The Times of London, March 12, 2015
Throughout the decades in which the Frenchman Jacques Cousteau captured the world’s attention for his pioneering work in undersea exploration, it was an American, John Piña Craven, who, adhering to the maxim “run silent, run deep”, racked up many of the undersea world’s technological firsts.
Early in his career, Craven ensured that the USS Nautilus — the world’s first operational nuclear powered submarine — was not commissioned with a potentially fatal flaw in its construction. Later, he oversaw the development of the Polaris intercontinental ballistic missile system that for more than 20 years was a mainstay of America’s nuclear deterrent. Using an ingeniously adapted submarine, he further helped his country by retrieving ships and objects lost at sea; he also enraged and embarrassed the Kremlin by salvaging Soviet vessels sunk in waters beyond Russian reach.
The search and rescue submarine he designed was the USS Halibut, previously an attack vessel, which he transformed into a combined undersea laboratory and dock, replete with hoists, cables, probes and video cameras. The Halibut, named after the fish that can swim at all depths but prefers life at the bottom of the sea, spent years as effectively an annex of the CIA; it searched the seabed for enemy wrecks, stray armaments and concealed communications systems.
Craven was delighted when, in 1971, the Halibut discovered and tapped into a high-grade Soviet telephone line running from the Pacific Fleet headquarters in Kamchatka to the naval port of Petropavlovsk in the Sea of Okhotsk. A listening device was attached to the cable that recorded everything that was transmitted.
Three years earlier, trawling the central Pacific, the Halibut had discovered the wreck of a Soviet missile submarine, the K-129, that had been lost some months earlier. Moscow had made the recovery ofK-129 an urgent priority, but its ships found nothing. The Halibut, deploying equipment to a depth of 16,000 feet — unprecedented at the time — not only found the missing boat, but took some 22,000 well-lit photographs of its hull and exposed equipment.
Acting on orders from the White House, an even more specialised vessel, designed in part by Craven, was dispatched to bring in the K-129. Using the cover of a deep-sea mining operation, the revolutionary Hughes Glomar Explorer spent several months trying to secure what would have been one of the century’s greatest espionage achievements. The mission ultimately failed, but two nuclear warheads were discovered and made safe.
John Piña Craven was born in New York in 1924. His father’s family had a long naval tradition. His mother, it was said, had a heritage that included Barbery pirates from North Africa — his “black blood” as he called it. After graduating from Brooklyn Technical High School, he joined the navy and served for two years aboard the battleship New Mexico.
In 1945, taking advantage of the GI Bill that helped returning servicemen to continue their education, he studied engineering at the California Institute of Technology. He went on to specialise in mechanics and hydraulics at the University of Iowa, where he was awarded his PhD. Work for the navy followed: having developed an interest in submarine design, he detected a flaw in the ballast tanks of the Nautilus that was causing vibrations at high speeds. If uncorrected, it could have jeopardised the Nautilus’s 1958 record-breaking voyage beneath the polar ice cap.
Craven’s star then rose rapidly. He became the project manager responsible for the installation and testing of Polaris missiles, designed to be fired from submerged submarines. In 1966, as chief scientist of the navy’s special projects office, he led the successful search for a hydrogen bomb accidentally dropped by the US into the Mediterranean sea off Spain’s coast. He also pinpointed the wreck ofThe Scorpion submarine at a depth of two nautical miles.
So alarmed was the Kremlin by Craven’s exploits that it was said the KGB assigned a spy to monitor his movements. This would have come as no surprise to either the navy or the Pentagon, which regarded him so highly that he was awarded the Distinguished Civilian Award and bar — once by the navy and once by the department of defense. Believing that the arrival of Richard Nixon as president in 1968 boded ill for liberal politics, he gave up his naval work and moved into academia. He taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, then at the University of Hawaii. With a newly acquired degree in maritime law, he became an expert on seabed legalities. This led to a run for Congress from Hawaii, but he was narrowly beaten.
He met his wife Dorothy, a speech pathologist, while studying for his doctorate. She survives him, together with their two children: Sarah, who works for the UN Population Fund in Washington, and David, a Chicago-based lawyer.
Craven kept old age at bay by swimming, snorkelling and doing 50 press-ups every morning. An astute poker player, he could always form a calculated reading of his opponent. In retirement he continued to dabble in marine technology until the onset of his Parkinson’s disease. A forceful man with a demonstrative personality, he enjoyed company and staying up late. His party tricks included playing the piano, telling jokes and singing Pete Seeger’s hits.
The conflict between the sharing of information natural to a scientist and the necessary secrecy of his profession was something he found deeply frustrating. In his 2001 bestselling memoir, The Silent War: The Cold War Battle Beneath the Sea, he had to withhold certain details, even after 30 years — but, at last, he was able to tell his story.
John Piña Craven, naval scientist, was born on October 20, 1924. He died on February 12, 2015, aged 90.
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