By Howard Wilkinson
The Cincinnati Enquirer

The USS Cincinnati, a nuclear submarine mothballed at the end of the Cold War, probably won't end up as an educational tourist attraction on the Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky riverfront.

But maybe another kind of submarine will.

U.S. Navy officials recently decided that no Los Angeles class submarines - including the decommissioned USS Cincinnati, which went out of service in 1995 - would be donated to any community. The Navy notes many Los Angeles class submarines are still in service and it doesn't want any security breaches.

Submarine Cincinnati Discovery Center, the organization that organized four years ago to try to bring the decommissioned sub it was named after, will continue to try to convince Navy officials to change their minds, said Joseph Jaap, the former Navy officer and Cincinnati layer who founded the effort.

And if that doesn't work, Jaap said, "we'll see what parts of the sub are available to bring here for an educational display."

Jaap's group is determined to bring the USS Cincinnati here and is agreeable to docking it on either the Ohio or Kentucky sides of the river.

But a Northern Kentucky group formed last summer - the National Submarine Science Discovery Center - wants the submarine docked on the Kentucky side near Newport on the Levee.

And the Northern Kentucky group doesn't care if it is the USS Cincinnati or not, as long as what they can get from the Navy is a modern submarine.

"Our project does not depend on any one submarine," said Walter Foster, a trustee of the Northern Kentucky group. "We'll be happy with any modern-age submarine."

Jaap said his organization "is not interested in any old submarine."

"What we have wanted to do from the start is preserve a piece of history that bears the name of this city," Jaap said.

The USS Cincinnati, built in 1974, rode the waves under the North Atlantic as part of the U.S. Navy's delicate and often-dangerous cat-and-mouse game with the Soviet sub fleet. After the Cold War ended, it was decommissioned and sits at a navy yard in Puget Sound in Washington.

Jaap said he was informed of the Navy's decision in "a short letter that didn't offer much of an explanation."

"We're going to go forward," Jaap said. "This is not the end."