

"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," the Times of London and others report.

“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...*

Dr. Robert Ballard , an oceanographer, has admitted that he located and inspected the wrecks for the US Navy [in 1985] in top secret missions before he was allowed to search for the Titanic...

He was told that the military were not willing to spend a fortune on locating the liner, but they did want to know what had happened to their submarines.The military were anxious to know how the nuclear reactors had been affected by being submerged for so long.

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During the 1980s, the nuclear submarine fleet was reduced after the Salt II

(strategic arms limitation talks) agreement and one option was to sink unwanted reactors at sea...*

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.

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Thresher*, the US Navy’s most advanced attack submarine at the time, sank with all her 129 crew in April 1963 while undergoing seaworthiness tests after dockyard repairs...*

Scorpion* disappeared with 99 crew in 1968, and there had been speculation that it was sunk by Soviet forces. 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.

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