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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.
Bush's search for WMDs in Iraq was actually a cover story for the real search: Where's Waldo?
So is James Cameron going to make a 3 hour chick flick where a young enlisted man falls in love with a high ranking officer, and they make love in the engine room while the Captain, the officer's life partner, searches frantically for him. Then the submarine starts to sink and the gay enlisted man gives the officer the last life jacket and the officer says, "I'll never let go!" and then he lets go and James Cameron wins 200 more Oscars?
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/
Hey, RMS might be a little on the large size, but Titanic? Come on.
Phoenix, Boston, Little Rock, see a pattern?
Didn't anybody else wonder how Ballard got funding for a picture taking expedition? Salvage in the ocean is basically anyone's ball game and is funded on premise of profit...who else other than the Navy would be funding essentially R&D for salvage without salvaging anything?
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
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.
Infuriate left and right
Knowing where on the surface the Thresher went down is quite different from knowing where she lies on the bottom, 11,000 or so feet below. Ships travel significant distances on their way to the bottom, since they don't just drop vertically. Not only are there currents, but also the boat is not spherical, so it has more hydrodynamic resistance in some aspects than others. That makes it glide and twirl down like a leaf falling through air. It's also breaking apart on the way, and releasing air, and these impulses further push and pull on the wreckage as it sinks. They reach a respectable downward velocity, probably 40-80 MPH near the end, but even so it takes a good 5-10 minutes to get to the bottom. Plenty of time to travel many miles horizontally.
In any event, the purpose of Ballard's expedition was not just to know where the subs were, but to know whether the Soviets had found them yet, and to know what condition they were in (so if the Soviets did find them, it would be known what knowlege might have been at risk).
A friend of mine who is an editor on the 'reality' TV show, 'The Deadliest Catch,' told me it's actually a documentary on the search for the Russian sub that sank in 2003 while it was being towed to the scrapyard. Most of the work he has to do is replace the unmanned search subs with CGI crab pots in every shot.
The producers are financing the search for the nuclear sub by selling it to the Discovery Channel as a fishing show. Once they find the submarine, then they're going to remove all the CGI and do a little more editing and re-sell the same footage back to the Discovery Channel as a submarine salvage show.
Still no word on what the producers are planning to do with the nuclear kit they're hunting for.
Seth
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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.
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.)