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USS Cincinnati (SSN 693)

USS CINCINNATI was the sixth LOS ANGELES-class fast attack submarine. She was decommissioned and stricken from the Navy list on July 29, 1996, and spend the following years laid up at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton, Wash, awaiting her turn in the submarine recycling program. In 2014, recycling was finished but CINCINNATI's sail and portions of the upper rudder have been preserved and are planned to become the centerpiece of the USS CINCINNATI Cold War Memorial Peace Pavilion in West Chester Township, Ohio.

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Crew List:

This section contains the names of sailors who served aboard USS CINCINNATI. It is no official listing but contains the names of sailors who submitted their information.

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USS CINCINNATI History:

USS CINCINNATI was ordered on February 4, 1971, when the Navy awarded Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company the contract for one of the early LOS ANGELES-class nuclear attack submarines, the fourth U.S. ship to carry the name of the city of Cincinnati, Ohio. Her keel was laid at Newport News on April 6, 1974, and the hull took shape over the next three years in the East Coast's major nuclear-submarine yard. The submarine slid down the ways on February 19, 1977, sponsored by Nancy Keating, wife of newspaper publisher William J. Keating. After fitting-out and dockside testing, the Navy accepted the boat on May 26, 1978. She was commissioned at Newport News on June 10, 1978, with Commander Gilbert V. Wilkes III in command, and was assigned to the Atlantic Fleet with Norfolk, Virginia, as her homeport.

Immediately after commissioning, CINCINNATI sailed to New London, Connecticut, to conduct crew training and initial operations out of the primary East Coast submarine base. Through the summer of 1978, she ran acoustic trials, midshipman orientation cruises and live torpedo-firing exercises, building up the crew's proficiency and collecting baseline sonar signatures of the new hull. In the autumn of 1978, she joined other Atlantic Fleet units in the NATO exercise "Northern Wedding", a major Cold War reinforcement drill in the North Atlantic and northern European waters that practiced moving U.S. forces to support northern Europe in a crisis.

In January 1979, the submarine returned to her building yard at Newport News for a five-month post-shakedown availability, during which shipyard workers corrected construction-period deficiencies and made minor improvements found necessary during the first months at sea.

Completing this yard period around mid-1979, CINCINNATI resumed operations from the U.S. East Coast. She was used in the training of prospective commanding officers and conducted further sound trials and weapons exercises, reflecting the Navy's practice of using new attack submarines both for their own readiness and as platforms to qualify future commanders on nuclear submarines. In August 1979, during operations off the southeastern United States, she took part in one of the most widely reported individual events of her career. A Finnish seaman from the freighter FINNBEAVER had fallen overboard and drifted in the Atlantic for roughly twenty-two hours. CINCINNATI located and recovered him about 70 miles off the east coast of Florida, an incident later retold in multiple Navy and veterans' accounts as an example of the submarine force's role in peacetime search-and-rescue when already at sea.

Later in 1979, the submarine underwent workups for her first overseas deployment. According to a former-crew chronology based on contemporaneous logs, she departed Norfolk for the Mediterranean on November 27, 1979, beginning a roughly five-month cruise. After crossing the Atlantic, she entered the NATO submarine support facility at La Maddalena, Italy, on December 10, 1979, remaining in port until December 27 for upkeep and crew rest. In early 1980, she took part in Sixth Fleet operations in the central and eastern Mediterranean. Port-call records from that same cruise indicate visits to Naples, Italy, from February 7-13, 1980, an anchorage off Athens, Greece, from February 17-21, and a further call at Naples on March 19 as she cycled between at-sea patrols and support-area visits. She completed this first Mediterranean deployment and returned to her home waters on April 24, 1980.

In the broader Cold War context, these operations supported NATO surveillance and anti-submarine warfare in a period marked by high Soviet naval activity in the Mediterranean and continued U.S. interest in secure sea-lines around southern Europe and the Middle East.

In the autumn of 1980, CINCINNATI became briefly prominent in the U.S. media when she hosted former President Richard M. Nixon and Admiral Hyman G. Rickover for an overnight familiarization and orientation cruise. Navy historical summaries compiled from the ship's command histories list the event under October 1980, while several later narrative accounts place it in November after a Mediterranean patrol. All agree that it occurred in late 1980, with Nixon and the influential head of the Navy's nuclear propulsion program embarked together for a short underway period. The cruise was intended to give the former president an updated understanding of modern nuclear-submarine operations at sea, and it underscored CINCINNATI's role as a representative of the then-new LOS ANGELES-class.

By late 1980, CINCINNATI had been tasked to operate farther afield. Official summaries and later descriptions agree that she made an extended deployment to the Indian Ocean spanning 1980-1981, during which she effectively circumnavigated the globe. Under the command of Commander Kurt T. Juroff, the submarine steamed on the order of 60,000 miles and served with both Atlantic and Pacific fleets in the course of this around-the-world cruise. The deployment took place against the backdrop of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and continued U.S. presence in the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean following the Iran hostage crisis, when American carrier battle groups and their escorting submarines maintained a strong presence in the region. One documented port call during this cruise was a visit to Western Australia: from June 8-13, 1981, CINCINNATI moored at HMAS Stirling at Rockingham near Perth for rest and recreation, giving her crew a rare liberty stop in Australia before the submarine continued on her route back toward the United States. A U.S. Naval Institute review of naval events in 1981 later noted that CINCINNATI's arrival back at Norfolk completed this global circuit, emphasizing the fact that she had served successively with forces in both oceans during the cruise.

After the conclusion of the Indian Ocean deployment and world cruise, CINCINNATI settled into the pattern typical of Atlantic-based LOS ANGELES-class boats in the mid-Cold War years, alternating periods of maintenance and local training with further deployments. The Navy's historical evaluation based on the boat's command histories records that over her career she completed five Mediterranean deployments in addition to the Indian Ocean cruise, reflecting a consistent focus on Sixth Fleet support and NATO operations.

Open-source material gives only fragmentary detail for some of these later cruises, but a U.S. Naval Institute survey of 1985 naval operations confirms that during a mid-1980s Mediterranean deployment CINCINNATI made port visits at Naples and La Maddalena, as well as Palma de Mallorca and Gibraltar, combining upkeep periods with at-sea tasks in one of the era's key maritime theaters. Crew recollections preserved in veterans' biographies further indicate that during this general period the submarine operated not only in the Mediterranean and central Atlantic but also in northern waters. At least one former officer records earning his "Blue Nose" qualification for crossing the Arctic Circle while serving in CINCINNATI, showing that she sometimes pushed into high-latitude patrol areas associated with tracking Soviet forces transiting from the Northern Fleet.

By the later 1980s, as reflected in the same Navy summary, CINCINNATI had accumulated a record that merited several unit-level recognitions. The historical evaluation credits the boat with one Meritorious Unit Commendation, one Navy Expeditionary Service Medal and three Armed Forces Service Medals over her service life, indicating participation in at least one expeditionary operation and several later qualifying operations or contingencies, even though the unclassified summaries do not tie individual awards to specific named operations in the open record.

Throughout these years, she continued to be homeported in Norfolk and assigned to Commander Submarine Force Atlantic (COMSUBLANT). Photographic evidence from the early 1980s shows CINCINNATI moored alongside submarines such as USS MEMPHIS (SSN 691) at East Coast facilities, reflecting her integration into the operational rotation of the growing LOS ANGELES-class force.

With the end of the Cold War approaching, CINCINNATI remained active in both the North Atlantic and Mediterranean. Biographical notes for later senior officers document that Lieutenant (later Captain) David J. Kern reported aboard CINCINNATI as engineer officer in 1990 and deployed with the submarine to the North Atlantic, a period when U.S. submarines were still honing anti-submarine tactics but were also beginning to shift focus toward broader regional contingency operations.

Rear Admiral Thomas Wall likewise recalls serving as a division officer on CINCINNATI and completing both North Atlantic and Mediterranean deployments during his tour. In these years, the Mediterranean saw increased attention because of instability around the collapse of the Soviet Union and later the crises in the Balkans, and Atlantic submarines like CINCINNATI contributed to surveillance, deterrence and presence missions under U.S. and NATO tasking, even though specific patrol details remain largely classified.

Command-history data summarized for NAVSEA indicate that CINCINNATI continued to make Mediterranean deployments into the mid-1990s, completing her tally of five Med cruises before decommissioning. Between these deployments, she underwent the normal cycle of upkeep and inspections in U.S. ports and ranges, maintaining her nuclear propulsion plant and combat systems within the standards required for LOS ANGELES-class boats. No major mishaps or accidents are recorded in the official summaries, which instead present a picture of a submarine that sustained a steady tempo of operations - Atlantic training, Mediterranean cruises, and northern forays - over roughly seventeen years of active service.

By the mid-1990s, the Navy was beginning to reduce the size of its attack-submarine force in response to post-Cold War budget constraints, and many early LOS ANGELES-class hulls faced retirement earlier than their maximum technical life in order to avoid the cost of reactor refueling overhauls. For CINCINNATI, whose reactor core was approaching the point where such an overhaul would have been required, the Navy elected to inactivate and dispose of the boat instead. According to the NAVSEA historical evaluation, she entered an inactivation availability on January 7, 1995, a shipyard period that extended through July 31, 1995.

During this time, her weapons and much of her equipment were removed, and preparations were made for long-term storage and eventual dismantling. She was formally decommissioned and stricken from the Naval Vessel Register on July 29, 1995, ending her active career after just over seventeen years in commission. The hull was transferred to Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Washington State to await processing in the Navy's Ship-Submarine Recycling Program.

Even after decommissioning, the physical story of CINCINNATI continued. As with other nuclear submarines, the Ship-Submarine Recycling Program removed the reactor compartment as a sealed unit for transport to the Department of Energy reservation at Hanford, Washington, where defueled reactor compartments are stored in a specially engineered trench. News reports note that the reactor compartment from ex-CINCINNATI was moved by barge up the Columbia River to Hanford in September 2014, marking the completion of the most sensitive stage of her disposal.

Other parts of the submarine - most notably the sail and portions of the upper rudder - were set aside for preservation. After an earlier attempt to create a riverfront museum in the city of Cincinnati did not advance, veterans and civic groups developed a new plan for a Cold War memorial at Voice of America MetroPark in West Chester Township, Ohio. By 2024-2025, local announcements and ground-breaking ceremonies confirmed that these components from USS CINCINNATI would form the centerpiece of the USS CINCINNATI Cold War Memorial Peace Pavilion.

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USS CINCINNATI Patch Gallery:

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