The man who located the wreck of the Titanic has revealed that his mission was used as a cover up story to camouflage the military’s real objective of inspecting the wrecks of two Cold War nuclear submarines.

Dr Bob Ballard who led the team that found the wreck of the Titanic back in 1995, admitted that he was only allowed to search for the sunken luxury cruise liner after he located the wrecks of USS Thresher and USS Scorpion.

Both of the United States Navy vessels sank during the 1960s, killing more than 200 men and arousing suspicions that at least one of them, Scorpion, may have been sunk by the USSR.

Dr Ballard approached the US Navy for funding to search for the Titanic in 1982 after developing a robotic submarine to search the ocean floor. The Military responded by saying they were not willing to spend a fortune on locating the liner, but they were anxious to know how the nuclear reactors had been affected by being submerged for so long.

The oceanographer was given the funding to embark on two expeditions, one to find the wreck of Thresher in 1984 off the eastern coast of the US and another to find Scorpion in the eastern Atlantic.

After the Ballard located the two submarines he only had 12 days to find the Titanic.

“I couldn’t’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.”

Dr Ballard said inspecting the two submarines gave him the idea of finding a trail of debris that could lead him to the main section of the Titanic.

Thresher had imploded deep beneath the surface breaking up into thousands of pieces and Scorpion was almost completely destroyed.

“It was as though it had been put through a shredding machine. There was a long debris trail.”

USS Thresher (SSN-593) Submarine

Thresher was at the time, the US Navy’s most advanced attack submarine. She was launched on 9 July 1960, sponsored by Mrs. Frederick B. Warder (wife of the famous Pacific War skipper), and was later commissioned on 3 August 1961, with Commander Dean L. Axene in command.

Thresher sank with all her 129 crew in April 1963 while undergoing deep-diving tests after dockyard repairs.

A surface ship, Skylark, was in contact when the crew reported a high-pressure pipe supplying the nuclear reactor with cooling water had blown. The accident happened at a depth of 1000ft, causing the vessel to sink so deep that the pressure hull imploded.

The loss of the Thresher in 1963 is often considered a watershed event in the implementation of the rigorous submarine safety program SUBSAFE

USS Scorpion (SSN-589) Submarine

USS Scorpion was a Skipjack-class nuclear submarine of the United States Navy. She was the sixth ship of the U.S. Navy to carry that name and was launched on 19 December 1959, and later commissioned on 29 July 1960 with Commander Norman B. Bessac in command.

On June 5, 1968 Scorpion was declared lost with a crew of 99 onboard. There had been speculation that Scorpion was sunk by Soviet forces however Dr Ballard’s visual examination of the wreck site showed that the most likely cause of its destruction was being hit by a rogue torpedo that it had fired itself.

The Titanic

The Titanic was a luxury ocean liner built at the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast, Ireland by White Star Line. At the time of her launch she was the largest passenger steamship in the world.

During her maiden voyage on 14th April 1912, the Titanic struck an iceberg and sank with the loss of 1,500 lives.

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