Navy Surely Needs to Look at It Again : Was Iowa Explosion a Lovers’ Quarrel? Not So Fast

No one can fairly say at this stage that the U.S. Navy’s investigation of an explosion aboard the battleship Iowa that killed 47 sailors a little over a year ago was a deliberate sham. But it clearly was shoddy and it damaged, if not destroyed, the memory of one of the dead sailors. Congress will want to make certain nothing like this can happen again.

It’s true that the Navy did not invent the theory that the explosion in one of the Iowa’s gun turrets was the result of sabotage by a gunner’s mate bent on a bizarre suicide. That was the work of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, employing personality profiles to construct that case. But while it did not concoct the idea, the Navy obviously wanted to believe it. The theory conveniently ruled out the possibility of deadly flaws in its four floating relics of World War II that were taken out of mothballs early in the 1980s to perform missions that never quite lived up to expectations.

Now a more persuasive job of detective work has created serious doubts about the suicide theory and may even cost the Navy the battleships it was so anxious to protect. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney has already ordered two of the battleships into retirement to save money. The General Accounting Office, Capitol Hill’s chief investigative agency, now suggests that the other two, which include the Iowa, be decommissioned, too.

The Navy has insisted that since gunpowder blew the turret apart a year ago April it was no accident. Its formal finding was that gunner’s mate Clayton Hartwig, depressed at a fellow sailors rejection of his effort to strike up a “close relationship,” slipped a detonator into bags of gunpowder during firing practice with the Iowa’s 16-inch guns.

But technicians from the Energy Department’s Sandia National Laboratory told Congress this week that they made a powder bag blow up by re-creating pressures that would be put on it by ramming it too hard while loading the gun.

As a GAO investigator put it, “A possible alternate scenario to the Navy’s finding of a deliberate act is that an unintentional high-speed over-ram of the powder bags combined with the impact sensitivity of the powder led to the explosion.”

This is as much theory at this point as was the suicide plot, but in combination with another Sandia finding, it looks bad for the Navy.

To support the theory that Hartwig slipped detonators into powder bags, the Navy said it had found calcium and chlorine residue in the Iowa turret, residue that had to have come from a detonator.

But Sandia officials said they found the same sort of residue in turrets aboard the battleships New Jersey and Wisconsin and that what the Navy found was “not inconsistent with the maritime environment.” That’s something the Navy could have discovered if it wasn’t so hooked on the suicide theory.

Sandia officials do not claim to know the truth, only that the detonator theory has been shaken. They think the Navy should have a second look. When that happens, Congress will want a lot of people peering over the Navy’s shoulder.