethys was entirely too large and would be utter rubbish for the job.
Which was a problem. Because Tethys would, by 1959, consume almost RS$1,000MM in research and development costs. Which is a
lot of money, even by modern standards, and that’s without six decades of inflation. So of course the Navy felt it had to get its money’s worth from the Tethys program. I mean, sure, it was never going to work, but since when has a little thing like the obvious stopped the military procurement?
Because the Navy had a plan! A plan so cunning that you’d forgiven if you thought it came from the U.S. Air Force. And that plan revolved around that 1954 agreement with, obviously enough, the USAF.
As, in a stroke of genius, the Air Force had managed to define “intercontinental ballistic missile” as “a missile with sufficient range to strike the sovereign soil of any foreign power which is not located on the North American continent.” See, they
thought that because the Navy is ocean-going and there’s always some island owned by a decaying European empire nearby, the Navy would never be able to operate a ballistic missile of any kind.
That the USAF underestimated the U.S. Navy in the Fifties should come as about as much of a surprise to you all as that there is gambling in this establishment. Because the Navy had won a seemingly worthless concession of its own: It got to decide where would be used to determine the exact range of any given missile entering Naval service.
And they chose Naval Air Station Olathe.
In Kansas.
Which was conveniently at least fifteen hundred double-kilometers from any non-North American foreign soil.
Because -- …okay, just bear with me on this, okay? As this is going to be dumb. Like, the kind of idea Mike Sparks would come up with, were he not already trying to build an Astro-Gavin.
So the United States Navy intended to build a missile range. In Kansas. Where they would actually base a ballistic missile submarine. Like, a real, nuclear-armageddon-carrying submarine. In a giant pool. And assign every ballistic missile in the fleet to be based out of this one submarine. But since the sub clearly couldn’t store all of them in a ready state, they’d need to be stored off-site. Aboard actual boomers. That would go on patrol and do normal boomer things. Even though their payloads were not, in fact, “deployed” for combat purposes.
Say what you will about modern procurement politics, but Christ on His cross at least they’re not as poisonous as to make someone this kind of hare-brained bureaucratic end-running was a good idea.
This just the tip of the iceberg, though, folks. You think the boomer base in the middle of the continental United States is bad? We’re only getting started on the fractal bad decisions. Because remember: The Navy is a military bureaucracy and bad decisions are the order of the day.
Which comes back to Tethys. See, the Navy was already intending to experiment with a solid-fuel version of the Army’s Jupiter IRBM. What nobody was working, however, was a ballistic missile powered by liquid storable fuels. Tethys was fueled by kerosene and liquid oxygen, which made it something of a pain to store in a launchable state. Especially on a submarine. Not that the chief alternative of N2O4 and unsymmetrical di…meth…dimethyl…di…hyd…
I hate chemistry.
The chief alternative of explosive cancer. There we go. We’re using that because it’s truth in advertising.
Not that something with a name like that was much better than handling liquid oxygen in a very confined space. Martin, Tethys’s designer, though had actually done a mark-up of a hypergolic version powered by explosive cancer that it had pitched to the Air Force. And from it would be born Tethys-EC – the “EC” supposedly being for “Expanded Capabilities”, but us smart folks know it’s really because of the explosive cancer – to ensure that the Navy’s ballistic missile program fully leveraged all possible advantages of its existing work on Tethys.
Pardon me, I have to go take a
long dip in the mud, to wash away the sleaze of defense-contractor-ese.
Now, for all two of you still watching, I’m sure you’re asking: Wasn’t Tethys supposed to be bad at this? Absolutely it is. Was? And the Navy was smart enough to know that and, to do itself one better,
did know that. It never actually wanted to develop a hypergolic-fueled version of the rocket. That’d be immensely expensive and produce a shitty weapon to boot. But it was a useful fiction that they wanted to develop one, because it meant they could do things to serve boomer-in-Kansas plan, like beginning construction oat NAS Olathe for its future role at the heart of the Navy’s boomer fleet.
Which would be where the U.S.S.
Gar came in. As someone in the Navy, clearly unhappy at the absolute utter lack of sense being employed so far, conceived of modifying a surplus World War 2 diesel-electric submarine to see if this whole “ballistic missile submarine” idea was in fact practicable. Which was a good idea. So of course the Navy has to one-up itself with another bad idea, that being constructing the demonstrator submarine
at NAS Olathe.
Let’s just process this for a moment. The world’s largest and most formidable navy proposed build a proof-of-concept ship about as far as physically possible from the actual ocean. And this was considered a
good thing. Seriously, is it any wonder these people gave Zubrin money? The people who were ensigns when these decisions were being made would’ve been flag officers by then.
Christ.
So the Navy cuts up a perfectly good veteran boat, ships it to the center of the country, and then not only reassembles it in a pool purpose-built to let it fully submerse itself but also guts its fittings along the way to mount mock-ups of Tethys-EC first stages. Which is probably the brightest aspect of this whole scheme. The usage of mock-ups, that is, instead of actually converting a Tethys A first-stage and giving it explosive cancer tankage.
That
was proposed, though, so props on the Navy for their commitment to the madness?
So in the middle of Kansas, by October 1957, you’ve got this giant pool with a bodged-together submarine that’s laden to the gills with a chemical mixture that, it cannot be stressed enough, is accurately called
explosive cancer. That’s the thing about hypergolic rocket fuels. They spontaneously combust when they come into contact with one another. The trick, though, is that
air is an oxidizer. What with all of the oxygen in it.
So when a hypergolic reaction mass comes into contact with air, well, it goes off just as well as if it came into contact with its partner oxidizer. (Aliens think our planet is insane, given that we breathe the stuff that makes rockets go.) There’s a reason why explosive cancer fuels ranks higher than nuclear power on that meme Naval Astronautical Service Hierarchy of Respect. At least an atomic pile isn’t actively plotting to kill you the way hypergolic fuels usually are. If it’s not the Chemistry Hell Word trying to cook off, it’s the N2O4 trying to give you, you know,
cancer.
So is it any surprise that an accident occurred? Those who were betting on October 2, 1957 in the pool took home the prize, as that night a chemical fire started aboard the poor
Gar that soon got out of control at about the time the “explosive” part of the “explosive cancer” fuel mix made itself felt. The ensuing blast spread fire and debris as far as the aviation fuel bunkers, whose cooking off would in turn damage and set fire to most of the rest of the base. The burning down of the U.S.S.
Gar would claim the lives of 26 souls and injure dozens more, as well as shut down NAS Olathe for the next four years.
The events of the next few days, of course, would overshadow what happened to the
Gar. And were why the Navy was allowed to quietly memory-hole the whole
Gar idea – and the careers of its progenitors – as the Navy very much wanted to talk about the Naval Astronautical Service’s plans for Tethys.
And only them.
So remember everyone: There is no limit to how far you can take a bad idea if you’re just pigheaded enough to keep pushing it. Who knows what
else the Navy might be looking to burn down. If you’ve got a good enough idea, you might just be able to reach the same pyromaniacal heights as the U.S.S.
Gar!
Or maybe just keeping working on that nuclear salt-water rocket. It’ll explode real good too. Exploded real good? The Navy’s still never officially denied those claims that they got as far as trying to actually build an experimental one by the early Nineties.
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Author's Notes
Some days when writing, you can't stop the flow of creativity. And some days you're left trudging across the wastes, pulling teeth to get anything at all. Chapters 14 and 15 are highly interrelated and it's been like trudging across the wastes with them, as every time I think I'm making progress, it ends up getting derailed by something else.
So enjoy filler that's been kind of covered up-thread OOCly, through the lens of TTL's version of the YouTuber who introduced me to the memetic potential of
I Am A Pole. With some appropriately vague foreshadowing about things down-time. Also our first Zubrin sighting, because it's required he turn up in any mad space timeline that thinks about the Eighties.
Also also: We're into the final 48 hours of the voting for the 2022 Turtledoves.
LEVIATHAN Rising just so happened to have been nominated for
Best Spaceflight and Technology Timeline. Wink wink, nudge nudge.
