Name: cove stanton
Social Justice Group: Nuclear Weapons/Nuclear Proliferation
Date of Fieldwork: January 29, 2024
Name of Organization and person (people) with whom you met and their title(s):Growler submarine at the intrepid
Type of Fieldwork: [69]
What I did and what I learned about my topic, activism, social justice work or civil and human rights work from this fieldwork?:
First when we arrived at the Growler, there was a tiny museum about what the Growler did and just the general backstory before you went inside the Growler. One thing I learned from that museum is that the Growler used to go out on patrol during the cold war era and that the longest it has ever been out on sea was two and a half months, which I thought would be super depressing for the crew. And also during those two and a half months, the crew saw no sunlight because the Growler was very stealthy so they were underwater for most of the time. And to put on top of all that misery, inside the Growler was super skinny and claustrophobic. every single place you walk (except for the dining room and the game room) was a tiny bit wider than the average person. One thing that caught my eye especially was the bathrooms and shower rooms. The rooms were smaller than you can imagine, with little room to move your arms at all. One thing that made everything feel more claustrophobic was the bulkheads. The bulkheads were half the size of the narrow hallways so you kinda had to climb through it. Aside from all the depressing stuff about the Growler, there were also some pretty cool looking things too. The coolest thing was probably where they launched the torpedoes. I got to see what the room looked like and a replica of the torpedoes. I also got to see how it worked, like how they loaded it and how the communication worked between the crew to launch the torpedoes. Another very cool thing was on top of the submarine, the nuclear warhead. It looked pretty big compared to the submarine, at least one eighth of the submarine. Luckily the crew never had to use the weapon while out on patrol. That was my experience on the USS Growler.
