Posted on 05/24/2008 8:11:06 AM PDT by PotatoHeadMick
A mission to find the lost wreck of the Titanic was actually a cover story for inspecting the wrecks of two nuclear submarines, the man who discovered the famous liner has revealed.
Dr Bob Ballard led a team in 1985 that pinpointed the wreckage of the enormous ship 73 years after it sank in the Atlantic. But he almost didn't succeed after his top secret mission to find two Cold War subs left him with just 12 days to find the Titanic.
The United States Navy lost two submarines during the 1960s - the USS Thresher and USS Scorpion - which had more than 200 men on board.
Officials feared at least one of them had been sunk by the USSR. When Dr Ballard approached the Navy for funding to find the Titanic using his robotic submarine craft, they asked him to discover the submarines first.
"I couldn't tell anybody," the oceanographer said.
"There was a lot of pressure on me. It was a secret mission. I felt it was a fair exchange for getting a chance to look for the Titanic."
He added: "We handed the data to the experts. They never told us what they concluded – our job was to collect the data. I can only talk about it now because it has been declassified."
The USS Thresher (SSN-593) was the lead ship of her class of nuclear-powered attack submarines. She was lost during deep-sea diving tests in 1963 after a high-pressure pipe blew causing the vessel to lose power and implode as it sank.
However, the USS Scorpion disappeared in 1968 amid speculation that it was sunk by Soviet forces.
Dr Ballard mapped both submarine wrecks using his newly developed underwater robot craft. He concluded that the most likely cause of the Scorpion's destruction was being hit by a rogue torpedo it had fired itself.
Investigating the wrecks gave Dr Ballard the idea of finding a trail of debris that would lead him to the Titanic. Both the Thresher and Scorpion had both broken into thousands of pieces.
He criss-crossed the North Atlantic seabed and eventually found a debris trail that led him to the luxury liner's final resting-place.
He found the Titanic split in two but had little time to explore further. It was not until he returned to the site in 1986 that he was able to make a detailed study.
Too bad conclusions are not posted on the subs.
Considering that this info has been declassified, and also considering that there is no Soviet Union to take action against for any such incident, can’t we find that out somehow?
I thought it was eventually concluded that the Scorpion ran into an uncharted undersea mountain? Of course, maybe thats what they just want us to think.
Ping.
http://www.history.navy.mil/danfs/t/thresher.htm
I believe USS Scorpion was lost in 1968, and the wreckage found and photographed a few months later.
Either this is a garbled story or Ballard is embellishing. I'm inclinded to believe the former.
BS......He can conclude that she was hit by a torpedo.. but how in he77 can he say it was it's own??????
Also what in he77 is she firing at????? You don't go around firing big buck torpedoes at random...much less operational ARMED torpedoes..
My conclusion FWIW is if she was hit by a torpedo then it was USSR's, or if she was hit by her own.. she was defending herself..
BUBBLEHEAD responses????
I served on board a thresher class sub, the uss dace ssn-607.
Actually, subs don’t “implode” as they sink. Generally, they start to collapse and then a joint or pipe blows and floods the compartments one by one.
In brief, the MK 37s they carried had a bad batch of batteries. Electrolyte could leak, causing the battery to partially activate, the reaction would overheat, and cause the adjacent warhead to "cook off." Note, not a full explosion, but quite probably a low-order detonation. Ordnance types believe a low order detonation would probably not be sufficient to set off other warheads nearby. Particularly if the torpedo racks weren't full. (they weren't) Hence possibly no torpedo right next to one that cooked-off.
However, even a low order detonation would be enough to blow the escape and loading hatches from the torpedo room, thus causing catastrophic flooding of the sub and it subsequently falling below crush depth.
Authors back this up with several intriguing facts:
Like I said, they make a good case. However, probably no-one will ever know for sure. There were no other ships or submarines in the area. I also believe there are no bottom features in the area that rise above crush depth for that class of submarine. Hence, it couldn't have run into one, as it had to be well above the bottom.
“Investigating the wrecks gave Dr. Ballard the idea of
finding a trail of debris that would lead him to the Titanic.”
That methodology for locating a wreck has been used forever.
You find a piece of the wreck and you trace it to the main wreckage.
This certainly should not have been any kind of a revelation
for Dr. Ballard or anyone else.
Rumor has it that the USSR sub nocked the conning tower off the Scorpion.
My understanding is that there was a problem with the torpedoes which would sometimes activate while still on board.
If this happened the sub needed to make an immediate hard 180 degree turn to disarm the torpedo. The sub was heading east, near the Azores, after it was known that it was heading for Norfolk. A good compilation of all events surrounding the loss of this Sub can be found in Chapter 5 of the book, “Blind Man’s Bluff” by Sherry Sontag and Chris Drew. ISBN 1-891620-08-8, copyright 1998. There is no evidence that the Soviets were any way involved in this unfortunate accident.
What a trip!
Per "Blind Mans Bluff" (see my other post here) the authors also note this as a remote possibility. The question is, why would they fire a torpedo? Consider.
The authors noted this as a remote possibility... That a MK37 was activated while being tested and that the crew jettisoned it as they had the exercise torpedo, that the safety mechanism failed, and it hit them. But the authors do not seem to believe USS Scorpion's crew would've violated SOP with a warshot.
The acoustic evidence I mentioned in my other post also points to USS Scorpion having executed a 180 degree turn. The sequence of explosions and implosions indicate a course track headed east not west as she should have been going. The theory put forth by the authors is that someone in the forward torpedo room noticed the smoking-hot torpedo (from a battery failure, see my other post) moments before it cooked off. They would've called to the control room something like "Hot Torpedo!" The control room would've immediately taken that to mean "Hot running torpedo" which was the SOP call for a torpedo that activated in its rack. Hence whoever had the conn would've immediately called for a course reversal to deactivate what he thought was a "usual" activated torpedo. However, it wasn't a hot-run, it was physically on fire and moments later exploded, flooding the sub.
Monitoring the site for radiation and mapping the site for details regarding the cause of the wreck are not the same thing.
Even today I believe that Scorpio was sunken by Soviets.
What is bugging me is that Scorpio was heading opposite course of planned and that hade its periscope risen.
True, and as I understand it, no-one is satisfied with what is known about either accident. I believe he may have been asked to take a look with his newer, more capable gear to see if there was any new information to be gained. What I was taking issue with was the notion of his having to “find” them. I believe their locations are very well known as there have been several missions to each to collect any information possible.
Its like Kursk. Cat&mouse play taht is ongoing since WWII and occasionaly costs scores of lives...
bttt
That’s kind of a problem with how you define “find”. Until around the time the Titanic was found there wasn’t really the technology to gather anywhere near the kind of information about location and condition of deep sea wrecks. Obviously it was fairly well known, for example, where the Titanic was or he’d have never “found” that wreck either.
Maybe we must understand one thing.
How many times we bought new car, that is just not working properly, engine trouble, small mechanical errors, sometimes, some cars are just sloppy built or not up to the standards.
Now cars are built in 100 of thousands and errors designer or manufacture ones are being discovered during production.
Submarines are built at the best in their doesents, 10, 20, 30 in series, and there is no chance to discover small failiures until something bad happens.
Now small electrical fiers can happen on cars while you are driving, you know you feel smell, and see smoke coming out of the dashboard...
Now imagine that while you are 300 meters down the surface, and your engine just stopped for some reason...
True, he would’ve had to have “found” the subs in some sense first before he could examine them with his gear. Even knowing their location it isn’t simple. It’s not like have the GPS coordinates of a gas station and simply driving over too it. It is more like flying your helicopter to the coordinates at an altitude of 10 to 15 thousand feet, then dangling a camera on a wire and trying to find the station...
The Thresher nor the Scorpion had a “conning tower”. The old diesel boats had conning towers which were shaped like a rounded off barrel as part of the pressure hull but outside of the actual full pressure hull inside the sail. Those two classes of nukes did away with the conning tower. You may be referring to the “Sail”. Whether or not knocking the sail off would make it sink is questionable. A catastrophic event like that would probably make it sink but that is not absolute.
Coming back to read this more thoroughly later.
” BS......He can conclude that she was hit by a torpedo.. but how in he77 can he say it was it’s own??????”
The torpedoes the Navy was using at the time were notorious for their unreliability. Same thing with our air-launched weapons of the time. The USS Forrestal was nearly sunk because a Zuni rocket decided to “launch itself” on the flight deck.
They think it went hot inside the sub The design was changed.
true, as i mentioned, it was a rumor.
Pinging the submarine list
Aboard the USS Tinosa SSN-606, 1979-1983
Scorpion was not hit by any torpedo, either US or USSR.
Ballard wants to sell a book. I appreciate his help in finding the boat, but he’s wrong.
Actually, subs do implode if they go passed crush depth...at least non-flooded compartments do. The steel the hull is made of will actually fracture under crush depth pressure, into many pieces. The debate we always had was whether we would die first by physically being shredded by the debris, or whether we would burn to death by the heat of the compressed air as the hull gave way. Either way, it would be over for us in a fraction of a second.
Good thing we always had one surface for every dive.
This led directly to changes in reactor startup procedures, and brought the Sub-Safe system into being.
Thresher was checked out immediately on its loss: it was lost on sea trials, and the surface craft supporting the dive knew its location.
Scorpion was much, much harder to find. See Blinds Man Bluff for a comparable story, also believable. We really don't know what happened even now, but have guesses.
My opinion, if it had been a Russian sub torpedo, we would have sunk one of theirs immediately. We didn't know, still don't know, but suspect the torpedo discharged because it lit off in the torpedo room. Its engine exhaust gasses were killing the crew, threatening the integrity of the torpedo tube and hull, and it had to be ejected.
Once ejected, or once it was live and running, it ran anyway/exploded/jammed and “exploded” as a fuel-gas explosion, or turned back/got turned around as the sub turned to try to self-kill the torpedo running logic.
In an emergency, some things may not ever be found out.
This led directly to changes in reactor startup procedures, and brought the Sub-Safe system into being.
I've heard this one before. I also heard that we used to routinely allow our surface Destroyers to practice with live depth charges on our subs. One got too close and blew one of the hull valves. We no longer allow our DDs to practice on us with live ammo.
First I’ve heard of that...
I do know that Thresher was in radio contact with the surface while she was having problems...which is why we were able to pinpoint what led to the sinking.
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