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The Military Science

Search For RMS Titanic Was a Cover Story 277

Posted by timothy from the just-like-in-the-spy-who-loved-me dept.
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.
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Search For RMS Titanic Was a Cover Story

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  • In other news (Score:5, Funny)

    by InvisblePinkUnicorn ( 1126837 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @11:37AM (#23640003)
    Bush's search for WMDs in Iraq was actually a cover story for the real search: Where's Waldo? [triumf.ca]

  • Old News (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Major Blud ( 789630 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @11:38AM (#23640011) Homepage
    I remember hearing about this quite a few years ago, so this really isn't ground breaking news. I wish I could name a source....probably the Discovery Channel. I saw the special on the National Geographic Channel about this last night. The part that amazes me is that Ballard was able to keep his French partner in the dark about searching for the Scorpion.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by sjwest ( 948274 )
      The English Navy where also 'rumored' to know the position of the boat (back in 1985) with all that submarine detection stuff in the atlantic perhaps its was question of knowing what to do with the data. The Royal Navy didnt find it physically but according to one newspaper hack they where spot on when it was found.

      • Re:Old News (Score:5, Informative)

        by jabuzz ( 182671 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @01:18PM (#23641443) Homepage
        What is this "English" Navy that you speak of? As a loyal subject of Her Majesty I know of a Royal Navy.

        You could perhaps get away with describing it as the British Navy, but describing it as the English Navy has been completely incorrect since 1707.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by LWATCDR ( 28044 )
        That is pretty unlikely.
        Most systems use sound. A sunken ship is pretty dang quite.
        The other system that I can think of is MAD and with all the ships on the bottom of the North Atlantic I doubt that they would know the Titanic from a liberty ship from a MAD contact.
        I find it most interesting that they found the Titanic using the experence they gained from imaging the Threaser and Scorpion. I have to wonder why looking at our own subs was such a big secret?
        Now if they took a look at that Mike or Yankee that

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Richard_at_work ( 517087 )
      I read this in his official illustrated book out in the mid 1990s, so it most certainly is not news!

    • Re:Old News (Score:5, Informative)

      by Jeremy Erwin ( 2054 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @12:59PM (#23641169) Journal
      Discovery Channel? DISCOVERY Channel? You and your newfangled fancy pants cable channels. Back in the day, we didn't have A&E or History, or Discovery. We had PBS. And it was free. Except for Pledge week.

      Subs, Secrets and Spies, NOVA January 19, 1999 [pbs.org]

      NARRATOR: Scattered fragments of twisted metal are all that remains of Thresher, the greatest submarine of her day. This footage was shot in the 1980s by Bob Ballard, as part of a classified Navy effort to survey the debris. His cover story was his search for the Titanic.

      • Re:Old News (Score:5, Informative)

        by DerekLyons ( 302214 ) <<fairwater> <at> <gmail.com>> on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @02:59PM (#23642869) Homepage
        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) [amazon.com]
         
        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) [amazon.com] 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 [navy.mil] ).
         
        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 [whoi.edu] 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.)

        • Well? Can you? (Score:3, Interesting)

          by inKubus ( 199753 )
          CAN you dispose of reactors by ocean dumping? If so, it seems like they should just build the reactors down there, then get the energy topside somehow. If something happens, just open the door.
    • But now it appears that Ballard, and the Navy, are admitting it.

    • Re:Old News (Score:5, Informative)

      by tm2b ( 42473 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @01:40PM (#23641739) Journal
      I love the way people immediately start whining about things being "old news" without bothering to RTFA.

      Pieces of this Cold War tale have been known since the mid-1990s, but more complete details are now coming to light, said Titanic's discoverer, Robert Ballard.

  • This is either... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    a test to measure the international paranoia level or a carefully timed admission, now that nobody would be surprised anymore about the US faking a civil operation to hide military objectives.

    • gee duh huh (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Quadraginta ( 902985 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @12:36PM (#23640859)
      Oh yeah, because, you know, you shouldn't hide military objectives. They should be done right out in the open. Gentlemen don't read other gentlemens' mail. And all this hiding behind rocks and stuff when you're in a shooting war? Totally not cricket, old boy. You're supposed to just form ranks in your nice red uniforms and march out into the machine-gun fire, closing up ranks whenever someone takes a bullet.

      Sheesh.

    • Neither (Score:3, Interesting)

      by iamlucky13 ( 795185 )
      This was neither. It was Dr. Ballard and a retired admiral involved in the project independently describing the work to National Geographic, which Ballard now works for. Presumably they were finally cleared to reveal this, but as I understand it (I'm not with National Geographic), the accounts came from them as individuals, not in any capacity as naval officers. As others mentioned above, this cover-up was also related on the Discovery channel a few years ago, although it doesn't sound like the sources were

  • The Diamond (Score:4, Funny)

    by D Ninja ( 825055 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @11:41AM (#23640057)
    Nah...Robert Ballard was really searching for a very expensive diamond [imdb.com] dropped overboard by Rose.

  • Titanic 2: Underwater Love (Score:5, Funny)

    by Forrest Kyle ( 955623 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @11:41AM (#23640059) Homepage
    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?

    • Re:Titanic 2: Underwater Love (Score:5, Funny)

      by Hal_Porter ( 817932 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @11:44AM (#23640105)

      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?
      It's like a slash fanfic adapted for twitter.

  • Project Jennifer (Score:5, Informative)

    by darkmeridian ( 119044 ) <william@chuang.gmail@com> on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @11:41AM (#23640061) Homepage
    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.

    • Re:Project Jennifer (Score:4, Informative)

      by VEGETA_GT ( 255721 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @11:46AM (#23640137)
      I believe they also recovered 12 Russian crew members bodies in the piece they did recover which there given a proper burial at sea. Tho they have never actually stated how much of the sub was actually recovered or what was in it. In all honesty this is the first time I heard any specifics of what was brought up.

      • Re:Project Jennifer (Score:5, Informative)

        by Iphtashu Fitz ( 263795 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @12:05PM (#23640361)
        You're correct. They actually performed a burial at sea for the remains of the Soviet sailors that were recovered. In the 1980's during a trip to the Soviet Union, President Regan provided a copy of the video taken during the ceremony. This fact wasn't made public until almost 15 years later though. A short snippet of the video has been shown on a tv show about the Glomar Explorer & it's true mission. It was on one of the tv channels like Discovery or History Channel.

        And here's a bit more trivia. Know why it was called "Project Jennifer"? Jennnifer was the name of the daughter of the guy who conceived of the idea.

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        The unofficial story is that the entire operation was successful with a full recovery of all weapons, code books, navigation systems, communication encryption hardware, etc. The bodies of the soviet sailors were returned to the location for a proper burial along with dissected wreckage of the Soviet sub that could be scattered to create a debris field to make the mission look like a failure. The failure story was designed as disinformation to keep the Soviets guessing as to how much we knew about their mi

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Iphtashu Fitz ( 263795 )
      There's a lot of controversy about exactly what was recovered. It's now public knowledge that the remains of some of the Soviet crew was recovered. It's also believed that multiple missiles were recovered, as you indicated. But how could they successfully recover missiles from inside the sub as well as human remains but not recover much of the actual sub itself? The public story that the claw used to grab the sub broke and thereby caused the sub to also break in half seems a bit far fetched given what w

      • Re:Project Jennifer (Score:4, Informative)

        by darkmeridian ( 119044 ) <william@chuang.gmail@com> on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @12:25PM (#23640669) Homepage
        The operation pulled up only a small fraction of the submarine, but it was 38 feet's worth of submarine. You can fit six corposes and two nuclear missiles in that much space. It's also unclear what the CIA would be lying about at this time; were there space aliens in the submarine?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by afidel ( 530433 )
        No it's easy to believe, returning hulls from the deep often cracks them along some seam, if one part of the ship had its center of gravity within the cradle while the other part did not it's easy to imagine how they could recover a part of the ship with contents in tact while the other part would be lost
    • The article on the Nt'l Geo site makes no mention of K-129, the Soviet sub that sank in 1968 in the Pacific Ocean about 200 miles from Hawaii. I suppose it's not directly related to the story. But the sub sank due to an unknown reason, and apparently released a lot of plutonium into the oceans. Note what the person leading the funeral service in the Google Video [google.com] said the Soviet sailors died in the service of their nation during Cold War hostilities. He also said their remains were recovered six years later,
      • K-129 was the sub that was targeted by the Glomar Explorer (Project Jennifer). See all the other posts here that mention those two.
    • The official report states that the K-129's forward section broke apart while being winched up by Glomar Explorer, but that two nuclear-tipped torpedoes and the remains of six crewmen were recovered (they were given a memorial service and buried at sea with military honors by the U.S. Navy). There have been whispers that the official story was disinformation for the Soviets' benefit, and that the mission was an unqualified success, recovering a ballistic missile and the real jackpot, the code books containi

    • Re:Project Jennifer (Score:5, Interesting)

      by inviolet ( 797804 ) <slashdot@ide[ ]atter.org ['asm' in gap]> on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @01:53PM (#23641899) Journal

      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.

      Probably the most interesting thing about that mission was the real reason behind it...

      The Russian sub had left its assigned patrol area without leave. It surfaced and may have attempted a rogue missile launch against Hawaii. A failsafe or tamper-proofing or other failure caused the missile to self-destruct inside the launch tube. The sub then sank.

      In the salvage effort the Americans weren't aiming to learn anything about Soviet nuclear sub construction. Rather, they wanted to prove (to the Russians) the suspicion that the sub's officers had gone rogue. This information was a powerfully upsetting revelation to the Russian military command, because it meant they did not have reliable control over their boomers.

      John Craven, one of the guys who worked on the salvage project eventually wrote a tell-some book about it. Fascinating stuff.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by gardyloo ( 512791 )
        The story I've heard (from one who worked closely on the Glomar project) is that:

        1) An early SOSUS network picked up a rather large "thump" from a region of the ocean in which the rogue sub was suspected to be. Using the SOSUS data is how people were able to find the wreckage in the first place;
        2) Recovered was part of the hull, which proved to be very pitted along its top surface, and Russian sailor corpses, who were wearing heavy coats of the type

  • Titantic title unfair (Score:5, Funny)

    by gihan_ripper ( 785510 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @11:41AM (#23640071) Homepage
    Hey, RMS [wikipedia.org] might be a little on the large size, but Titanic? Come on.

  • Wow, it makes sense now... (Score:3, Funny)

    by monkeyboythom ( 796957 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @11:41AM (#23640075)

    "I was a little short with him," said Thunman, who retired as a vice admiral and now lives in Springfield, Illinois. He emphasized that the mission was to study the sunken warships. Once Ballard had completed his mission--if time was left--Thunman said, Ballard could do what he wanted, but never gave him explicit permission to search for the Titanic.

    And all this time I thought Ballard was pissy because the others on the boat were making fun of his hair loss.

    Now I know it was both!

  • Imagine the phone call home? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Lurker2288 ( 995635 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @11:43AM (#23640097)
    "Hi, Navy? It's Bob Ballard. Guess what I just found."

  • Doesn't Compute (Score:4, Insightful)

    by headhot ( 137860 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @11:44AM (#23640103) Homepage
    I call BS. The USN knew exactly where the Thresher when down as if failed durring monitored sea trials, and knew that the Scorpion didn't go down in the North Atlantic.

    • Re:Doesn't Compute (Score:5, Informative)

      by brouski ( 827510 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @11:56AM (#23640245)
      The point wasn't to locate the two subs, it was to get up close investigation of the wreckage.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by BCW2 ( 168187 )
        They had only used towed cameras to photograph Scorpion before. The Thresher was visited by the Trieste and they had recovered some parts.

        The Thresher did go down during sea trials after an overhaul. There were several factors that sank her, too many for here. One soul actually called the depth every 50 ft as they sank, no panic just steady data. He knew what was coming!

        The Scorpion was sunk by a battery malfunction in a Mark 37 electric torpedo. The battery got hot enough to set off the warhead or exploded

        • Re:Doesn't Compute (Score:5, Informative)

          by Raistlin77 ( 754120 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @12:56PM (#23641115)

          The Scorpion was sunk by a battery malfunction in a Mark 37 electric torpedo. The battery got hot enough to set off the warhead or exploded and set it off. Then the rest of the torpedo warheads detonated.

          This was proven not to be the cause, as the area where the torpedoes were stored was neither utterly destroyed nor even partially damaged. You can clearly see that part of the sub perfectly intact in photos. 1 torpedo exploding would cause significant damage - all the torpedoes exploding, whether all at once or in succession, would have completely obliterated the bow.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by bkr1_2k ( 237627 )
          The article specifically negates your account of how it sank. Read it and check out the videos...

        • Re:Doesn't Compute (Score:5, Interesting)

          by CrimsonAvenger ( 580665 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @03:06PM (#23642967)

          There were several factors that sank her, too many for here.

          Realistically, it reduces to two things:

          1) When the Main Seawater Pipe shears, the boat sinks. Period. The engine room has too much volume to be lifted to the surface by any combination of blowing ballast and driving up, even ignoring that you lose the main engines when the MSW shears.

          2) The High Pressure Air system iced up. The air in the tanks wasn't dry enough, and when it expanded, it froze out until the pipes were blocked. Which pretty much prevented blowing ballast.

          One soul actually called the depth every 50 ft as they sank, no panic just steady data. He knew what was coming!

          Everyone who goes down in one of the boats knows. There's always the chance of taking the Thresher and Scorpion out of Port and Starboard when you go down, and any sane sailor knows it. Any experienced sailor knows how many times his boat has come closer than he'd like to doing it (mine, once while I was on it, once before that), and worries every time he goes down.

          • Re:Doesn't Compute (Score:5, Interesting)

            by CrimsonAvenger ( 580665 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @03:10PM (#23643015)
            Don't like answering myself, but it occurred to me that "Port and Starboard" was not self-explanatory.

            Used in that way, it refers to watchstanding. Normally, a Sailor stands one watch in three. Occasionally, for whatever reason, you find yourself standing one watch in two. Which means you are Port and Starboard with the other guy who stands your watch while you sleep.

            The Thresher and Scorpion are on a Port and Starboard watch at the bottom, waiting for someone to come along and put them on a three-watch rotation...

    • They still needed a deep-water submersible to check them out, and Ballard used the experience with the debris fields of the subs to help him find the Titanic. What exactly are you calling BS on?

    • don't forget how far deep the Atlantic is (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Quadraginta ( 902985 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @12:24PM (#23640647)
      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).

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by UnknowingFool ( 672806 )
        The Thresher is believed to have been lost 200 miles east of Massachusetts. The Scorpion left Spain and was to scout near the Azores. The Titanic was found 13 miles from its last reported position southwest of Newfoundland. There is a possibility that Ballard could have found the Thresher. It's extremely improbable that they would have found the Scorpion as it was thousands of miles away.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dpilot ( 134227 )
        As BCW2 mentions, the Thresher wreckage was visited by Trieste, not that long after it happened. I remember reading about it and looking at the pictures in National Geographic magazine, as a kid. (In retrospect it seems that Picard and Trieste were National Geographic favorites, along with Cousteau.)

        There weren't all that many pictures in the article, and with the limited mobility of Trieste the investigation may not have been very thorough. Perhaps they wanted more detailed investigation by Ballard. Bu
    • This story doesn't add up to me either. One doesn't deviate from military orders to go on a fishing expedition for lost treasure. You could spin it like this. "A government contractor used the cover of finding two nuclear submarines as funding and license to recover artifacts for the the Titanic. This discovery was used by Ballard for his own fame and fortune, at taxpayers expense through a military contract." From the ABC article:

      The Navy made a deal with Ballard. After his submarine search was concluded

  • Uh, duh? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by grocer ( 718489 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @11:44AM (#23640109)
    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?
    • You might have a point if it wasn't the Titanic they claimed to be lokking for. Since it was, I don't find the idea far fetched at all (hint: that's why it was a good cover story, it was believable. Pretending otherwise after the fact doesn't change that).

  • Dual Use Technology (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Lumenary7204 ( 706407 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @11:46AM (#23640135)
    The remotely-controlled drone that Ballard used to search for the Thresher, Scorpion, and Titanic is an excellent example of a piece of dual-use equipment.

    More recent exploration of the Titanic's wreckage with remote drones and two-man submarines indicates that the edge of the iceberg that the Titanic hit may have been somewhat "crowbar" shaped, with a vertically-oriented escarpment below the surface puncturing the ship from underneath, in addition to gashing it open from the side. This may help explain why the Titanic sank so rapidly, since the side-hull tears didn't seem to be large enough to account for the volume of water pouring into the ship.

  • Fractured story (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Ancient_Hacker ( 751168 )
    Actually the Navy has been down to the Thresher and Scorpion sites several times, with cameras, many decades ago.

    While the Navy may have funded Ballard's research, it's unlikely that a "cover story" would fool anybody. Those thingies are expensive to build and run, nobody does that just for fun.

    • With Pics! (Score:3, Informative)

      by csmacd ( 221163 )
      USS Scorpion has been visited a couple of times, http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/sh-usn/usnsh-s/ssn589-n.htm [navy.mil] has pics.

    • Re:Fractured story (Score:5, Informative)

      by Iphtashu Fitz ( 263795 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @12:14PM (#23640499)
      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.
  • They had this huge Howard Hughes project to vacuum up metallic nodules off the ocean floor that was a cover to attempt to recover a Russian sub that sank in 15000 feet of water, they got a chunk of it, but a mechanical failure resulted in most of the sub staying on the bottom.
  • My Technological Catastrophes professor back in college was on the team that searched for the thresher as a nuclear environmental safety expert. He gave a lecture on this subject a year ago. I don't think this is still a secret.
  • That the Titanic was an afterthought to the submarine search has been well-known for many years.

                Brett

  • define your acronyms (Score:4, Funny)

    by poot_rootbeer ( 188613 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @11:53AM (#23640215)

    "RMS Titanic"...? Oh, you must be referring to the GNU/Hurd kernel.

  • A great submarine book.. (Score:5, Informative)

    by SixDimensionalArray ( 604334 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @11:55AM (#23640235)
    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
  • If they admit this so easily and without being cornered by evidence, what were they really after?

  • Anyone else notice.... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by arkham6 ( 24514 )
    That the navy wanted to chuck nuclear waste into the OCEAN!?!

  • Contradictory stories (Score:5, Informative)

    by richmaine ( 128733 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @12:18PM (#23640545)
    The two cited sources actually contradict each other. One says, like the slashdot headline, that the Titanic search was a cover-up. However, the other source directly quotes the searcher and makes it clear that it was not at all a cover-up, but rather the opposite - something that accidentally drew attention when it unexpectedly succeeded. There was concern that the attention might also raise other questions.

    Methinks that some of the news media just likes to use the word cover-up, without particular regard for whether or not it fits.

    • Re:Contradictory stories ESPECIALLY (Score:4, Informative)

      by davidsyes ( 765062 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @01:12PM (#23641353) Homepage Journal
      When these landlubbers mix up terms. For instance, "The ship is docked..." or "Tied up..." when it's really MOORED.

      But, FTA, what caught my eye was:

      "They call it scrambling"

      BZZZT! Get ur stuff right, reporters. It's SCRAM, as in Safety Control Rod Activation Mechanism. I frackin' knew this back in 80, as a 15-year old. WTF is wrong with these well-funded reporting arms out there? So, the text probably ought have said, "They call it SCRAMing"..., that is, unless something changed that i didn't know about in the past decade or so...

      If the reporter wants to discuss "reactors" and "scrambling", then maybe the story should cover intra-molecular scrambling....

      http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S1381116996002701 [elsevier.com]

      But, the reporter should have done some basic patent and process checking:

      http://www.freepatentsonline.com/4337118.html [freepatentsonline.com]

      "APRM 40 transmits a scram signal to the rod drive system 6 to scram the reactor. Scramming takes place when the power level reaches about 120% of the ..."

  • just to let everyone know... (Score:5, Funny)

    by SethJohnson ( 112166 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @12:26PM (#23640691) Homepage Journal


    A friend of mine who is an editor on the 'reality' TV show, 'The Deadliest Catch [discovery.com],' told me it's actually a documentary on the search for the Russian sub that sank in 2003 [bbc.co.uk] 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
  • Why do I envision a Das Boot remake where the submariners are Americans instead of Germans and they don't make it back to port with a subplot of modern scientists looking for the wreckage decades later under the guise of looking for something else? I know. That was a run-on sentence. But the excitement over the prospect of such a movie made me lose my composition skills.

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