Titanic search was cover for secret Cold War subs mission

Times Online ^ | 5/24/08 | Lewis Smith

[Dawnsblood]

The man who located the wreck of the Titanic has revealed that the discovery was a cover story to camouflage the real mission of inspecting the wrecks of two Cold War nuclear submarines.

When Bob Ballard led a team that pinpointed the wreckage of the liner in 1985 he had already completed his main task of finding out what happened to USS Thresher and USS Scorpion.

Both of the United States Navy vessels sank during the 1960s, killing more than 200 men and giving rise to fears that at least one of them, Scorpion, had been sunk by the USSR.

Dr Ballard, an oceanographer, has admitted that he located and inspected the wrecks for the US Navy in top secret missions before he was allowed to search for the Titanic.

Only once he had used his new underwater robot craft to map the submarine wreck sites was he able to use it to crisscross the North Atlantic seabed to pinpoint the last resting place of the luxury liner. It meant he had only 12 days to find the Titanic.

“I couldn’t tell anybody,” he 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.

“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.”

[Interesting Times]

Thresher ping.

[Know et al]

Why would they use a live and armed torpedo in a training exercise? Why did they not have a way to disarm the rogue torpedo? Why did they not have counter measures. If the sub looked like it was run through a shredder, how could they have any idea about the cause of the sinking? Something doesn't smell right.

[ApplegateRanch]

Q: What do these have in common?

John Anthony Walker, Jr

his son, Michael Walker

John Walker Lind

A: They all need a short drop off a tall scaffold.

[sailor4321]

Maybe that’s why it was defective!

[tlb]

>>>I can understand how a visual examination could show that it was destroyed by a torpedo, but how the hell could you tell whose torpedo it was?

Internal blast pattern outward, or not.

[mad_as_he$$]

Thanks for the memory jog. I had forgotten that one. Makes the story even less plausible.

[Vinnie]

Beat me,
‘Assembled in Mexico from US and Chinese parts”

[metesky]

Great book! After I read it I passed it along to an old submariner pal of mine and he had high praise for it.

[null and void]

Yours is better.

[Nailbiter]

One very enlightening book.

[zot]

Thanks for the ping. The loss of Thresher really tore up the little town of Portsmouth, NH, where most of the crew and their families lived.