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Search For RMS Titanic Was a Cover Story

Posted by timothy on from the just-like-in-the-spy-who-loved-me dept.

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.

6 of 277 comments (clear)

  1. Project Jennifer by darkmeridian · · Score: 5, Informative

    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/
    1. Re:Project Jennifer by Iphtashu+Fitz · · Score: 5, Informative

      You're correct. They actually performed a burial at sea for the remains of the Soviet sailors that were recovered. In the 1980's during a trip to the Soviet Union, President Regan provided a copy of the video taken during the ceremony. This fact wasn't made public until almost 15 years later though. A short snippet of the video has been shown on a tv show about the Glomar Explorer & it's true mission. It was on one of the tv channels like Discovery or History Channel.

      And here's a bit more trivia. Know why it was called "Project Jennifer"? Jennnifer was the name of the daughter of the guy who conceived of the idea.

  2. A great submarine book.. by SixDimensionalArray · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  3. Re:Fractured story by Iphtashu+Fitz · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  4. Re:Thresher was found years before. by Xiaran · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  5. Re:Old News by DerekLyons · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.)