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| Titanic Cold War Cover |
Bob Ballard found the wreckage of the Titanic in 1985. It turns out now that finding the Titanic was not his first task on his undersea mission. His main goal was to find out what had happened to two Cold War nuclear submarines: the USS Thresher and USS Scorpion. Both vessels sank in the 1960s, taking down 200 men with them, and fears were that the USSR had been responsible.
Ballard, an oceanographer, has confirmed that he located and inspected the two wrecks before the US Navy allowed him to search for the Titanic. After finding the two wrecks, he had only 12 days to search for Titanic but made the most of his time.
"I couldn't tell anybody," he told the Times Online of his top secret mission. "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."
Ballard said that the trail of debris that his inspection of the wrecks showed gave him the idea to do the same thing to find the Titanic. Ballard had developed a robotic submarine and approached the US Navy in 1982 for funding to find the Titanic. The Navy was not interested in looking for the liner, which sank in 1912, but that they were interested in finding their lost submarines and to find out what their submerged nuclear reactors would look like after being underwater for so long.
Thresher had imploded far below the surface and had broken into thousands of pieces. Scorpion was also almost completely destroyed. "It was as though it had been put through a shredding machine. There was a long debris trail," Ballard said.
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