Enough with the Titanic!

[lpetrich]

Two Fallen Nuclear Submarines and Their Top-Secret Link to the Titanic

In the 1980s, Ballard received funding from the Navy to develop underwater robotic camera technology. The Navy asked him to use the technology to study the USS Thresher, which sank on April 10, 1963, killing all 129 on board, and the USS Scorpion, lost on May 22, 1968, with its 99-person crew. Many Connecticut residents died on the Thresher, and the Scorpion was built in Groton at Electric Boat. The Navy wanted to study the submarines to see how nuclear materials — in addition to its reactor, the Scorpion was carrying nuclear weapons — fared in the ocean over time and how they affected the environment of their North Atlantic resting sites.

“We want you to look for radioactivity. We want you to find the reactors,” Ballard recalls being told. “In the case of the Scorpion, we want you to go inside to look for the nuclear weapons.”

What he found:

From studying the wreckage of the Thresher and Scorpion, Ballard learned that pieces of debris form a line on the seabed from lightest object to the heaviest, which is typically the bulk of the vessel’s hull. “[I was] thinking it was going to be a circular pile of stuff, and it was a comet instead,” he says.

It was an important observation. Ballard used that knowledge to follow the debris trail of the Titanic to the shipwreck. Mixed with the elation of finding the Titanic was worry that it would attract too much attention to the secret portion of the expedition. It didn’t. “It was a perfect cover,” Ballard says.

Robert Ballard also discovered the remains of a sunken WWII German battleship: The Wreck of the Bismarck

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Man, that ship was doomed the day they named it The Wreck of the Bismarck.