Objective To establish a safety culture scale for conventional submarine troops and to analyze the key factors influencing the safety during peace time, so as to provide evidence for future study. Methods Twenty-five items from relative scales were sorted based on a literature review, and 21 of them were included in the final safety questionnaire after extensive analysis and review. A total of 180 submariners were surveyed with the questionnaire, and the effective response rate was 81.67% (147) and their data were used for further analysis. Results Thirty-two (21.77%) responders have experienced a safety incidence, and 12 (8.16%) had been injured due to the incidences. Four dimensions of the safety culture for the target population were indentified by exploratory factor analysis, including commitment to safety by the decision-makers, satisfaction degree of safety effort, priority of safety effort, and communication on safety, which could explain 71.532% of the variance. The Cronbach's α was calculated for each scale (all over 0.7), indicating satisfactory internal consistency for this measurement. Conclusion High incidence of safety events and injury rate of the participants from submarine troop demand more efforts on safety. Submariners are different from other seafarers in civil groups. They are trained to be obedient to orders and leadership, aware of the importance of missions; on the other hand they have stronger self-consciousness and they are not satisfied with simple emphasis on safety and repeated education. However, they are not active in reporting safety issues to the superiors, so the safety culture among them needs to be improved.