Secret missions

Titanic search was cover for secret Cold War subs mission - Times Online

So, Robert Ballard was engaged by the US Navy to check out the wrecks of the nuclear submarines USS Thresher and USS Scorpion. He succeeded too:

Thresher, had imploded deep beneath the surface and had broken up into thousands of pieces and Scorpion was almost as completely destroyed. “It was as though it had been put through a shredding machine. There was a long debris trail.” Dr Ballard developed a robotic submarine craft in the early 1980s and approached the US Navy in 1982 for funding to search for the Titanic, which sank in 1912 with the loss of 1,500 lives after hitting an iceberg.

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.

The story of Thresher is particularly nightmarish:

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.

A surface ship, Skylark, was in contact when the submarine’s crew reported that a high-pressure pipe supplying the nuclear reactor with cooling water had blown. The accident 1,000ft down, caused the vessel to lose power. It then sank so deep that the pressure hull imploded.

But, according to the Wikipedia entry, the wreckage was already examined in the 1960's after the accident, so it's not as if Ballard was the first to go there. In fact, this report seems to be based on publicity for a National Geographic special, so that may explain a degree of exaggeration here.

Still, an interesting story.