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.

Comments

Re:Old News

[Jarjarthejedi]

There is little doubt that Saddam must have had the capability to gas his own people, many modern pesticides could be used for that with few alterations. The question was if he had the capability to manufacture high quality chemical weapons of the type that are dangerous to anyone, not the capability to kill his own people.

Heck, if he really couldn't get his hands on any other chemical weapons, he could just use Chlorine, which is not hard to get (a number of insurgent attacks have already been carried out with it) and very deadly.

Just because there's no evidence Saddam had chemical weapons doesn't mean he couldn't have gassed people. The two are entirely different matters, with one (chemical weapons) being highly tailored chemicals designed to kill the highest number of people from a distance, even if highly dispersed, and the other being easy to acquire but not very effective unless used in controlled circumstances (chlorine is useless because its visible and easily stopped by a gas mask).

Trying to simplify something as complex as chemical and biological weapon capabilities down to a simple Yes/No boolean is foolish. There are a near infinite range of possibilities. The US has the capability to very quickly and easily manufacture a boatload of chemical weapons (of the real weaponized kind, not the other kind) yet if you asked the average person if the US had chemical weapons I bet you'd get a response of No. Same goes for biological. Weapons are complex, especially when you start talking weapons that have other purposes besides war.