NARRATOR: Cold War killing machines and lethal nuclear weapons,
abandoned under our oceans.
JAMES: The thought that these Doomsday weapons lie
down there in the depths is frightening.
NARRATOR: The terrifying reality has been hidden,
the keys to the truth of the Cold War
lost under icy waters for over half a century.
Imagine if we could empty the oceans,
letting the water drain away to reveal the secrets of the sea floor.
Now we can...
Using accurate data and astonishing technology,
to bring light once again to a lost world.
How did the Cold War's most advanced submarine end up shattered on the sea floor?
ROBERT: A giant hand had just crushed it.
NARRATOR: How close does America come to accidentally nuking Europe?
JOE: There was this terrible explosion.
Big ball of flame.
NARRATOR: And who stole parts of a secret Soviet submarine?
October, 1962.
The United States and the Soviet Union hit crisis point.
MAN [over PA]: This is a red alert. Repeat.
NARRATOR: Moscow installs nuclear missiles in Cuba.
President Kennedy issues an ultimatum;
withdraw the missiles or it's war.
KENNEDY: A poor retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.
VLADISLAV: 31,000 nuclear devices.
If it starts, the world would go up in smoke.
That's it. Crazy.
NARRATOR: The Soviets back off.
But the world remains just one mistake away from nuclear apocalypse.
Many flash points are hidden from view, shrouded in secrecy.
Now we can reveal just how close we came to disaster.
In the waters of Northern California
a mysterious wreck could reveal the truth about
top secret experiments at the dawn of the Cold War.
A giant object has been detected under these waters.
Maritime archaeologist Doctor James Delgado wants to know more.
JAMES: Mapping the seabed outside the Golden Gate, they found a big target,
a very big target.
Was it a ship?
Was it something more?
What brought this here?
Why is it on the bottom?
NARRATOR: James hopes the new find could solve a Cold War mystery.
The location of a ship lost for over 60 years.
USS Independence, a giant aircraft carrier.
JAMES: Imagine the wreck of an aircraft carrier as big as this sitting on the bottom,
just off the coast of San Francisco,
unrevealed for so many years.
It's powerful, it's compelling.
NARRATOR: He sets out to explore the site with his team,
sending a remotely operated vehicle, or ROV,
2,600 feet down.
A submerged beast.
JAMES: You got to go a little further, brother.
A little more to the left.
This is an area where we would have had the name painted.
There's the Independence.
You can see it.
E-N-C-E.
Yes! Yes!
NARRATOR: This carrier is a hero of the Second World War.
It battled to recapture Pacific Islands from the Japanese.
It survived all that,
but it hasn't been seen for over half a century.
Why is it now sitting in an unmarked location
at the bottom of these cool coastal waters?
Using precision scan data,
the waters roll back to reveal a staggering sight.
A World War II colossus.
It looks almost new, but on the flight deck there's evidence of damage,
the surface torn, buckled and bent,
and one giant corner punched in completely.
On the hull, strange scars.
Steel plate creased like tin foil.
On the control tower, eerie details.
Japanese flags were painted on this kill board, for every enemy unit destroyed.
But now only white paint remains.
JAMES: Now this should be painted in different colors.
It should be red, for example, but it's not here and that's not age or sea water.
NARRATOR: What could have caused such bizarre damage?
James picks up on a trail of evidence that leads him all the way to the fiery dawn of
the Cold War.
Bikini Atoll, July 1946.
Behind a ring of low rise islands, nearly 100 obsolete war ships
lie empty and abandoned.
One of them is the USS Independence.
This remote Pacific lagoon is America's new atomic test arena.
It's less than a year since the first ever atom bomb attacks on Japan ended the
Second World War, and the US needs to know more about what
these terrifying new weapons can do.
On July 25th, at 8:35 am,
the first ever test of an atom bomb underwater.
Two million tons of radioactive seawater blasted into the air.
JAMES: The bomb punches out of the lagoon, with a heated core hotter than the sun shooting
up through the heart of it.
NARRATOR: Also an airborne detonation as big as the bomb at Nagasaki.
A mile and a half from the epicenter is the USS Independence.
A blinding flash eradicates her, instantly vaporizing the red paint on the kill board.
JAMES: The bursts not only of light, but heat.
Took away all the other colors, leaving only the white base coat.
NARRATOR: Then blast waves rock the carrier,
shredding her flight deck,
and washboarding the steel around her hull.
JAMES: This is all of those thousands of pounds of air or water coming right up
alongside the ship and slamming into it, bending, denting, rippling it.
This is what an atomic bomb does to a ship.
NARRATOR: The many war ships destroyed at Bikini carry a message.
This is the future of warfare.
With the Soviet Union working around the clock on an atom bomb of its own,
an arms race like no other will dominate the decades to come.
The drained wreck of USS Independence can tell us more
of this shadowy confrontation,
but first we need to know why does she lie
not close to Bikini, but California?
NARRATOR: Hidden under the waters of Northern California,
the wreck of the USS Independence.
4,500 miles away from where she smashed by atomic blasts at Bikini Atoll.
How did she get here, and why?
Can our immense drained wreck provide a clue?
JAMES: When you look at all the damage brought by the atomic bomb,
while grievous for the most part is above the water line,
it wasn't enough to sink the ship.
NARRATOR: The Independence survives the atomic blasts,
but she is ravaged by radiation.
JAMES: It had been coated in radioactive steam.
There's a near panic that the radiation levels have not subsided much at all.
NARRATOR: In the summer of 1947, the Independence is towed to California.
James Delgado and his team want to know why.
MAN: This was here for a couple of years.
NARRATOR: They discover a link to a top secret naval research facility
on the fringes of San Francisco
Hunter's Point.
Inside the high security port, a specialist team studies the
radioactive fallout on board Independence.
Their mission; design a defense against nuclear weapons.
JAMES: The key lessons underscored by study of Independence
is to just get scarier, to build more weapons,
to bring more of them into play.
In short, proliferation.
NARRATOR: But a question remains.
After almost four years at Hunter's Point, the US Navy scuttles Independence.
And the wreck is nowhere near where contemporary news stories claim she is.
JAMES: We found it only 30 miles offshore,
more than 100 miles away from where reports said
Independence had gone down, which stunned us and we began to think, "Why?"
NARRATOR: Off the waters of Northern California, James goes deep inside the Independence
to look for answers.
JAMES: As the robot drops down, I have it zoom in again, and again,
until finally I see exactly what they're hiding.
NARRATOR: Now, using precision data, we can reveal what he finds there.
In the hangar, tucked behind a Hellcat fighter plane,
a stack of large sealed barrels.
On one barrel, a side panel has rusted away,
and when James inspects it up close,
something catches his eye.
JAMES: Those are rubber gloves.
Looking at it, everything from the labs is getting packed in barrels,
sealed in concrete.
Not only from Hunters Point, but from the labs in and around the bay area.
They wanted to put these away, out of the sight of prying eyes,
beyond the reach of Soviet spies.
They were afraid of espionage.
NARRATOR: The US Navy decides to take no chances,
whether Soviet spies are operating in California or not.
JAMES: What better thing to do then with your atomic secrets, than to put them inside this
big carrier in a location with all these nuclear secrets entombed within it?
NARRATOR: The battered wreck of the Independence still lies off the California coast.
A chilling reminder of the dawn of the Cold War.
In the years that follow, the two super powers build huge nuclear arsenals,
and sometimes accidents happen.
The coast of Almeria, southern Spain.
Draining these waters reveals a shocking site.
A nuclear war head, more powerful than a million tons of TNT.
How does it get here?
And how close is Spain to a nuclear disaster?
Joe Ramirez is serving with American forces here in the 1960's.
It's the height of the Cold War and the US is flying nuclear arm
patrols over Europe around the clock.
JOE: Operation Chrome Dome as it was called.
B52 bombers, each carrying four hydrogen bombs, in flight 24 hours a day.
NARRATOR: Chrome Dome maintains a constant nuclear threat
against the Soviet bloc.
But to keep the bombers airborne for as long as possible,
crews must refuel in mid-air.
A delicate and dangerous procedure.
On January 17th, 1966, in the skies over Spain,
something sparks an explosion.
Four bombs complete with nuclear war heads hurtle towards the ground,
two without their parachutes.
The nuclear components are unarmed, but the conventional explosives do detonate,
spreading radioactive plutonium over a square mile.
Hundreds of American and Spanish personnel scour the countryside
and find three of the bombs.
But that's all.
JOE: We couldn't find the fourth one.
NARRATOR: The US military needs to locate their lost nuke,
before it leaks dangerous radiation or falls into the hands of the Soviets.
After more than a week of searching, the team still can't find the bomb.
Then Ramirez meets a local fisherman.
He reports seeing a parachute fall into the sea on the day of the accident.
JOE: It hit me, we're looking in the wrong place.
We're looking for the bomb on land.
This bomb may be under water.
NARRATOR: But if the nuke is under the ocean, where is it, and what condition is it in?
In the last few years, Spanish oceanographers have mapped the Mediterranean Sea floor.
JESUS: The bottom of the ocean is dark, but thanks to acoustical techniques,
we can see all the particular features with them,
in great, high resolution of the sea bed of the oceans.
NARRATOR: Now, with access to Doctor Rivera's data, we can drain the waters of
Southern Spain, exactly as it looked in 1966,
and remove the sea from an American nuclear calamity.
The lost nuke, 2,500 feet down,
teetering on a cliff edge.
A state of the art hydrogen bomb, 100 times more powerful than the one that destroyed
Hiroshima, the nose cone dented, but the bomb itself still intact.
The Americans need to find it first,
to get it away from this densely populated coast line,
and to stop the Soviets from salvaging it for themselves.
NARRATOR: American ships and divers scour the Spanish Mediterranean,
looking for a lost nuke.
They search miles of dark seabed for almost two months...
But find nothing.
JOE: You can imagine what it's like, feeling your way around there,
trying to find an atomic bomb.
NARRATOR: Then, on March 15th, 1966, a remotely controlled
submersible finally spots something.
JOE: When the announcement came through, I said, "Phew."
NARRATOR: The submersible attaches a rope,
but as they carefully attempt to winch the bomb to the surface
the rope suddenly snaps.
All the US Navy can do is wait for it to hit the bottom.
The fail-safe system holds, and there's no chance of a detonation.
But a nuclear weapon, full of plutonium, is lost once again.
Now, using the latest data, we can drain the Mediterranean completely
to reveal where it falls.
A huge sea canyon opens up,
nearly 3,000 feet deep.
And right at the bottom, the nuclear bomb.
The difficult rescue attempt has just become near impossible.
BARBARA: One of the Air Force colonels said if somebody had sat down and thought about a
way to lose a hydrogen bomb, they couldn't of thought of anything more devilish.
NARRATOR: Finally, the Navy sends a cable controlled robot down into the canyon,
and use it to grab the nuke.
But it snags on the bomb's parachute.
It's now completely stuck half a mile under the sea.
The only way to retrieve the nuke is to haul the robot up,
and drag the parachute and bomb along with it.
A delicate daisy chain for a two ton nuclear weapon.
BARBARA: The man leading the mission actually fainted from the tension.
NARRATOR: Miraculously, the chain holds.
These are two of the four thermonuclear bombs dropped on Spain.
On the left, the nuke that journeyed to the bottom of the sea,
now safely stored in New Mexico.
BARBARA: To just see it lying there, this item contained the power to destroy a city.
It's scary, you know?
NARRATOR: A Cold War catastrophe is avoided.
But Operation Chrome Dome is suspended two years later.
Nuclear confrontation has moved beneath the waves.
200 miles off the coast of New England,
draining the waters of the Atlantic exposes the horrors of a deep sea disaster.
By the 1960s, the Cold War has a new front line.
Submarines armed with nuclear weapons try to creep into enemy waters.
America deploys hunter killer subs to guard against the threat.
The very latest is the USS Thresher, powered by a nuclear reactor.
On April 9th, 1963, Thresher sets out from
Portsmouth, New Hampshire for sea trials.
Just over 200 miles out,
it begins trialing extreme deep water dives.
KEVIN: Thresher was pushing boundaries under the ocean.
The men who served on her are very similar to space astronauts.
NARRATOR: A US Navy ship called Skylark is in attendance.
A few hours into the trial, the captain of Thresher sends out a call,
saying the sub is experiencing minor difficulties.
Then, fragments of a garbled message,
a loud hiss and silence.
KEVIN: The staff aboard Skylark is not quite sure what has happened,
and continue to call to them and ask them to respond.
They continue to do that for some period.
NARRATOR: Thresher never makes contact and never resurfaces.
Lori Arsenault is eight years old when the sub goes missing.
LORI: We were watching TV, and there was a news flash.
A Navy ship was missing.
My brother went running out into the kitchen.
By the time I got there, everyone was crying and I didn't know why,
but I just started crying.
And then little by little,
I found out that my dad was on that boat.
NARRATOR: In 1985, deep sea explorer Doctor Bob Ballard
sets out to find the wreck of the Titanic,
but his famous expedition is a Cold War cover story.
In fact, Ballard is on a top secret mission to investigate the wreck of the USS Thresher.
ROBERT: I was a trained naval intelligence officer.
The Soviets could track me with satellite, so we needed a cover.
NARRATOR: Ballard deploys a submersible equipped with video cameras.
The once classified footage
shows images of jagged metal.
Ballard's first glimpse of what's left of the lost submarine.
The only way to understand the scale of the wreck is to see it in the light of day.
A traumatic scene.
The sub is ripped into mangled pieces and scattered across the sea floor.
Water drips off a torn rudder, and laying behind it, the conning tower on its side.
There's a blasted air canister, and finally fragments of piping.
Little else is identifiable.
ROBERT: So what we're seeing here is the debris field of the Thresher,
but it's completely shredded.
This is carnage.
The only big piece was a piece of the tail, and even that looked like a giant hand that
just crushed it.
So it was everywhere.
NARRATOR: How did the USS Thresher end up like this?
It wasn't carrying munitions, its nuclear reactor isn't explosive,
and there's no evidence of a Soviet attack.
Ballard believes that only a force of nature can explain the damage.
ROBERT: Pressure is a deadly force, so we have a lot of
experience with things really blowing up.
NARRATOR: If a sub goes too deep, the pressure of the ocean becomes overwhelming.
The whole structure will suddenly fail and implode.
ROBERT: An implosion is a gigantic explosion.
NARRATOR: It's known as crush depth.
But why would the Thresher be so deep?
Ballard searches the wreck looking for clues
in the vast field of scattered wreckage.
Bent pieces of piping litter the sea floor.
Some of these pipes would have carried water into the sub from the sea outside,
to cool the reactor.
And during deep dives, they become highly pressurized.
Ballard knows a leak from any of these pipes could trigger
a shut down in the nuclear reactor.
ROBERT: When it comes in, it comes in like a jet.
And it can atomize and form a cloud,
so it's just really coming in.
When that happens, the nuclear reactor automatically scrams.
NARRATOR: He digs back into US Navy files,
and uncovers a survey of the Thresher's cooling pipes.
The report reveals that some of the pipe joints are weak and fail testing.
The message from Thresher about difficulties now makes sense.
At 2,200 feet below, the sub springs a super high pressure leak.
DAVE: Makes a really nasty noise, sounds really high pitched.
It would just go through you like a knife.
NARRATOR: The reactor power cuts out.
The sub begins to fill with water.
ROBERT: They can't drive out.
They're dead in the water.
NARRATOR: But Thresher should still survive.
Studying the wreck, Ballard can see components of a crucial buoyancy system.
Compressed air canisters.
If the sub needs to surface, the canisters blow into ballast chambers,
and the buoyancy propels it upwards.
So why didn't the Thresher do that?
The US Navy conducts an investigation.
What they find is chilling.
In the cold conditions of the Thresher's deep sea dive, moisture in the compressed air
freezes and blocks the ballast.
ROBERT: So it froze over.
It couldn't blow.
NARRATOR: The hiss in the captain's final message is the crew trying and failing to
blow the ballast.
The shocking discovery completes the story of the
last moments of the USS Thresher.
At the bottom of its deep dive, a powerful leak kills the engines,
and the icy deep freezes and blocks the ballast pipes.
Without power and buoyancy, and partially full of sea water,
the Thresher is dragged deeper and deeper.
ROBERT: And they are now taking on water, the ceiling collapsed in.
They have no way out.
NARRATOR: The hull creaks and groans.
The crew know they are reaching crush depth.
DAVE: They're just going down, they're getting deeper, and they're crushing.
And that is a tough way to die, because there's just nothing you can do.
NARRATOR: At 2,400 feet below, the pressure is 70 times greater than at the surface.
ROBERT: And when that went, it just destroyed the submarine.
KEVIN: It'll just crush it like you're not even there.
NARRATOR: From above, the full terrifying power of that monumental implosion is clear.
The wreck has been blasted across four square miles of ocean.
LORI: The first time I ever saw the pictures of the wreck,
it was a profound and powerful experience.
The Cold War was not a war without casualties.
NARRATOR: Americans are not the only ones to lose their lives.
Beneath the wild waters of the Northern Pacific lie the remains of another submarine.
How does a Soviet wonder weapon fall victim to Cold War power games?
NARRATOR: On February 24th, 1968, a Soviet submarine leaves port in Eastern Russia.
K-129's mission is to disappear beneath the waters off America's West Coast,
armed with three state-of-the-art nuclear missiles
that can launch from underwater.
Once fired, the nukes are almost unstoppable;
each one 65 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.
JAMES: The ocean itself has become weaponized.
It is the ultimate cloak in which you can hide, and wait, and then deliver death.
VLADISLAV: The whole aura about the nuclear submarines is to disappear from the radar
of the opposite side.
NARRATOR: Two weeks into its patrol in the North Pacific,
K-129 misses a scheduled transmission home.
Something has gone badly wrong.
A Soviet Navy flotilla scours the Pacific looking for K-129.
But it could be anywhere in a 1,000 mile sector of deep ocean.
JOSH: I mean, it's beyond needle in a haystack;
it's like needle in 1,000 haystacks.
There was a submarine out there that had been sunk and the Russians had lost it;
literally lost a submarine.
NARRATOR: After months of searching, the Soviets are forced to accept that their
submarine, and their nuclear weapons, are lost.
So what does happen to K-129?
Today, a new investigation is uncovering a story of spycraft and subterfuge.
Journalist Josh Dean has recently acquired images from a source in America that show
parts of the wreck of the lost Soviet sub.
The remarkable black and white pictures are hard to decipher,
but using expert analysis to enhance the images means it is
now possible to reveal what remains of K-129
three miles under the Pacific Ocean.
The black steel of a conning tower.
And a fractured silo still loaded with a nuclear missile.
Only some sections of the sub have ever been identified,
and a clue as to why lies here at the stern:
jagged edges of peeled back metal;
the telltale sign of a powerful internal explosion.
JAMES: This is an image I never thought we'd be seeing, K-129.
It's heavily damaged.
Whatever forces were at play, and I don't know if we'll ever really know,
this is an amazing and tragic image.
JOSH: It's hard to think of anything more mysterious than K-129.
It's an unprecedented wreck.
NARRATOR: Searching for an explanation, Dean digs back into Cold War history.
His research leads him to the tropical shores of Hawaii.
In the 1960's, this row of innocuous-looking buildings is a listening post for a top
secret US facility called SOSUS.
SOSUS is a vast network of underwater microphones that
stretches across the oceans of the world listening for the
sound of Soviet submarines and tracking their movement.
Marine acoustics professor Bruce Howe has access to the Cold War data.
BRUCE: The Russians were building submarines that were coming uncomfortably close to
the United States and so that motivated putting out these listening arrays.
NARRATOR: In 1968, the Americans use acoustic technology
to try and find K-129.
Noticing the Soviet's frantic search,
they scanned back over their data
looking for a marker
and identify something far out in the Pacific.
Analysis suggests it could be an underwater detonation.
Have they found the sound of the explosion that blasts K-129 into pieces?
BRUCE: Sound can travel underwater literally halfway around the world,
so in the case of a submarine explosion, that would be a pretty obvious signal.
NARRATOR: If there was an explosion, to this day no one knows what caused it.
But by triangulating the noise across the network,
the US Navy can pinpoint where the sound comes from.
Here, one and a half thousand miles northwest of Hawaii.
For the US Military, a Soviet sub loaded with nuclear missiles
is a priceless bounty.
But attempting to seize K-129 would be an act of war.
JOSH: You can't just take stuff that belongs to another military.
There was real risk that going after this thing could start a war.
NARRATOR: The US Navy closes the file and leaves the wreck untouched.
But someone does tamper with K-129 and its nuclear missiles.
And the evidence is in the wreck.
NARRATOR: Some experts think that K-129 is probably destroyed by an internal
explosion deep under the Pacific Ocean and there's evidence for this theory
on the drained wreck.
But there's something else too,
signs that something more than an explosion happens here.
At the front, there's no trace of the jagged remains
typically produced by an explosion,
and the nose itself is missing, cleanly sliced off.
How could that have happened?
Investigative journalist Josh Dean is determined to find out.
JOSH: I think there are pieces of the K-129 out there somewhere.
It's been lost for some reason and lost is never good.
NARRATOR: Dean has been passed video,
shot in 1974 on-board a ship called the Glomar Explorer
Owned by eccentric American billionaire Howard Hughes,
the Glomar claims to be a deep-sea mining vessel.
But the video reveals something straight out of a James Bond movie.
JOSH: It's mind-boggling. It's remarkable to see today.
That's footage that's never been released before.
NARRATOR: Hidden within the Glomar Explorer is a giant cavity and a hydraulic claw.
The men on board are CIA operatives.
Operation codename: Project Azorian.
Their mission is to recover sections of K-129,
and especially its nuclear missiles,
six years after the sub went down.
JOSH: Even most people within the CIA were not aware of the existence of this program.
The stakes could not be higher, essentially.
NARRATOR: The claw is designed to drop down through three miles of ocean and retrieve
the sub and its nuclear missiles.
In the murky 45-year-old video, it's possible to see it down in the deep,
preparing to grasp a part of K-129.
It pulls a 2,000 ton section away from the seabed,
and begins an agonizing three-day-long ascent to the ship.
Two days into winching,
on the surface there's a sudden jolt.
JOSH: Those engineers who had spent a lot of time on boats thought like,
"We definitely just dropped some weight. Something happened."
NARRATOR: Stressed from digging into seafloor,
one of the claws has cracked open.
Only the tip of the nose remains.
Most of what was in the claw, including the nuclear missiles,
plunges back into the darkness.
JOSH: The guys on the ship have to sit there and say,
"We can't try again, the claw is broken!"
NARRATOR: The CIA is forced to abandon the operation.
The dropped sub is still on the floor of the Pacific today,
along with its nuclear weapons.
Nobody knows how many more Soviet warheads are lost in our oceans.
The US admits that six of its nuclear weapons are unrecovered,
left behind by a conflict that abruptly ends in 1989.
DAVE: Gorbachev said, "We have tried to kill your submarines.
We have failed. We quit."
[crowd cheering].
NARRATOR: The Soviet regime collapses.
But the scars of the Cold War remain beneath our oceans.
Nuclear weapons and radioactive waste litter the sea.
Now, the super powers are re-arming,
with thousands of new missiles that can strike across the globe.
Secret nuclear power games continue day and night.
Captioned by Cotter Captioning Services