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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.
I remember hearing about this quite a few years ago, so this really isn't ground breaking news. I wish I could name a source....probably the Discovery Channel. I saw the special on the National Geographic Channel about this last night. The part that amazes me is that Ballard was able to keep his French partner in the dark about searching for the Scorpion.
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
The remotely-controlled drone that Ballard used to search for the Thresher, Scorpion, and Titanic is an excellent example of a piece of dual-use equipment.
More recent exploration of the Titanic's wreckage with remote drones and two-man submarines indicates that the edge of the iceberg that the Titanic hit may have been somewhat "crowbar" shaped, with a vertically-oriented escarpment below the surface puncturing the ship from underneath, in addition to gashing it open from the side. This may help explain why the Titanic sank so rapidly, since the side-hull tears didn't seem to be large enough to account for the volume of water pouring into the ship.
Actually the Navy has been down to the Thresher and Scorpion sites several times, with cameras, many decades ago.
While the Navy may have funded Ballard's research, it's unlikely that a "cover story" would fool anybody. Those thingies are expensive to build and run, nobody does that just for fun.
They had this huge Howard Hughes project to vacuum up metallic nodules off the ocean floor that was a cover to attempt to recover a Russian sub that sank in 15000 feet of water, they got a chunk of it, but a mechanical failure resulted in most of the sub staying on the bottom.
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The English Navy where also 'rumored' to know the position of the boat (back in 1985) with all that submarine detection stuff in the atlantic perhaps its was question of knowing what to do with the data. The Royal Navy didnt find it physically but according to one newspaper hack they where spot on when it was found.
There's a lot of controversy about exactly what was recovered. It's now public knowledge that the remains of some of the Soviet crew was recovered. It's also believed that multiple missiles were recovered, as you indicated. But how could they successfully recover missiles from inside the sub as well as human remains but not recover much of the actual sub itself? The public story that the claw used to grab the sub broke and thereby caused the sub to also break in half seems a bit far fetched given what was recovered.
Er, it used to be fairly common practice. It certainly was in the UK for quite some time: the low level waste was put into drums, sealed up and dumped in the Irish Sea. Windscale used to discharge certain by-products into the Irish Sea, too.
Turns out the Irish weren't to happy about that.
They had only used towed cameras to photograph Scorpion before. The Thresher was visited by the Trieste and they had recovered some parts.
The Thresher did go down during sea trials after an overhaul. There were several factors that sank her, too many for here. One soul actually called the depth every 50 ft as they sank, no panic just steady data. He knew what was coming!
The Scorpion was sunk by a battery malfunction in a Mark 37 electric torpedo. The battery got hot enough to set off the warhead or exploded and set it off. Then the rest of the torpedo warheads detonated.
Electric torpedoes have sunk more of our subs than enemy vessels. The MK18 in WWII sank the Tang and several other boats as they had a tendency for circular runs. If anyone ever proposes another electric fish he should be shot!
A cold war Sub sailor.
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I read this in his official illustrated book out in the mid 1990s, so it most certainly is not news!
The Thresher is believed to have been lost 200 miles east of Massachusetts. The Scorpion left Spain and was to scout near the Azores. The Titanic was found 13 miles from its last reported position southwest of Newfoundland. There is a possibility that Ballard could have found the Thresher. It's extremely improbable that they would have found the Scorpion as it was thousands of miles away.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Probably the most interesting thing about that mission was the real reason behind it...
The Russian sub had left its assigned patrol area without leave. It surfaced and may have attempted a rogue missile launch against Hawaii. A failsafe or tamper-proofing or other failure caused the missile to self-destruct inside the launch tube. The sub then sank.
In the salvage effort the Americans weren't aiming to learn anything about Soviet nuclear sub construction. Rather, they wanted to prove (to the Russians) the suspicion that the sub's officers had gone rogue. This information was a powerfully upsetting revelation to the Russian military command, because it meant they did not have reliable control over their boomers.
John Craven, one of the guys who worked on the salvage project eventually wrote a tell-some book about it. Fascinating stuff.
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You should also use nonsenseofhumor tags so the humor-impaired will get a message instead of a blank space, or people with their senseofhumor disabled will know they're missing content and can re-enable it if they wish.
For example:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=570431&cid=23629289
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Realistically, it reduces to two things:
1) When the Main Seawater Pipe shears, the boat sinks. Period. The engine room has too much volume to be lifted to the surface by any combination of blowing ballast and driving up, even ignoring that you lose the main engines when the MSW shears.
2) The High Pressure Air system iced up. The air in the tanks wasn't dry enough, and when it expanded, it froze out until the pipes were blocked. Which pretty much prevented blowing ballast.
Everyone who goes down in one of the boats knows. There's always the chance of taking the Thresher and Scorpion out of Port and Starboard when you go down, and any sane sailor knows it. Any experienced sailor knows how many times his boat has come closer than he'd like to doing it (mine, once while I was on it, once before that), and worries every time he goes down.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Used in that way, it refers to watchstanding. Normally, a Sailor stands one watch in three. Occasionally, for whatever reason, you find yourself standing one watch in two. Which means you are Port and Starboard with the other guy who stands your watch while you sleep.
The Thresher and Scorpion are on a Port and Starboard watch at the bottom, waiting for someone to come along and put them on a three-watch rotation...
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
This was neither. It was Dr. Ballard and a retired admiral involved in the project independently describing the work to National Geographic, which Ballard now works for. Presumably they were finally cleared to reveal this, but as I understand it (I'm not with National Geographic), the accounts came from them as individuals, not in any capacity as naval officers. As others mentioned above, this cover-up was also related on the Discovery channel a few years ago, although it doesn't sound like the sources were as clear.
The timing of this particular article is related to the release of a film documentary about it on the National Geographic Channel last night. I know this because I had the fortuitious opportunity to act as a red-shirt extra (meaning I died) in the production of the documentary back in November.
In my opinion it was a decently interesting, slightly over-dramatized program. Those who regularly watch the History Channel like I do will enjoy it. If you care to watch it, keep an eye out for a sailor frantically trying to restart a scrammed reactor* during the account of the loss of USS Thresher! The program is called Undercover Titanic with Bob Ballard.
As for hiding military operations behind civil facades, that's not at all uncommon, nor do I find it particularly scandalous. In this case, the civil facade was real and actually did achieve its objective. If you want an example of a good, old-fashioned SNAFU with a totally bogus non-military cover-up, read about Project Jennifer and the Glomar Explorer. That story broke 20+ years ago, and it's partially why the Navy wanted the examinations of Thresher and Scorpion kept secret. If we could steal (or at least try to) top secret Soviet hardware from the ocean floor, they could do the same to us, if they knew where to look.
* Bonus trivia - the submarine the re-enactment portion was filmed on is a retired diesel-electric boat built the same year as USS Scorpion. The "Radiation Hazard" signs were just props to distract you from the huge diesel engines they were hung on.
The story I've heard (from one who worked closely on the Glomar project) is that:
1) An early SOSUS network picked up a rather large "thump" from a region of the ocean in which the rogue sub was suspected to be. Using the SOSUS data is how people were able to find the wreckage in the first place;
2) Recovered was part of the hull, which proved to be very pitted along its top surface, and Russian sailor corpses, who were wearing heavy coats of the type *worn when fuelling missiles*;
3) Simulations done at-sea later, with high-explosives, indicates that the pitting and deformations of the hull were probably left there when something exploded *above* the sub;
4) Postulations abound, but one making the rounds is that a nuclear warhead launched from the sub exploded above it, essentially forcing the entire sub underwater. When the sub reached its crush depth, the distinctive sound that the hull makes when collapsing is what SOSUS picked up.
I haven't read the fictionalized accounts about the whole incident. All that I report here I have heard from one who worked with Craven, and I don't know how much is hearsay or simply good storytelling.
CAN you dispose of reactors by ocean dumping? If so, it seems like they should just build the reactors down there, then get the energy topside somehow. If something happens, just open the door.
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