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Search For RMS Titanic Was a Cover Story
wiredog writes "According to National Geographic, Robert Ballard's search for the RMS Titanic in 1985 was a cover operation for the real search: They were looking for the USS Thresher and USS Scorpion, two US nuclear submarines that sank during the Cold War." ABC News also has a story on this two-fer undersea search.
The U.S. government has used false pretenses to cover up secret submarine recovery operations before. In Project Jennifer, the CIA got Howard Hughes to build the Glomar Explorer, ostensibly to mine undersea minerals but actually to try and recover a sunken Russian submarine. The project failed to recover much of the submarine, which broke apart as it was being pulled to the surface. However, two Russian nuclear missiles were recoverd.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
Ya, this was first announced about 3 years ago (I'm a big Titanic buff). That's where/how they got most of their funding for the expedition.
One of my favorite books which tells some of the stories of cold-war era submarine operations is "Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage" (ISBN# 006103004X). One of the stories is about the USS Scorpion.
I haven't read it yet, but the story of the USS Thresher is also told in "The Death of the USS Thresher: The Story Behind History's Deadliest Submarine Disaster" (ISBN# 1592283926).
Very interesting!
SixD
The point wasn't to locate the two subs, it was to get up close investigation of the wreckage.
Proud member of the American Non Sequitur Society. We might not make much sense, but boy do we love pizza!
USS Scorpion has been visited a couple of times, http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/sh-usn/usnsh-s/ssn589-n.htm has pics.
Don't pick up the pho*(@)$*@&@!@ NO CARRIER
I believe that Ballard was looking specifically for the nuclear reactors on board the two subs. The Navy hired him to locate them to ensure they weren't leaking anything radioactive. So he had to do more than just locate the hull of the subs but search the entire debris field of each sub. According to an interview I heard with him just the other day he used what he learned searching those debris fields to locate the Titanic.
The two cited sources actually contradict each other. One says, like the slashdot headline, that the Titanic search was a cover-up. However, the other source directly quotes the searcher and makes it clear that it was not at all a cover-up, but rather the opposite - something that accidentally drew attention when it unexpectedly succeeded. There was concern that the attention might also raise other questions.
Methinks that some of the news media just likes to use the word cover-up, without particular regard for whether or not it fits.
"Royal Mail Ship" is a mark of honor for especially fast ships, qualified to carry the mail.
Probably also because it's similar to the Royal Navy title, HMS = "Her/His Majesty's Ship."
Here. Hasn't been active for a couple of years, though.
Floating face-down in a river of regret...and thoughts of you...
I usually dont do this. But reading the comments here has somewhat frustrated me as you are not alone in not having read the article. It is quite clear if you read it that they were not searching for the subs. They knew exactly where they were. The Navy was interested in having the reactors of the subs inspected for safety and also seeing if they could get any further information.
This was proven not to be the cause, as the area where the torpedoes were stored was neither utterly destroyed nor even partially damaged. You can clearly see that part of the sub perfectly intact in photos. 1 torpedo exploding would cause significant damage - all the torpedoes exploding, whether all at once or in succession, would have completely obliterated the bow.
Subs, Secrets and Spies, NOVA January 19, 1999
When these landlubbers mix up terms. For instance, "The ship is docked..." or "Tied up..." when it's really MOORED.
..."
But, FTA, what caught my eye was:
"They call it scrambling"
BZZZT! Get ur stuff right, reporters. It's SCRAM, as in Safety Control Rod Activation Mechanism. I frackin' knew this back in 80, as a 15-year old. WTF is wrong with these well-funded reporting arms out there? So, the text probably ought have said, "They call it SCRAMing"..., that is, unless something changed that i didn't know about in the past decade or so...
If the reporter wants to discuss "reactors" and "scrambling", then maybe the story should cover intra-molecular scrambling....
http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S1381116996002701
But, the reporter should have done some basic patent and process checking:
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/4337118.html
"APRM 40 transmits a scram signal to the rod drive system 6 to scram the reactor. Scramming takes place when the power level reaches about 120% of the
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Standard operating procedure throughout the cold war. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farallon_Islands#Nuclear_waste
What is this "English" Navy that you speak of? As a loyal subject of Her Majesty I know of a Royal Navy.
You could perhaps get away with describing it as the British Navy, but describing it as the English Navy has been completely incorrect since 1707.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
A civilian provides plausible deniability, which is exactly why the military would ask civilians to do something for them. A civilian research vessel within a few dozen miles of your lost vessel is maybe cause for a raised eyebrow, but a US Navy-flagged vessel nearby is cause to put a few extra subs in the area and maybe send a battle fleet nearby to continue protecting the right to transit international waters.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
There's no official explanation for the loss of the Scorpion, but from the available evidence it seems like it suffered some kind of casualty that quickly drove it under test depth (like flooding or a jammed diving plane). Check out "Silent Steel" by Stephen Johnson for a well-researched and rational look at the events surrounding the Scorpion's loss.
You and your newfangled shiny TV stuff... Back in my day we had books...
"Explorations: my quest for adventure and discovery under the sea." (Hyperion, 1995)
Seriously, not only is this not news, or even new news... TFA gets the sequence of events all wrong. Ballard had already been hunting Titanic with side scan sonar and photo sleds (which is even harder than finding a needle in a haystack) when the Navy approached him to map the wreckage of Thresher and Scorpion. Not find, but map (the locations were already known to the Navy). This was done as part of a Navy project to examine reactors known to be on the bottom of the ocean to determine if reactors could be disposed of by ocean dumping. They also dove on both wrecks using the Alvin (Oxford University Press, 1990) to take samples of the seabed and wreckage and to take radiation readings (photographs from this expedition can be seen at the Naval Historical Center page on Scorpion ).
When the Navy hired him to perform those surveys, he examined the earlier ones (there have been several), and realized that debris trails were the key to locating deep water wrecks. The Scorpion wreck site is compact as she broke up on impact with the bottom. Thresher's wreck on the other hand is scattered across a considerable area as she broke up (relatively) shallow. The Navy however refused to pay for a search for Titanic to prove the theory and to further test Dr. Ballard's new mapping sled. Instead the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution funded a search for Titanic as an extension of the expedition to map the Scorpion's wreckage. (Though all WHOI knew was that it was a classified USN expedition.)
New Scientist reported Ballard was looking for the nuclear subs in a 1995 feature. http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg14719974.500-20-000-tasks-under-the-sea.html
George VI fought at Jutland as an officer on HMS Collingwood. Some of the others had joke appointments, but no-one can complain that he didn't put his ass on the line.
"by that I mean people who don't sit on slashdot all day wondering why everyone else isn't building robots" DECS