Why should Americans care anymore about a purported accident aboard an obsolete Third World submarine, aside of course from mourning for the crew? Secretary of State Colin Powell sent his condolences, so there'd seem to be closure even there. Well, here's why we might want to still care:

1. The most recent information only heightens the mystery of how the Ming's crew died. (More below.)

2. The real situation in China's submarine fleet is important to our own future defense plans. The Pentagon and Congress recently issued reports stating we have serious (dangerous?) gaps in our intelligence on Chinese military capabilities and intentions.

3. If North Korea somehow did play a role, this factor should be a major, big-time input to our dealings with the so-called Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) on nuclear arms.

Consider this: Beijing now says that the fatal accident occurred around April 16, but wasn't discovered for ten days or two weeks. The submarine was found drifting by Chinese fishermen, who first noticed a periscope sticking up. The Ming was discovered "partly submerged," but definitely on the surface. The president of China and a senior military official were shown on Beijing TV -- over the weekend of May 3/May 4 -- touring the hulk in port, after the seventy bodies were removed. There was no sign of any damage inside the boat.

Woops! Alarm bells went off in my head as I read this. Seventy corpses rotting for many days, within a hull barely twenty feet in diameter, would have created an utterly, totally unbearable stench. This stench would linger tenaciously. No one could "tour" the vessel without a gas mask or other conspicuous nasal protection. The expression on their faces, otherwise, couldn't possibly be disguised from the cameras. So, was the Ming shown on TV even the real Number 361? (China owns about twenty of the Ming class.) And if the inspection was staged on a sister ship, what is China hiding?

The fact the Ming was found partly submerged could imply she had an accident, while diving or submerged, that began to suffocate the crew, and they tried to surface but didn't make it in time. However, the explanation could be much more mundane. Any naval submarine, including the most advanced nuclear-powered ones, surfaces by blowing air into her main ballast tanks. But that air will gradually leak out, via imperfect seals in the tank upper vents, and by sloshing through the open bottom gratings. If a submarine doesn't periodically inject more air into those tanks, she eventually -- literally -- sinks. So a sub on the surface, on an even keel at first, with everyone suddenly dead, would gradually seem to "partly submerge" over a couple of weeks.

One leading theory for the cause of death is an "engine run-on casualty," in which one or both of the Ming's big diesel engines continued to operate after the sub was closed-up for diving -- or started operating by accident when the sub was deeply submerged. But as mentioned previously, crewmen in theory should be on guard for exactly such a problem, and would shut down the engines fast. The Ming, in fact, because it's an update of known Russian designs, is very likely to have had automatic devices for doing this shut-down, even if the crew were overcome or confused. These devices work like barometers, and are typically set to cut the diesel fuel supply if atmospheric pressure drops by 6 or 7 millimeters of mercury -- barely one percent!

There is, though, one infamous phenomenon which might defeat these safety procedures. If a diesel engine is extremely worn, it could continue running by burning its lube oil for a short while. The best recourse is then to plug the engine block's air intakes -- with rags, crewmen's shirts, anything. One item diesel-sub engine rooms usually have in abundance is rags. Granted, the crewmen might lose consciousness from lack of air before snuffing an engine run-on. But remember, the diesel needs oxygen in its cylinders, or fuel combustion stops instantly. A human being can keep going for some time on the oxygen already in their blood stream. If you're curious, do what I did as an experiment: Exhale suddenly, hard. Then start doing jumping-jacks to simulate physical stress. See how long you last before you just can't resist inhaling. I'm in only moderately good shape fitness-wise, but I managed for forty-five seconds. Given mental "time dilation" common to humans in stress, those seconds on the Ming might each have felt like minutes or hours.

And we still keep coming back to the basic conundrum. If the crew suffocated from a bad engine run-on, with intense pain to their eardrums as the hull's air pressure dropped, why were they all at their posts in such repose? Something just doesn't add up, forensically speaking.

Two other interrelated factors are in play here:

1. There's a big difference between an "obsolete design" and an ancient, decrepit warship. The Ming-class design may trace back to WWII German U-boat practices, but the 361 was built around 1990. And even the U-boats of WWII, primitive as they may seem compared to a modern Los Angeles-class or Seawolf SSN, did give the Allies a frightening run for the money before Black May in 1943. The Mings should not all be dismissed out of hand as unseaworthy rattletraps. Which brings us to the next point.

2. The Ming-class crew is about fifty-five. But seventy people were killed. Who were the "extra" fifteen? Different scenarios suggest themselves, as I'll mention in a moment. But all of these scenarios imply the Ming used would have been one in the best condition, with engines tuned up well, not one virtually fit for the scrap heap.

Now, possible reasons why fifteen extra people were aboard:

1. Dignitaries or officials along for the ride, for an accountability inspection or for good will. This is common practice in the U.S. Navy, so it's believable in China too.

2. Technicians present for special testing. One news source suggests that an air-independent propulsion system was under trial, and it malfunctioned and an explosion or fire occurred. This is certainly possible, but is not consistent with crewmen found peacefully dead and with no visible damage to their boat.

3. Perhaps it's just coincidence, but fifteen is about the size of a U.S. Navy SEAL platoon. Were the riders on the Ming actually Chinese Special Forces, with the Ming on a spy mission to North Korea after all? The DPRK, the world's newest self-proclaimed nuclear power, has been extremely aggressive to her neighbors for many years. The DPRK has done strange things to South Korea using North Korea's own spy subs, she's fought naval battles with Japan's Coast Guard, and even kidnapped innocent Japanese civilians -- plus don't forget the USS Pueblo outrage in the 1960s. Did North Korean frogmen attack the Ming with poison gas, and leave her to float home some 150 miles on the Yellow Sea's prevailing currents, as a eerie ghost ship, to "send a message" to China not to snoop?

I keep coming back to the theory the Ming crew loss was a compromised spy mission for several reasons. One of them is that Chinese officials gave three different explanations for the training mission the Ming was supposedly on. Yet there should have been no confusion on this point. Warships don't just go sailing merrily around like the Yellow Submarine from that old Beatles movie. Submarines leave port with specific written orders to do so, for very specific purposes. There should not have been confusion within China on this matter -- but there was. Consider once more the three missions described:

"A silent, no-contact drill."

"A long-distance navigation training mission."

"An extremely dangerous antisubmarine training exercise."

All three could be euphemisms, invented by different people to explain the same actual fact: The Ming was on an urgent, high-risk espionage deployment against the brand-new nuclear state next door. If so, the Chinese would certainly never fess up. And to save face, they'd surely never admit their Special Forces and submarine crew were defeated by the enemy in such a humiliating way. Besides, whether or not they're the culprits, the North Koreans seem to gain the most by playing dumb.

This "enemy action" theory is conspicuous by its absence from news reports. How much does the U.S. intelligence community really know? We send spy subs to North Korean waters all the time these days. Well, if the CIA or the Pentagon suspect something, they aren't saying. They don't call America's submarine fleet the Silent Service for nothing.

JoeBuff.Com / Joe Buff Inc. Joe Buff, President Dutchess County, New York E-Mail readermail@JoeBuff.Com